"I think they saw me as something like a deliverer, a way out. My means of expression, my music, was a way in which a lot of people wished they could express themselves and couldn't"

He’s describing the strange alchemy between an artist and an audience living under limits, racial, sexual, generational, religious, where one person’s uninhibited sound becomes a collective escape hatch. In mid‑century America, a Black, flamboyant performer crashing the airwaves with wails, pounding piano, and swagger didn’t just entertain; it modeled a permission structure. The hair, the makeup, the ecstatic yelps: those weren’t only stylistic flourishes, they were demonstrations of a self declared publicly, loudly, joyfully. Listeners who felt policed by segregation, decorum, or gender expectations could suddenly feel their own bodies loosen. If he could get away with that, maybe they could move, too. The stage turned into a portal where shame, restraint, and silence briefly lost jurisdiction.

He also names the power of form. Music isn’t a speech or an argument; it’s a visceral technology of freedom. Rhythm seizes the nervous system; call‑and‑response collapses the distance between performer and crowd; the beat organizes strangers into a single organism. His means of expression transformed private, unspeakable feelings, desire, frustration, giddy defiance, into sound waves that anyone could ride. In that moment, he became a conduit, taking on the risk of transgression so others could experience its thrill without bearing its penalties. The performance is thus both sanctuary and spark: a protected space to feel, and a catalyst to imagine life beyond the walls.

There’s a burden inside being cast as a deliverer. Audiences project longing onto a human being who still carries his own contradictions and costs. Yet the framing also honors the communal nature of his art. He isn’t delivering people to himself; he’s delivering them back to themselves, to capacities they already possessed but couldn’t access. That is the quiet radicalism here: expression as social action, not only self‑revelation. By embodying the uncontainable, he exposed how small the container had always been, and how ready people were to step outside it.