In the summer of 1957, Little Richard stopped, not slowed down, not paused, stopped. He was on a tour bus somewhere between Atlanta and Charlotte. He was 24 years old. He was the loudest, most physically overwhelming performer in American music. He had just come off stage from a show where 5,000 people had responded to him in ways that no audience had responded to any performer in living memory.
He was at the absolute peak of his commercial and creative power. And somewhere on that bus between Atlanta and Charlotte, Richard Wayne Penman looked out the window at the southern night and felt something. He described it many times over the following decades in interviews in the autobiography he published in 1984 in conversations with journalists who were trying to understand why he had walked away.
He described it differently each time, not inconsistently. The same experience in different words, the way a person describes something they are still trying to understand. What the descriptions had in common was this. He had felt on that bus that he had been given a gift he had not earned. Not the music, not the talent, the adoration.
He had felt that the adoration, the screaming, the hysteria, the way people reacted to him as if he were something more than human had been building a wall between him and whatever it was he actually believed in. He had grown up in the Pentecostal church in Mon, Georgia. He had learned music in that church, the physical, overwhelming, total body music of Pentecostal worship.
music that was not a performance but an act of surrender. He had taken that music and done something with it that was entirely new. He had taken it into rock and roll. He had taken it into concert halls. And the response, the screaming, the hysteria had started to feel to him like the wrong thing, like people surrendering to him.
when he had always believed the surrender was supposed to go in the other direction. He left the tour. He enrolled in Oakwood University, a 7th Day Adventist institution in Huntsville, Alabama. He intended to become a minister. He came back to music within a year. The ministry didn’t hold in the way he had hoped.
The music kept pulling, but he never resolved the tension. For the rest of his life, which was long, little Richard died in 2020 at the age of 87. He lived inside the unresolved space between the gift and the question of what the gift was for. In 1970, Little Richard and Elvis Presley were at the same event in Los Angeles, a music industry gathering.
both men at similar points not in their public careers which were at very different stages but in their private relationship to what they did. Elvis was 35. He had been performing without meaningful interruption for 16 years. He was in the early stages of the Las Vegas period. He was successful and troubled and searching in ways that the Las Vegas crowds could not see and that the people around him could.
Little Richard was 37. He had come back to rock and roll multiple times. He had left for religious reasons multiple times. He described the conversation with Elvis in a long interview he gave in 2002. He said they found themselves standing together slightly apart from the main event in the way that two people at a party sometimes find themselves occupying the same marginal space.
Richard said he had been watching Elvis across the room. He said he had noticed something in Elvis that he recognized. A quality of performance that had become separate from what Elvis actually felt. the show working perfectly and something behind the show not quite connecting. Little Richard said he knew that look.
He had worn it himself. When they ended up standing together, Richard said something directly. He said, “You’re doing what I did.” Elvis looked at him. “You’re getting away from the thing that made it real,” Richard said. Elvis was quiet for a moment. “I know,” Elvis said. Richard described what happened after that as one of the most unusual conversations he had ever had with another performer.
They talked for almost an hour about the church, about the music that had come from the church, about what it meant to take something sacred and offer it to secular crowds, about whether the secular crowds received it as it was intended, whether the surrender the music asked for was possible in an arena, or whether the arena always changed the nature of the asking.
These were questions Richard had been living with since 1957. He had not found answers. He was not sure the questions had answers. But he said that talking with Elvis, who had grown up in the same Pentecostal church tradition, who had learned music in the same space, who had carried the same gifts into the same secular arenas, was the first time he had spoken to someone who understood the weight of the questions from the inside.
Not theoretically, from the inside. He understood what I had given up, Richard said in the 2002 interview. To be what the world wanted me to be, and I understood what he had given up. He paused. We had both given up the same thing, Richard said. the private part, the part that knew where it came from.
And we were both trying to get it back. Little Richard lived until he was 87. He never stopped wrestling with the tension. He left rock and roll for the church and came back from the church to rock and roll more times than his biographers could count. Each departure was a version of the same thing he had felt on a tour bus between Atlanta and Charlotte in 1957.
The adoration pointing in the wrong direction. Elvis died at 42. He was never able to leave. He tried or he wanted to, which is different, but the machinery of what he had built was too large to step out of. Richard said in the 2002 interview that he thought about Elvis often in the years after his death.
He said that Elvis had understood in that Los Angeles conversation exactly what Richard was talking about. Had nodded at the right moments, had asked the right questions. He knew what he had given up. Richard said he just couldn’t get it back. The private part, the part that knew where it came from. Little Richard got it back in pieces over 87 years.
Elvis got 42. And in the Los Angeles conversation of 1970, briefly standing with another man who understood the weight from the inside, he talked about it honestly, fully for the first time.
