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A month after his death, his label released, posthumously, A Change Is Gonna Come— which has since become the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement. The man himself was no longer around to see any of its rewards.
Flashmag! Issue 174 July 2026
Little Richard: the bill that was never settled
If Sam Cooke understood the trap too late, Little Richard lived inside it for thirty years, with a rage that never burned out. You only need the first ten seconds of Tutti Frutti to understand what this man gave the world: a scream, a piano hammered like a machine gun, a scandalous and theatrical joy that would go on to feed the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Prince. And yet in 1984, while those same acts were selling out stadiums on borrowed pieces of his musical language, Little Richard was filing a lawsuit seeking $ 115 million in unpaid royalties. He had already walked away from Specialty Records, furious, twenty-five years earlier. The fight itself had never stopped. Picture the absurdity of it: the man who essentially invented the founding scream of rock‘ n’ roll, forced, well into his fifties, to bang on courthouse doors demanding a fair share of what his own genius had produced— while white artists who had covered his songs in more“ radio-friendly” versions for the era kept collecting glory and royalties he himself never fully received.
Little Richard
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The scandal here isn’ t a contract signed under duress. It’ s something more insidious: the industry simply assumed, for decades, that it was normal to pay a Black artist to create but never to own. They asked him for the energy, the body, the invention, the risk onstage. The masters, the catalogs, the decades of royalties to come— those stayed elsewhere.
Phyllis Hyman: the voice no one let finish
There’ s another kind of exploitation, less spectacular than stolen masters but just as devastating: demanding that an artist become someone else in order to stay marketable. And there is perhaps no more heartbreaking example than Phyllis Hyman. Her voice was an instrument unlike any other— a sweeping, dramatic contralto equally at home in smoky jazz clubs and on the Broadway stage; she earned a Tony nomination for her role in Sophisticated Ladies, the musical tribute to Duke Ellington.