Reprise

Let’s be clear: I don’t know anything about music. And I don’t want to come off as dramatic, but a local DJ changed my life. By that I mean I’d been floundering. Getting ready in the morning is rough enough as it is, and when you want to play a little something to make the experience a tad more bearable, you need to depend on a trove of songs that will get you there. But I didn’t have that.

The DJ played a few tracks from Little Richard’s Southern Child.

This album was scheduled to release in 1972, the same year it was recorded, but Reprise Records shelved it.

Once he passed away, amid the height of the pandemic, somebody decided to finally let it come up for air. Yes, Little Richard made a country western album.

If I had to guess I’d say the label was embarrassed by it. I smirked when the DJ introduced it. Then I listened to it. Now I can’t stop playing it.

Why shouldn’t Little Richard have a country western album? Why was that amusing to me? Why didn’t I take it seriously? Why didn’t the label even take it seriously?

Granted, there are songs that don’t age well. Like when he compares his old girlfriend to a racehorse or explains how dogs bark across the globe through ethnocentrically cringy descriptions. However, the guy really can do it all, and now I’m fully embracing his range.

Back in 8th grade, a classmate of mine committed suicide. I never knew him. His face didn’t even look familiar. That might have been part of the problem. Apparently he was bullied. I’m sure there’s a lot more to the story.

That year was the apex of physical awkwardness for me. I was caught up in the same things every pubescent peer was caught up in. I had friends and crushes and after-school activities that sort of took over and it was overwhelming and terrible and downright fantastic.

Our middle school Chorus teacher was somehow asked if she could pull a performance together for this boy’s funeral.

The only thing we had practiced was “When You Believe” from Prince of Egypt, an
animated movie about the biblical Exodus. Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston popularized it.

Anyway, that’s what we had to go with. And we did. We sang about miracles while a boy’s family stared blankly ahead and a Catholic priest prepared to speak about a child who ended his own life. (As a Presbyterian, I knew enough to know that most Catholics think suicide automatically translates to Hell. Us Protestants didn’t make such declarations.)

I saw Little Richard once, about five years ago, in Nashville’s Hillsboro Village. He was hanging out the back of an Escalade greeting bystanders, tooling down the road. Maybe he was preemptively saying goodbye, the cancer chewing up his bones.

Regardless, Little Richard was waving to his subjects. He was gracing us all with his royal––and originally rural––presence.