Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Richard “Little Richard” Penniman were gender-nonconforming black musicians who began their recording careers in the South in the early 1950’s. Both demonstrate how queerness was an indelible part of the early rhythm and blues performances that influenced the development of rock ‘n’ roll. The backlash against queerness during the Cold War and the related focus on respectability during the civil rights movement, however, increasingly affected the ways that black artists could express gender nonconformity. Nevertheless, Thornton and Penniman found ways to subvert normative ideas about gender. These queer black musicians’ gender nonconformity helped establish the rebellious nature of rock ‘n’ roll, which shows how black southern queer performance influenced the genre in the 1950’s and beyond.
Tyina (pronounced Ta-wa-na) Steptoe hails from Houston, Texas. She holds a Ph.D. in History and an M.A. in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also earned a B.S. in Radio-Television-Film and a B.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, she is an associate professor of history at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her work focuses on race, gender, and culture in the United States. Her award-winning book, Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (University of California Press, 2016), examines how the migration of Creoles of color, ethnic Mexicans, and black East Texans complicated notions of race in Houston between the 1920s and 1960s. Her latest book is Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle. Dr. Steptoe also hosts a weekly radio program called “Soul Stories” on 91.3 KXCI Tucson. The show explores the roots and branches of rhythm and blues music.