The pompadour is a rock n’ roll hairstyle with teased roots going back to 18th-century France. This hair style is named for the woman who started it, Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of Louis XV.
Madame de Pompadour was born on December 29th, 1721 in Paris to a bourgeois family who spared no expense on her education. She was taught by renowned singers and actors to play the clavichord, dance, sing, and recite entire plays by heart. She was a real scenster of a gal and her reputation grew such that the King himself wished to meet her. He threw a royal masked ball as an excuse to meet her and became so smitten that, less than a month after the ball, she was living at Versailles in an apartment directly below his.
Madame de Pompadours’ style influenced the elite of France and soon her elaborate up-do was imitated by women across the country. The hair got bigger over the years and began to include things like toy ships and bird cages. Many men and women began to get pompadour wigs or hair pieces to pile on top of their own hair that were teased and held in place with beef tallow and bear grease.
It’s no wonder that 1950s tent show queens picked the pompadour as their hair-do of choice when performing bawdy R&B numbers for rowdy southern crowds.
Billy Wright was a flamboyant blues singer from New Orleans who performed in southern tent shows in the late 1940s dressed in drag. Little Richard met Wright in Atlanta in 1952 and was greatly influenced by his appearance. He became Wright’s protégé.
Wright had gold fronts on his teeth, wore eyeliner and face powder, and used pomade to pile his hair high on his head. Little Richard began performing with Wright dressed in drag and balancing a chair on his chin while he sang.
As the popularity of rock grew, so did the pompadour. Rock stars like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis slicked their long locks up into pompadours. The pompadour’s popularity waned in the late 60s and 70s but experienced a bit of resurgence in the 1980s with musicians like The Stray Cats and Buster Poindexter of former New York Dolls fame.
The style gained even more popularity in the early 1990s with the emergence of Psychobilly, a fusion of punk and rockabilly. The style is still seen today on greasers and those who are part of the rockabilly and physchobilly scenes.
Photos by Jean-François Chénier, Julian Bleecker, and Jlacpo on Flickr.
