Published: 22 May 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
I’LL ALWAYS ASSOCIATE LITTLE RICHARD, who died this month at the age of 87, with the first time I heard the phrase: “It’s more than my job’s worth.” But more of that later. Most astonishingly, the Macon, Georgia-born former gospel singer, “Little” Richard Penniman, the most flamboyant of all rock stars …was Jewish.
He seems to have converted around 1985, in which year, when filming Down and Out in Beverly Hills, he dumbfounded its Jewish director Paul Mazursky by refusing to work on a Friday evening because it was “Shabbos”.
Not long after that film was made, LR was severely injured in a car crash. He was treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles and later told journalists: “All I remembered when I awakened was I was in a Jewish hospital and I said: ‘Thank God’.”
He was visited there by his “blood brother” Bob Dylan, who, LR told an interviewer, “spent seven hours at my bedside talking about the importance of keeping the Sabbath”. On several subsequent occasions, Richard spoke of keeping kosher and attending synagogue.
FULL STORY Little Richard, from gospel singer to Jewish star (Jewish Chronicle)
Rock legend Little Richard was fascinated with Judaism (Times of Israel)
An ordained minister who grew up attending Baptist and Pentecostal churches, he later described himself as ‘a lil’ Jewish boy, black bottom, from Georgia’
