Little Richard
December 5, 1932 – May 9, 2020
‘His extraordinary voice rang out across the world and changed the
face of popular music forever.’
Ian Fortnam looks back at the life and music of the self-acclaimed “architect of rock’n’roll”, who changed the face of popular music.
Little Richard always knew his true worth and was more than aware of his legend. “I am the originator, I am the emancipator, I am the architect of rock’n’roll,” he informed me with all due modesty back in 1996. “I am the engineer, I am the one that brought the train to the city… What a pity.” There was no ‘off’ switch on the self-styled Quasar Of Rock. He’d learned his craft drumming up business for snake oil salesmen, and he never forgot how to dazzle. He beamed, his eyes wide, seemingly bordering on frenzy; a pompadoured, cosmetics-drenched, star-spangled vision. He was – depending on who you spoke to – either the King or the Queen Of Rock’N’Roll, King Of The Blues, Creator Of Soul and, back in the early 1950s when the young James Brown was engaged as his tour support, customarily introduced as ‘The Hardest-Working Man In Show Business’. And that extraordinary voice, soft and charming in conversational repose, had an explosive power that was way beyond the reach of his peers. An irresistible clarion call that united both black and white audiences, even in the segregated US South, it rang out across the world and changed the face of popular music forever.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘Awopbopaloobop-Alopbamboom’. As an unaccompanied statement of intent, it was as nonsensical as it was inarguable. The secret language of nascent rock’n’roll, of teenage, of rebellion. Tutti Frutti, Richard’s ground-breaking debut for Art Rupe’s Speciality Records in October ’55 ,was produced by Robert ‘Bumps’ Blackwell, and captured a level of raw excitement that was entirely without precedent. Against a driving R&B beat laid down by double-bass player Frank Fields and drummer Earl Palmer, Richard, urged on by dual saxophonists Lee Allen and Alvin ‘Red’ Tyler, pounded out insistent piano lines and unleashed a rapid-fire vocal fit to wake the dead. Shrieks, hollers, screams; volume, power, passion. It was the sound of a damn bursting. The sexual revolution’s year zero.
Little Richard had been performing an unexpurgated version of Tutti Frutti live for years, but its original lyric (‘Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it’s tight, it’s alright, if it’s greasy, makes it easy’) was considered unsuitable for release, so Blackwell got local lyricist Dorothy LaBostrie to clean it up.
Even censored, Tutti Frutti lost none of its potency. It roared to No.2 on the R&B chart and crossed over to No.21 on the US national chart. With the floodgates open, Little Richard and Bumps Blackwell set about recording a series of singles that defined rock’n’roll: Long Tall Sally b/w Slippin’ And Slidin’, Rip It Up b/w Ready Teddy, Heeby Jeebies b/w She’s Got It, The Girl Can’t Help It, Lucille,Jenny Jenny, Keep A-Knockin’, Good Golly Miss Molly. He took America by storm. His tightly drilled backing band, The Upsetters (Lee Diamond Smith on sax, Buster Douglas on guitar, Olsie ‘Bassy’ Robinson on bass and drummer Chuck Connors) accentuated the back beat of his recordings when they played them live, and in so doing – according to no less an authority than James Brown – pioneered funk.
In 1956, Elvis Presley recorded four Little Richard songs, Pat Boone received two gold discs for limp, painfully caucasian retreads of both Tutti Frutti and Long Tall Sally, and even old Bill Haley got with the programme, hitting the UK top five with Rip It Up. Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, the Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis all covered Little Richard songs as the 50s progressed. The rock’n’roll pecking order was obvious for those who cared to look. By 1969, even Elvis was prepared to admit that Little Richard was “the greatest”.
Richard Wayne Penniman was born in Macon, Georgia on December 5, 1932. The third of 12 children, he was, according to his mother, Leva Mae, “the most trouble of any of
“I am the originator, I am the emancipator, I am the architect of rock’n’roll.”
Little Richard
’em”. Leva Mae married brickmason, church warden and moonshine dealer Bud Penniman when she was just 14. “My mother had all these kids,” Richard would later recall, “and I was the only one born deformed.” With a right leg shorter than his left he would “twist and walk feminine… The kids would call me ‘faggot’, ‘sissy’, ‘freak’, ‘punk’. The boys would want to fight me because I didn’t like to be with them, I wanted to play with the girls. See, I felt like a girl.”
He’d wear his mother’s make-up, affect her speech patterns and mannerisms, because he “wanted to be a girl more than a boy”. Ultimately abused by both older women and men, he was soon active within the local gay community. Simultaneous to his myriad earthly indiscretions, Richard attended Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal and Pentecostal churches, he’d regularly perform with his family’s Penniman Singers, and would sing almost constantly. “He’d get on our nerves hollerin’,” remembered his brother Charles. “Just a noise.”
While still in high school, Richard landed a part-time job at Macon City Auditorium, selling bottles of Coke. It meant that he could get in to hear all the latest performers for free, including his favourite R&B singer, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Seeing her arrive backstage, Richard started singing her songs until she eventually came across and asked him to get up on stage with her and sing a song. “Everybody applauded and cheered and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Sister Rosetta gave him 40 dollars. He was on his way.
Unsurprisingly, his overnight success was years in the making. As well as a lifelong devotion to singing, Lil’ Richard (as his family took to calling him due to his slight, skinny stature) was taught to play E-flat alto saxophone while still at school. In 1949, following his introduction to audience acclaim he started out on a long, circuitous road to stardom. He performed with local ‘prophet’ Doctor Nobilio, a turban-wearing spiritualist who’d attract trade by offering glimpses of ‘the Devil’s child’ (“a dried-up body of a baby with claw feet like a bird, and horns on its head”, according to Richard), before leaving home to join travelling snake-oil vendor Dr Hudson’s Medicine Show, with whom he sang Louis Jordan’s Caldonia, the only secular song he knew. And as if abandoning gospel wasn’t enough to condemn his mortal soul, he even took to performing in drag under the nom de frock Princess LaVonne on the minstrel circuit.
He first appeared as Little Richard with Buster Brown’s Orchestra, donned a red velvet gown to appear with Sugarfoot Sam From Alabam, and earned himself 10 dollars a week during a stint with the Tidy Jolly Steppers, before joining a troupe of made-up, false eyelash-fluttering cross-dressers in LJ Heath’s minstrel show. Settling in Atlanta, Richard got a regular gig (out of drag) with the
Broadway Follies, appearing regularly at Bailey’s 81 Theater, and began to gradually build a reputation. Audiences were becoming more responsive, and Richard’s confidence grew, even though “there was nobody screamin’ over me but me”.
It was while performing at Bailey’s 81 that Richard first encountered Billy Wright. Wright was a flamboyant character, whose clothes were almost as loud as his fearsome combination of blues-shouting and full-on crying. He wore his hair curled, high and in a pompadour. He not only converted Richard to R&B, he also influenced his embryonic look. Richard tracked down Wright’s exact brand of pancake make-up and, by way of an extra flourish, adopted a thin pencil moustache to cover a scar on his lip.
In 1951, Wright put Richard in touch with young, white DJ and R&B scenester Zenas Sears, who used his not insubstantial influence to secure the 19-year-old prodigy a deal with RCA Records. His first recording session produced the decidedly Billy Wright-alike Every Hour. It didn’t exactly shake the world of music to its very core, but it did become a local hit.
Little Richard left the Broadway Follies and returned to Macon. Every Hour garnered significant airplay in his home town, and his father, Bud, always sceptical and disapproving of his wayward son’s lifestyle choices, was finally proud of him. He joined Percy Welch And His Orchestra, got regular gigs and finally started to make a good living. But there was still something missing.
Richard had always messed around on the family piano, but couldn’t really play, until “I met this gay guy, a piano player called Esquerita”. Esquerita (real name Eskew Reeder Jr.) was a pianoplaying, gospel-rooted R&B vocalist who was more than a match for Billy Wright when it came to flamboyance. He wore heavy make-up, shades and, as if one were not enough, two wigs to ensure his pompadour’s dizzying height. He taught Richard to play piano, honed his skills in the deployment of gay slang and gifted him his trademark ‘Woooooooo!’
‘His extraordinary
voice rang out across the world and changed the face of popular music forever.’
Four weeks after Richard’s second session for RCA, in January, 1952, just as stardom finally appeared to lay panting at his feet, Bud Penniman was shot dead outside a bar. With his elder brother Charles away fighting in Korea, Richard became his family’s main breadwinner. He took a job washing dishes.
Fortunately, Macon promoter Clint Brantley recognised Richard’s potential, and relaunched his stalled career. He moved to Houston, where he formed the Tempo Toppers and signed with Don Robey’s Peacock Records. Clashing with Robey, it was a fractious time. Modest record sales ticked over but no one was getting rich. Ultimately, Richard disbanded the Tempo Toppers, formed The Upsetters, and came to the attention of Lloyd ‘Mr Personality’ Price. Price suggested he send a demo to Speciality Records in LA (for whom Price had delivered the massive 1952 hit song Lawdy Miss Clawdy). The demo arrived on ‘Bumps’ Blackwell’s desk, Art Rupe signed him to the label, Richard delivered his earth-shattering ‘AwopbopaloobopAlopbamboom’, and the rest, as they say, is history.
By 1957, Little Richard was a star. He’d play integrated shows across the nation in sequin-studded suits and sparkling jewelstudded capes as a veritable deluge of discarded undergarments rained down. Recognising his bankable charisma, DJ Alan Freed had featured him in roxploitation movies Don’t Knock The Rock and Mr Rock And Roll. Hollywood soon sat up and took notice, and he all but stole The Girl Can’t Help It from its star Jayne Mansfield. By now Little Richard was a household name. And the hits just kept on coming.
In October ’57, at the very peak of his fame he embarked on a package tour of Australia with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. All was going well until they reached Sydney. During an internal flight from Melbourne, Richard watched the plane’s engines “glowing red hot”. He imagined “angels with yellow hair” flying under the plane and holding it up. “It was like a sign to me.” Then, during his Sydney show, “a big ball of fire came directly over the stadium… It shook my mind. I got up from the piano and said: ‘This is it. I am through. I am leaving show business to go back to God’.” The ‘big
‘By 1969, even Elvis was prepared
to admit that Little Richard was
“the greatest”.’
ball of fire’ was apparently a launching Russian Sputnik. But the die was cast. Richard threw his rings into Sydney Harbour, cancelled his outstanding bookings and lost a fortune. Then the plane he was originally scheduled to return home on crashed into the Pacific. “That’s when I felt God really had inspired me”.
True to his word, following a farewell concert at Harlem’s Apollo Theater and a final recording session for Speciality, Richard enrolled at Oakwood College, Alabama to study theology. He even married. He signed with Mercury Records to release King Of The Gospel Singers in ’62. Mahalia Jackson’s sleeve-notes insisted that he “sang gospel the way it should be sung”.
Enter Don Arden. The hard-nosed British promoter tricked Little Richard back to rock’n’roll. Although God’s emissary on Earth didn’t take too much persuading; one audience booing his gospel set while crying out for his Speciality hits was all it took. The very next night, at Mansfield Granada, Richard gave the fans exactly what they wanted, and it nearly ended in a riot.
As the sixties played out, Richard continued to electrify live audiences, but was never to match the recordings he made for Speciality between ’55 and ’57. He played with The Beatles in support twice, in
Liverpool and Hamburg. Long Tall Sally was the first song that Paul McCartney ever sang in public, and a charmed Richard taught his puppy-eyed young acolyte how to deploy the Esquerita ‘Woooooooo!’
Richard returned to the UK in ’63 to rescue a failing Everly Brothers/Bo Diddley/Rolling Stones package tour, but the times they were a-changing. Even engaging Jimi Hendrix as a sideman couldn’t halt Richard’s steady decline as a creative force. Rock’n’roll was not, or so it seemed, here to stay.
But in the live arena no one could touch Little Richard. Ever more flamboyant, ever more androgynous, he took to stealing festival bills: from Janis Joplin in Atlanta, from John Lennon in Toronto, even from his arch-nemesis Jerry Lee Lewis in Detroit. Richard remained invincible. By ’72 he was still cleaning up on the Rock’N’Roll Revival circuit but, suffering the debilitating effects of cocaine addiction, his star gradually dimmed.
Little Richard’s best work was done by the time he threw his rings away. His conversion was as pivotal as Elvis’s call-up to the military. Richard would subsequently light up the screen in Down And Out In Beverly Hills and whoop along reliably to the clank of jewellery in Las Vegas casinos, but you can only really change the world once.
And change the world he most certainly did. Little Richard. The King Of Rock’N’Roll. The Queen Of Rock’N’Roll. The Georgia Peach. The Prince Of The Blues. The Original Hardest Working Man In Show Business. Creator Of Soul. Originator. Emancipator. Architect Of Rock’N’Roll.
Lemmy once told me: “If there was one record that changed me from the simpering cretin I was, into the high-energy rock machine that you see before you, it was probably Good Golly Miss Molly by Little Richard, because that is just the sound of pure joy. He was the best vocal ever in rock’n’roll.”
We all owe Little Richard an immense debt of gratitude. After all, he’s why we’re all here.
“He was the best vocal ever in rock’n’roll.”
Lemmy