Saturday, January 6, 2024: 3:50 PM
Continental Ballroom 2 (Hilton Union Square)
Cultural commentaries and academic scholarship on musician Little Richard reveal a tension between more recent assessments of the singer’s life and career that have extolled him as a liberalising influence in the areas of music, race, gender, and sexuality, versus older, more negative evaluations that have criticised Richard for evocating tropes from blackface minstrelsy and for making homophobic statements during his intermittent periods of conservative religiosity.
In this paper, I illuminate Richard’s complicated legacy through a discussion of notable concerts he staged between 1969 and 1970 in a diverse set of spaces: venues and gatherings associated with the contemporary youth counterculture, such as the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival, and spaces associated with the conservative establishment, like the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. When he inhabited conservative venues, observers in the music press accused Richard of performing a demeaning minstrel-type act for racist whites. Rolling Stone compared the singer in his February 1970 appearances at the Cocoanut Grove to that venue’s Sambo-themed décor. But only months later, Richard was being hailed as a patriarch of the counterculture when he performed for a young crowd at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles; a concert that was aggressively policed by the LAPD and concluded with the stage caving in during Richard’s act. ‘The Man considers rock music to be subversive, ranking it alongside the New Left, drugs and smut as things which he feels he must destroy,’ noted the Los Angeles Free Press in associating Richard with the anti-establishment set.
‘“God’s Bouquet”’ reassesses Richard’s cultural impact, arguing that it is neither straightforwardly progressive nor conservative. Further, building upon the work of cultural scholars like Pekka Kolehmainen, the paper illuminates how, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, rock and roll music was being appropriated by the political left and right.
In this paper, I illuminate Richard’s complicated legacy through a discussion of notable concerts he staged between 1969 and 1970 in a diverse set of spaces: venues and gatherings associated with the contemporary youth counterculture, such as the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival, and spaces associated with the conservative establishment, like the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. When he inhabited conservative venues, observers in the music press accused Richard of performing a demeaning minstrel-type act for racist whites. Rolling Stone compared the singer in his February 1970 appearances at the Cocoanut Grove to that venue’s Sambo-themed décor. But only months later, Richard was being hailed as a patriarch of the counterculture when he performed for a young crowd at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles; a concert that was aggressively policed by the LAPD and concluded with the stage caving in during Richard’s act. ‘The Man considers rock music to be subversive, ranking it alongside the New Left, drugs and smut as things which he feels he must destroy,’ noted the Los Angeles Free Press in associating Richard with the anti-establishment set.
‘“God’s Bouquet”’ reassesses Richard’s cultural impact, arguing that it is neither straightforwardly progressive nor conservative. Further, building upon the work of cultural scholars like Pekka Kolehmainen, the paper illuminates how, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, rock and roll music was being appropriated by the political left and right.
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See more of: AHA Sessions