Little Richard Penniman of Pleasant Hill

Richard Wayne Penniman was born in Macon on December fifth, nineteen thirty-two, the third of twelve children. The family lived in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood, a Black community on the hill west of downtown where churches anchored every block and where people sang, in Richard's later description, gospel songs throughout the day to feel their connection with God and to endure what needed enduring.

The Penniman family attended multiple churches, but young Richard was most drawn to the Pentecostal congregations, to the fire and the movement and the music that did not stay seated. Gospel performers became his early heroes, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson most of all.

In October of nineteen forty-seven, fourteen-year-old Richard was at the Macon City Auditorium, not as a performer but as a Coca-Cola vendor, working the aisles during a Sister Rosetta Tharpe concert. He was singing in the corridors before the show. Tharpe heard him. She invited him to open the performance. He walked out onto that stage and never fully came off it.

From that auditorium and from those Pleasant Hill churches, Richard Penniman built one of rock and roll's foundational vocabularies. The shrieking falsetto, the call-and-response, the kinetic physical performance that later performers from James Brown to Prince would study and absorb, all of it began in the Pentecostal register of a kid from Macon singing gospel because that was the only music that could hold what he felt. Little Richard was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its first class in nineteen eighty-six. He died in May of twenty twenty. The music he made in those few years before his religious conversion and return never stopped playing.