Small Town Joy

Introduction

All your favourite music is queer.

I should probably explain.

The music you love might not be made by queer musicians, or be made specifically for queer listeners, or address queer themes, but queerness is in its DNA.

Queer people have been making music for as long as there has been music. Tchaikovsky,1 Chopin,2 Schubert,3 Handel,4 and Britten5 are all believed to have been gay or bi, and while western pop and rock music quickly distanced itself from its primarily Black and queer roots, almost all of it owes its existence to the raucous "bulldaggers" of 1920s Harlem, the masculine-presenting Black lesbian blues and jazz singers who messed with gender roles and put queerness at the centre of their most celebrated, most sexual songs, and to the music made by the queer Black musicians that would follow them.

In the 1930s, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a bisexual woman, took queer and gospel music and created rock'n'roll. She forged a template mixing the sacred and the profane that would be made even more explicit in the 1950s by two queer artists, Minnie Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton and former drag queen "Little" Richard Penniman, who first performed as Princess LaVonne.

Penniman's image and act were borrowed from and shaped by two queer performers who were known as The Prince of the Blues and The Queen of Rock'n'Roll respectively. The prince was Billy Wright, a gospel singer and female impersonator who would perform in drag at the tent shows of the time, refining the make-up skills and tricks he would pass on to Penniman; and the queen was a kinetic, dramatic piano player born Eskew Reeder, Jr. but much better known as the bewigged, heavily made-up Esquerita. Esquerita was the pioneer - he would later be credited by the B-52's Ricky Wilson as a key musical influence and both Mick Jones of The Clash (on Big Audio Dynamite's 'Esquerita') and Adam Ant ('Miss Thing', from Ant's Vive Le Rock album) would write songs about him - but Penniman was the one who would become a musical legend and influence legions of musicians.

Both Thornton and Penniman had to be toned down for mainstream success, something that many recent LGBTQ+ musicians are familiar with. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the songwriters of 'Hound Dog', argued over Leiber's insistence that the chorus should say, "You ain't nothing but a motherfucker", while Dorothy LaBostrie was given the job of taming Little Richard's 'Tutti Frutti'. There are differing accounts of the original lyric, which began, "Tutti frutti / good booty" and then was either, "If it don't fit, force it / you can grease it, make it easy" or, "If it's tight, it's all right / and if it's greasy, it makes it easy". Either way, it's safe to say the 1950s America that lost its shit over a straight white man wiggling his hips wasn't quite ready for that.

Even in their bowdlerised form, 'Hound Dog' and 'Tutti Frutti' are among the most lewd, lascivious and life-affirming songs ever recorded - and among the most important and influential too.

Those songs and their creators inspired everybody from The Beatles to David Bowie. If it weren't for 'Hound Dog' we might never have heard of Elvis and the future of pop could have turned out very differently; and if it weren't for Sister Rosetta and Little Richard, we may never have had anybody else. Ringo Starr was in the audience for Tharpe's English shows and describes Little Richard as his hero; the other Beatles adored Little Richard too, with John Lennon teaching Paul McCartney how to emulate Richard's trademark howl. "It blew my mind," Lennon recalled.6 "We'd never heard anybody sing like that in our lives."

Lou Reed was a Little Richard fan,7 as was David Bowie. Speaking in 1991 about Richard, Bowie said, "Without him, I think myself and half my contemporaries wouldn't be playing music."8 Richard was also a formative influence on The Who's Pete Townshend, who has described himself as pansexual. Speaking about his 1966 song 'I'm a Boy', he said that at the time he had to couch songs of queerness and gender confusion "in vignettes of humour and irony."9 Townshend, the Little Richard-loving Beatles and the gender-bending, bisexual Bowie would prove to be just as influential as their heroes, and had a huge impact on many of the musicians you'll read about in these pages.

That impact was more than musical. The Beatles may not have been queer - according to Yoko Ono, John Lennon believed we're all "born bisexual"10 although he never experimented - but their image was considered to be unacceptably so by many conservatives. That image, shaped largely by their gay manager Brian Epstein, was scandalously androgynous by the standards of the time. Feminist writer Betty Friedan described it as a rejection of, "that brutal, sadistic, tight-lipped, crew-cut, Prussian, big-muscle, Ernest Hemingway"11 machismo particularly prevalent in the US, while one US Pentecostal writer was so furious about their apparent femininity that he took to his typewriter to exclaim, "No matter how popular the Beatles become, American girls still like boys to look like boys."12

LGBTQ+ people were just as influential offstage. In the 1950s Larry Parnes, a gay man, created the first British rock star, Tommy Steele, and transformed multiple boys-next-door into pop stars with a change of name and some better clothes: Steele was born Thomas Hicks, Ronald Wycherley became Billy Fury and Clive Powell became Georgie Fame. Parnes also invented the rock concert tour, where a bus full of bands travelled the country to play just one night in each town. Parnes' uncanny ability to spot the stars of the future - he was the most successful British music manager of the 1950s and 1960s - only failed once, in May 1960. Parnes had given a young band called The Silver Beats the job of supporting Johnny Gentle at dates in Alloa, Inverness, Fraserburgh, Keith, Forres, Nairn, and Peterhead. They performed as The Johnny Gentle Band and adopted stage names: Paul Ramon, Stuart de Staël, Carl Harrison, and Long John. However, despite their excitement, their first "showbiz" adventure was short-lived: Parnes decided not to continue working with them. The band went back to their given names: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Stuart Sutcliffe, and The Silver Beats became The Beatles.

Parnes was the first of what would later be dubbed the "velvet mafia", the gay managers, producers and music moguls of the late twentieth century who knew exactly what and who would sell to teenage girls. They shaped the careers and images of artists ranging from Billy Fury, Marc Bolan, The Beatles, and The Bee Gees to Wham! and The Who, effectively inventing pop culture as we know it today.

That culture may have tried to hide its queer roots - and in those much less enlightened times, many artists certainly had to hide their love away. But you can't hide your love forever, and queerness came swaggering and strutting out of clubs in the 1970s to take its place not just in disco, but also in US punk and new wave. Disco would fuel dance, electronic and pop music forever, and the punk music - named after a term originally used by Shakespeare to describe sex workers of any gender, but more usually used for men - of Lou Reed's Velvet Underground and of The New York Dolls would influence rock and indie musicians from The Sex Pistols to The Smiths, Green Day to Guns'n'Roses, Misfits to The Manic Street Preachers. On this side of the Atlantic, the fuse of the UK punk explosion was lit in the gay clubs of London.

By now you're probably thinking: This is a book about Scottish music. What does any of this have to do with Scotland?

Music is a story, and we Scots are among the world's finest storytellers. We tell our children tales of selkies and kelpies, supernatural and shape-shifting creatures of magic and mystery, so it's only natural that our music would be full of magic and mystery and shapeshifters too.

Scots have a long history of moving things and people around the world; if England is a nation of shopkeepers, Scotland is a nation of shipbuilders. And when you move people and things around the world their music - our music - moves with them. When music moves, it finds new shapes to take, new songs to sing and new voices to sing them.

Today, beats made in Bellshill bedrooms can be trending on TikTok by teatime. But while that speed is new, the motion isn't. My kids' music travels at the speed of light through fibre-optic cables, but my music travelled too: it came to me on cover-mounted cassette tapes and over the airwaves from far away and fading FM stations. For the generations before, music travelled from the other side of the world, on shellac and vinyl discs brought to Britain in the cavernous cargo holds of giant ships.

When music travelled by ship and by sea, the songs of innovators would be inhaled by imitators across the water and sometimes exhaled in whole new shapes. Those shapes would then make the return trip and influence the influencers, setting the next stage in...