With The Big Life of Little Richard, Mark Ribowsky accomplishes everything a good rock biographer should do (but seldom does as well). The author of several previous music (and baseball) bios narrates Richard’s life through key encounters, never bogging down in inessential detail. He sets Richard’s cultural context and describes the music vividly. The writing is sparse, descriptive and delivers with swift strokes. In peak moments, Richard “didn’t merely sing a song—he blew it apart and left it all over the walls and floor.”
The combustible singer-piano pounder was always a divided soul. Take the example of his father, who managed to combine preaching with bootlegging and running a bar. Even as a child, Richard wore his mother’s makeup (and was punished by dad). He was torn between impulses, reeling from amped-up R&B to gospel, giving up singing for Bible study and going back again. He was gay but omnisexual.
Nine of the book’s 11 chapters cover Richard’s life before 1965, understandable given that he spent his final decades touring hard and either thwarting his own career or being mismanaged (depending on who you believe). “If not a trend-setter, he was set into stone as something just as good—a creature comfort,” Ribowsky writes. But by that time, Richard mentored two of music’s greatest trend setters, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, and set a bar as a performer that was hard to reach.
