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Little Richard, the sel f - proclaimed “architect of rock ‘ n’ roll” who built his groundbreaking sound with a boiling blend of boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues and gospel, died on Saturday at the age of 87.
Richard, a Grammy Award winner and inductee to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame whose electrifying 1950s hits such as Tutti Frutti and Long Tall Sally and flamboyant stage presence influenced legions of performers, succumbed to cancer.
“Little Richard died in Tullahoma, Tennessee of bone cancer. He was loved by his family and adored by millions,” his family said in a statement through their lawyer, Bill Sobel.
Richard’s bass guitarist, Charles Glenn, told celebrity website TMZ the musician had been sick for two months and that he died surrounded by his brother, sister and son.
At his peak in the late 1950s and early ’ 60s, Richard shouted, moaned, screamed and trilled hits like Good Golly, Miss Molly and Lucille, all the while pounding the piano like a mad man and punctuating lyrics with an occasional shrill “whoooo!”
Time magazine said he played “songs that sounded like nonsense ... but whose beat seemed to hint of unearthly pleasures centred somewhere between the gut and the gutter.”
The music drew in both young black and white fans at a time when parts of the United States still were segregated. Many white artists, such as Pat Boone, had their own hit versions of Richard’s songs, albeit considerably toned down and “safer” for the pop audience.
“I’ve always thought that rock ‘n’ roll brought the races together,” Richard once said. “Although I was black, the fans didn’t care. I used to feel good about that.”
Soul men including James Brown, Otis Redding, Joe Tex and Don Covay all began their careers copying Little Richard’s harsh singing style, as did Paul Mccartney, who once described Little Richard’s voice as “a wild, hoarse, screaming thing, it’s like an out- of- body experience.”
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Travelin’ Band (1970), borrowed its structure and melody from Long Tall Sally. Led Zeppelin, a band with yet another screaming singer, Robert Plant, used the pounding drum rhythms from Little Richard’s Keep A- Knockin’ as the basis of their 1972 hit Rock and Roll.
Jimi Hendrix, who played in Richard’s band in the mid1960s, said he wanted to use his guitar the way Richard used his voice.
Later echoes of Little Richard’s unbridled style could be heard in the falsetto whoops of Prince in his song Kiss ( 1986) and in hip- hop duo Outkast’s uptempo 2003 hit Hey Ya! Prince, Elton John and David Bowie also owed much of their stage demeanour to Little Richard’s outre sensibilities and androgynous sexuality.
“I am the innovator,” Richard would tell interviewers and audiences. “I am the originator. I am the emancipator. I am the architect of rock ‘n’ roll!”
Little Richard’s sonic extravagance was matched by his campy flamboyance. He wore brightly coloured suits, a pencil- thin moustache, a carefully curled six- inch pompadour, mascara, pancake makeup and lipstick.
“Elvis may have been the king of rock ‘n ‘ roll but I am the queen,” he proclaimed.
He was born Dec. 5, 1932 as Richard Penniman to a poor family of 12 children in Macon, Ga. Religion was a guiding force in his family, which attended Pentecostal, Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches. His faith was so deeply ingrained that at times it would overwhelm his rock career.
His first performances were as a child in his church choir and his earliest inspirations were gospel singers, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who let a young Richard open her show when she stopped in Macon. A singer named Esquerita also influenced Richard’s fashion and manic musical style.
He first went on the road in the late 1940s, performing in medicine shows and drag shows and with bands.
Little Richard toured nationally, as a soloist and briefly as lead singer of a vocal group, the Tempo Toppers, but the records didn’t sell. He was sending out demo recordings when Specialty Records, a Los Angeles concern, contacted him.
Label owner Art Rupe instructed producer Robert Bumps Blackwell to find an artist in the mould of Ray Charles. Little Richard was working at the time in New Orleans, performing in a blues band that Blackwell found underwhelming.
It was during a break that Little Richard broke into a frantic, uptempo original, Tutti Frutti. Blackwell was floored and slated it for the next session but called on a local songwriter, Dorothy Labostrie, to rewrite the song’s risque lyrics. “Tutti Frutti, good booty” became Tutti Frutti, aw rooty.”
The disc hit No. 2 on the Billboard rhythm- and- blues chart and No. 17 on the Billboard pop chart in 1956. A tepid cover by Pat Boone later landed on the pop charts at No. 12. That same year, Elvis Presley covered Tutti Frutti and two other Little Richard hits, Rip It Up and Ready Teddy.
“They needed a rock star to block me out of white homes because I was a hero to white kids,” Little Richard told The Washington Post in 1984. “The white kids would have Pat Boone up on the dresser and me in the drawer ’cause they liked my version better, but the families didn’t want me because of the image that I was projecting.”
He became a dominating force on the music charts starting in 1956, following up Tutti Frutti, with Rip It Up, Slippin’ and Slidin’ and Good Golly Miss Molly. All were infused with the frantic rhythm of a runaway train.
“Shining like a quasar, the most intensely radiant object in the cosmos, he seems to tap a mystical source of mental power that is only accessible to great preachers and shamans,” Mccartney wrote in the preface to the 1994 biography The Life and Times of Little Richard.
But Richard’s career took a turn in 1957 when he decided to abandon rock in the middle of a two-week tour of Australia. Richard told a biographer that he saw a fireball shoot across the sky during an outdoor performance in Sydney and took it as a sign from God to change his life. He said he later determined the fireball was the launch of Russia’s Sputnik satellite.
A few months later, Richard was a student at a Bible college in Alabama. For a while he played only gospel music but slipped back into rock ‘ n’ roll, sharing a bill with the young Beatles in Hamburg, Germany, in 1962.
It was a pattern that persisted for years as Little Richard moved between rock ‘ n’ roll, alcohol, cocaine and heroin abuse and Christianity and gospel music. He would go on to become an ordained Seventh- day Adventist minister and eventually worked gospel and rock both into his shows, along with a little preaching.
“I talk about my life as a homosexual and a drug addict because I think it is right to tell people what God has done for me,” he wrote in his autobiography.