Little Richard’s big life
He influenced stars from Jimi Hendrix to Elton John, but struggled to reconcile his sexuality with his religion. When news broke that Little Richard had died at age 87, fans and musicians paid tribute to the rock pioneer
HE KICKED off the song with a feral cry, pounding his piano and singing in a high, frenetic voice that seemed to be permanently on the edge of hysteria. It was 1955 and with his first hit, Tutti Frutti, Little Richard made other early rockers such as Bill Haley and Elvis Presley sound decidedly tame.
The American legend’s importance in the history of pop music is impossible to overstate. When he was placed eighth on a list of the greatest performers ever by music magazine Rolling Stone, all of the seven ranked above him had been heavily influenced by him.
To Paul McCartney, he was simply “the king of rock ’n roll”. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones said appearing on stage with him in 1963 was the greatest moment of his life. Bob Dylan wrote in his school yearbook that his ambition was “to join Little Richard”.
David Bowie went out and bought a saxophone after hearing one of his records. He inspired Elton John to play the piano and Jimi Hendrix, who cut his teeth playing in Richard’s backing band, said he wanted “to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice”. Michael Jackson and Prince were others who testified to his influence.
So when it recently emerged that Little Richard had died of bone cancer at age 87, fans paid tribute to the larger-thanlife rock pioneer. The world has never seen anyone quite like him.
His theatrical and impassioned style owed much to gospel and the rabble-rousing of the Southern evangelists he grew up hearing as a boy. Yet he invested the preaching style with an almost demonic edge, singing with a lack of inhibition that took rock ’n roll to places it had never been before.
As a boy he’d hoped to become a preacher, and at the height of his success he became convinced he was heading for damnation. To make amends, he enrolled at a theological college and abandoning secular music to tour with an evangelical show, in which he delivered a sermon titled, “Why I left show business”.
By the time he returned in the early 1960s, popular music was changing rapidly. But the beat groups who were about to eclipse the first generation of rock stars were all in awe of him. The Beatles took second place to Little Richard on the bill when he toured Britain in October 1962, and Paul McCartney gleefully seized the opportunity to study and copy his singing technique at close hand.
“It’s like an out-of-body experience,” McCartney said. “You have to leave your current sensibilities and go about a foot above your head to sing it.”
The following year, the Rolling Stones supported him and Mick Jagger was equally starstruck.
“He drove the whole house into a complete frenzy. I’d watch his moves every night and learn from him how to entertain and involve the audience.”
Richard later enjoyed boasting, “Mick
EJagger used to watch my act. Where do you think he got that walk?”
VEN though he never recovered the chart dominance he’d enjoyed in the 1950s, Richard continued to tour endlessly, singing his old hits. He was a revered figure who, as an ordained minister, found an accommodation between evangelism and rock by distributing Biblical literature to his audiences.
When he appeared at a “Legends of Rock ’n Roll” show with Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis in London in 1998, he reportedly spent much of his appearance fee paying for a Bible to be placed on every seat in the arena.
He finally retired from touring in 2013.
“I think my legacy should be that when I started in show business there wasn’t no such thing as rock ’n roll,” he said. “When I started with Tutti Frutti, that’s when rock really started rocking.”
He wasn’t boasting. It was simply a statement of fact.
He once said that if Elvis was the king of rock ’n roll, he was the queen and claimed to be “omnisexual”. Yet he also denounced homosexuality as being “satanic” and against the will of God.
“I’m not gay now, but, you know, I was gay all my life,” he announced on Late Night with David Letterman in 1982. “I was one of the first gay people to come out. But God let me know that He made Adam to be with Eve, not Steve.”
At an evangelical rally in 1957 he met Ernestine Harvin, a secretary, whom he
‘He drove the whole house into a complete frenzy’
married two years later. They adopted a son, Danny Jones, who later worked for Richard as a bodyguard.
He and Ernestine divorced in 1964, apparently because she couldn’t put up with his wild ways. Even before he became famous he’d spent three days in jail for lewd misconduct in the back of a car. And with celebrity came even greater temptation to hedonistic excess. There were addictions to booze, drugs and “wonderful orgies” – including a threesome with Buddy Holly.
“I’ll never forget that,” Richard later recalled.
In the 1970s, he was spending $1 000 a day on cocaine. He was once held at gunpoint over drug debts. Yet even at his most debauched, God was never far away. “I’d get up off an orgy and go pick up my Bible,” he once said. “Sometimes I’d have the Bible right by me.”
He never remarried but had a lasting relationship with Audrey Robinson, who worked as a stripper under the name Lee Angel. They met in 1956 when she was 16 and their friendship endured on and off for more than half a century.
“Richard is insane,” she said in 2010. “I don’t mean clinically insane or crazy in a bad way. But he’s just insane.”
RICHARD Wayne Penniman was born in 1932 in Macon, Georgia. He was the third of 12 children. His father, Charles “Bud” Penniman, married Richard’s mother, Leva Mae Stewart, when she was 14. Richard was meant to have been named Ricardo but the registrar misspelt his name on the birth certificate.
Both his parents were Seventh Day Adventists, but the conflict between God and Mammon that characterised his own life was inherited: his father was a stonemason and a church deacon but supplemented his income by selling moonshine whisky and owned a nightclub called the Tip-In Inn.
There were frequent police raids on the family home in search of illicit liquor, but the trade enabled Richard to grow up a level above the abject poverty all around him in the Deep South.
The family had a gospel group called the Penniman Singers and performed in local churches. At an early age Richard displayed a loud, screaming voice that earned him the nickname “War Hawk”.
By the age of 10 he’d become a child “healer” and was soon preaching as well as singing gospel songs. As a boy he learnt the piano and played saxophone in the school band. He got a job selling soft drinks at the Macon City Auditorium, which allowed him to see popular performers of the day, including Cab Calloway and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who invited him to sing on stage with her.
His sexuality was complex from an early age and he was teased for his effeminate mannerisms. He put on dresses to entertain his sisters and when his father found him wearing his mother’s makeup, he was given a brutal beating. He was kicked out when he was 15.
“My daddy put me out of the house. He said he wanted seven boys, and I’d spoilt it, because I was gay,” he said.
He took to the road with a touring gospel group and a medicine show, and sang at segregated black dance halls around the Deep South with Buster Brown’s vaudeville orchestra. It was Brown who conferred the stage name Little Richard – although he’d also been nicknamed “Lil’ Richard” in childhood because of his skinny frame and his right leg being shorter than his left (which caused him to limp and at school he was labelled a “freak”). He also performed as a woman under the name “Princess Lavonne”.
When he moved to Atlanta in the early 1950s he frequented the drag clubs and bordellos in the city’s red-light district. There, he fell under the influence of the gay blues singer Billy Wright, whose pancake make-up and pompadour hair he imitated and made his own.
TRAGEDY struck in 1952 when his father was murdered outside his nightclub and Richard returned to Macon to help support the family. By then he’d already made his first recordings in an unremarkable R&B style for RCA Victor. A year later, he moved to Houston, Texas, where he signed with Don Robey’s Peacock Records. None of his records for the label charted and when he complained that he hadn’t been paid, he got into a fight with Robey in which he was knocked out cold. He returned to Macon and took a job washing dishes at the Greyhound bus depot.
He might’ve stayed there had it not been for Lloyd Price, who’d just enjoyed a big hit with Lawdy Miss Clawdy and suggested Richard should record a demo tape and send it to Specialty Records in Los Angeles.
For six months the tape sat on the desk of Art Rupe, the owner of Specialty, before he agreed to lend Richard the money to buy out his contract with Peacock. He put him in the studio with the producer Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, who’d helped to set Ray Charles on the path to stardom.
At their first session in New Orleans in early 1955, they were recording a slow blues number when Richard began pounding out an irrepressible, speeded-up boogie-woogie rhythm over which he screamed a lewd lyric he’d picked up from the red-light district.
The song was Tutti Frutti and “a-wopbop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!” was
He re-embraced rock ’n roll and his ways became wilder than ever
about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world – but only after Blackwell had insisted the original lyrics should be cleaned up.
The record was a sensation. However, there was still a racial divide in American music at the time and although Richard’s version of Tutti Frutti charted at No 17, the white singer Pat Boone had a bigger hit with an anodyne cover of the song in which all of the original’s sexual exuberance was removed.
The follow-up, Long Tall Sally, was characterised by the same speeded-up boogie-woogie piano and a saxophone solo by Lee Allen that screamed as manically as Richard’s voice. Once again the song was covered by Boone, although this time Richard’s original fared better than the sanitised white copy. It made it to No 6 in the American charts – two places higher than his imitator.
It was a significant breakthrough in the desegregation of pop music and by the time of his third hit, Rip It Up, Richard easily outperformed the white copyist, this time Bill Haley. After that, the practice of bland “white-bread” copies of black records faded, although he still played to segregated audiences in the Deep South, with white fans on the ground floor and black fans confined to the balcony.
Over the next two years he seemed unstoppable, with a string of further hits in the same sexually charged style, including Lucille, Slippin’ and Slidin’, and Good Golly Miss Molly.
Every song seemed to strike like a bolt of lightning, while on stage he was as wild and flamboyant as his music. Flashily dressed like a rock ’n roll Liberace, he didn’t so much play his piano as assault it. The sexual energy he generated produced an extraordinary reaction that, as he put it, made “your liver quiver, your bladder splatter and your knees freeze”.
It all came to an abrupt end in late 1957 when he announced during a tour of Australia that he was quitting to train for the ministry. According to one story, he saw a great ball of fire in the sky above the venue he was playing, and decided it was a message telling him to make his peace with God. History suggests it was actually the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1.
Another story had it that he’d been scared half to death on a rough flight across the Australian outback and had prayed to God for deliverance. When the plane landed safely in Sydney, he was convinced that angels must’ve been “holding it up” in the sky, threw his expensive jewellery into the harbour as proof of his faith, and cancelled the remaining concert dates.
The flight on which he was scheduled to fly home if he’d completed the tour subsequently crashed into the Pacific. To him, it was further “proof ” that the Lord had chosen him to do His work, and he enrolled at a college in Alabama run by the Church of God of the Ten Commandments.
He didn’t settle readily into life as a penitent and left theological college without graduating after being accused of exposing himself to a fellow male student. By 1962 he’d re-embraced rock ’n roll and his ways became wilder than ever. Two years later, young guitarist Maurice James joined his band. The world later got to know him as Jimi Hendrix, and much of his showmanship was derived from observing Richard.
He also had a profound influence on Otis Redding, who started his career in Richard’s band, and on James Brown, who also grew up in Georgia and wrote his first hit Please Please Please after Richard had scrawled the words on a napkin in a restaurant one night.
RICHARD continued recording but in 1977, after the death of a much-loved nephew in a violent fight, he once more repented. He returned full-time to evangelism as a travelling salesman for the Black Heritage Bible, proclaiming that it wasn’t possible to sing the Devil’s music and serve God at the same time.
Inevitably, he was soon back again as the struggle between rock and religion continued. There was even a return to the pop charts with Great Gosh A’Mighty. He wrote the song for the 1986 movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills, in which he starred alongside Nick Nolte. Further acting roles followed, including in TV series Baywatch and Miami Vice.
Cosmetic surgery enabled him to maintain his youthful, mask-like appearance. Playing in London in 1992, he quipped, “I’m 60 years old today and I still look remarkable.”
As a minister he officiated at the wedding of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore and the funeral of singer Ike Turner.
There was never a palatial Little Richard home like Presley’s Graceland as he spent much of his life living in luxury hotels. For a decade and more he made his home at the Hyatt on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip, and later moved to the Nashville Hilton. In recent years, after a series of debilitating surgeries including heart surgery and a hip replacement, he lived on a small farm in Tennessee.
In the late 1960s it was rumoured that he liked to be carried into restaurants in an ornate sedan chair. In retirement, his appearances were a little more low-key. He was often seen at fast-food drivethroughs, no longer rock ’n roll’s wildest wild man but still waving to fans and sporting his broad, trademark grin.