The text that I selected was “What Little Richard Deserved” by Hanif Abduqarrib. The text goes in depth to explain little Richard’s early life, how he developed to the artist that he became known and what caused him to spiral from a moment into who we knew him as up until his death. 

Little Richard is described to be a diamond in the rough and someone who should have gotten more credit. He was a trailblazer in his genre of music, yet he wasn’t the one to get credit for it. Not just even his style, but even when it came to things like his actual songs.

The overall mood of the texts shows that the author feels empathetic to Little Richard’s struggle in all things from people stealing his music to his relation with his faith vs who he actually is and everything in between. He truly understands Richard’s struggles and the readers are able to see that through the language he uses and the tone of the text. The author even admits this very bias himself when in the text he says, “When it comes to Black artists, I am not very interested in the performance of humility. To remind people of all you’re capable of, and all you’ve done, may not stop you from being erased, but it might at least hang some shame around the necks of those doing the erasing.” This is significant because as a black person himself, Abduqarrib is able to acknowledge and be compassionate to someone experiencing such a struggle that Little Richard has faced in the erasure of black voices. It is important that authors show their bias the way that Abduqarrib is because not only is it more honest, but it also provides a certain perspective that you might not get from someone claiming to be unbiased and understanding and accepting of all. 

Abduqarrib also contextualizes the situations Richard experiences throughout the text by bringing up how it is to be a black man or to be considered flamboyant or gay in that time period that Richard had his rise to fame. He goes on to say this exact concept later in the text. “But when Little Richard did perform his own stuff, audiences couldn’t get enough of his untamed flamboyance and his command of the stage. Richard was not only beautiful but confident in his beauty; … There’s a price to being a Black performer who’s that free and that beautiful. In Amarillo, Texas, after Richard took off his shirt onstage, a D.A. had him arrested on charges of lewd behavior In ‘I Am Everything’, Richard describes another incident, in Augusta,Georgia, where he was beaten  by police and told, ‘ You’re singing n music to white kids.’” We now live in a time and age where that type of language is not socially acceptable. An incident like that would immediately go viral on social media and be all over the news, but this happened back in the time where people weren’t all seen as equal, especially not black people to white people or gay people to straight people. Richard had to deal with the consequences of being different, which wasn’t something that he could control and the author makes sure that you’re able to understand that by bringing up this quote from another anecdote of Richard.  He grew up in a religious town with a pastor for a late father forcing him to be the man of the house. It could be argued that his means of making money conflicted directly with his beliefs. In his younger days, this never seemed to be a problem for Richard, at least until when he saw the mysterious light in the sky in 1957. Of course, we all know that to be Sputnik, but there must have been something subconscious in Richard, something that he was thinking of always in the back of his head to make him feel that he had to turn back to his religion.And abandon his music.His dreams.  Seeing sputnik was just a catalyst for all these thoughts. Part of the text may be relatable to many people coming from religious households who have the fear of being themselves at a cost. The story of Little Richard can either be taken as a warning for them or a reason to choose who they want to be.

The target audience of this text is anyone interested in Little Richard and music from his time period. Different people have different perspectives, so what they get from a text might be different. For that reason, it’s important for authors to do things like this to make sure that the readers can receive the overarching message of the text. For example, a person from a strict catholic family might understand a biography of little Richard compared to someone from a multi religious family, but from reading this text where Abduqarrib goes into detail, he might be able to understand his struggles a little better. The author’s choice of evidence varies from photos to eyewitness accounts to quotes from the film, and all of them work to make a strong argument because not only do they support, they’re all 1st hand accounts of what actually happened, some of them straight from Richard himself.

From the text, the readers can understand that Richard has been struggling with his identity with himself when it comes to religion through outside forces like when it comes from police and being from a Christian family and having to step up as the man of the house, from being a black man in his time period. He didn’t have the grace others were given for his decisions. 

Annotated Bibliography: 

Abdurraqib, Hanif. “What Little Richard Deserved.” The New Yorker, 26 Apr. 2023, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-little-richard-deserved. 

Submitted October 15 2024