RIP Little Richard: The Boy Couldn’t Help It, Either, Praise the Lord.
Of all the early rock ’n’ rollers, Little Richard was the one who really scared the hell out of America.
Your daughters might have an inexplicable thing for the sultry eyes and snake hips of Elvis. Jerry Lee had the hair and the wicked smile. Chuck Berry had the sly grin and the slick suit.
But Little Richard, man, he was just untethered. Pounding the piano, jumping on top of the piano, tearing off his shirt, howling like a man possessed by the devil himself. That voice. And the songs. What are they, anyway? Are they songs at all?
Barricade the doors, Martha, and lock up the children. If this is what American popular culture and music have come to, we’ve reached the end of days.
Spoiler alert: American popular culture and music survived. So did Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard. He was 87 when he died Saturday and 62 years after his last top-10 hit, his death still sent a loud, sad rumble across the land.
Musicians could note how Little Richard put blues, gospel and rhythm and blues together to create “Tutti-Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Jenny, Jenny,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Rip It Up,” “Keep A Knockin’,” “Good Golly Miss Molly” and a dozen other songs that sometimes didn’t seem like much more than the title repeated over and over like a freight train careening downhill at 80 miles an hour. Call them the rock ’n’ roll version of scat singing, but after two minutes their pure power left you soaking wet and gasping for air. Harness a few Little Richard songs and we could end our dependence on fossil fuel.
Or, as Bob Dylan put it after hearing the news of Little Richard’s death, “His was the original spirit that moved me to do everything I would do.”
Historians could note that it would be shorter to list the 1960s musicians who were not influenced by Little Richard than the ones who were. From Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Traveling Band” to Paul McCartney’s Beatle classic “I’m Down,” few rock ’n’ rollers of the ’60s didn’t want to create something as simple and insanely powerful as “Slippin’ and Slidin’.”
Little Richard knew that, and loved it. “I am the originator,” he said. “The emancipator, the quasar, the architect of rock ’n’ roll.”
Maybe not 100% true. Close enough.
Richard Penniman certainly was the architect of Little Richard, and an impressive feat that was.
Richard Penniman was born in December 1932, the bottom of the Depression, to a low-income black family in Jim Crow Georgia. He was one of 12 kids. He was gay. Not a lot of stepping stones there.
Like a whole lot of black Georgia kids, from Blind Willie McTell up to Ray Charles, Otis Redding and James Brown, he turned to music as a road that was open.
Gospel was his main musical taproot, and as a teenager he opened shows for Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He landed a record deal with RCA, which had him sing piano blues in the style of the times, backed by a small combo. The likes of “Taxi Blues” and “Please Have Mercy On Me” show his vocal skills, but didn’t set him apart from a hundred similar artists and didn’t sell. Neither did a handful of tracks he cut for Peacock with a vocal group, the Tempo Toppers.
That helps explain why he was washing dishes at a Macon Greyhound station in February 1955 when he sent an audition tape to Specialty Records, a New Orleans label that had scored with gospel, blues and R&B.
The owner was Art Rupe and the ears belonged to Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, who finally heard the tape and on Sept. 13, 1955, brought Richard to New Orleans for an exploratory session.
Over two days they cut a dozen songs with the sound of the day, like “I’m Just a Lonely Guy.” Blackwell still loved Richard’s voice, but wasn’t sure he heard a hit.
As Blackwell told Charles White for White’s definitive 1972 book The Life and Times of Little Richard, they took a break at one point to go out for some food. Richard saw a piano, sat down and played his go-to bar song, “Tutti Frutti,” a raunchy favorite that began “Tutti frutti, good booty . . . .”
Blackwell described it as a moment much like Sam Phillips felt when he heard Elvis Presley fooling around with a blues song instead of the pop he’d been recording.
Now that’s a hit, Blackwell said to himself. He recruited songwriter Dorothy La Bostrie to stop blushing and sanitize the lyrics. Her hasty rewrite wasn’t Shakespeare, but once Richard got over his surprise that Blackwell would have him record any version of it, he added “Awop-bop-a-loo-mop-alop-bomp-bomp” and Little Richard was in business.
“Tutti Frutti” only reached №17 on the pop charts, five notches below Pat Boone’s cover version. But Richard’s followup, “Long Tall Sally,” reached №6 while Boone’s cover only hit №8. The sun was slowly rising.
“Long Tall Sally” turned out to be Richard’s chart peak. He never had a top-five hit. The only Grammy he ever won was for lifetime achievement, in 1993. He never had a top-10 hit after 1958.
Stats and awards, as this suggests, only told part of the story.
He quit rock ’n’ roll in 1957, saying the Lord had sent him a vision. That’s why “Keep A Knockin’,” released after his epiphany, is really one fragmentary chorus spliced together twice to make it long enough for a 45 rpm record.
He became an ordained minister. Then by 1962 he was edging back into rock ’n’ roll, urged by admirers like the Beatles and launching a lifetime of commuting between the secular and sacred worlds. At any given point he could be leaping atop his piano at a rock ’n’ roll revival show, stripping down to his underwear, or inveighing against sin at a small Southern church.
While most fans knew him for the dozen songs that scorched the radio from 1956 to 1958, he stayed active in music for decades. One of his bands included the young Jimi Hendrix. He recorded hundreds of songs, some gospel, some rock ’n’ roll and some just songs he felt like singing.
He contributed a manic version of the old folksong “Rock Island Line” to a 1988 Woody Guthrie / Leadbelly tribute album whose other artists included Bob Dylan, U2, Taj Mahal and Bruce Springsteen.
When the late Don Imus recorded a CD to raise money for his children’s cancer ranch, Little Richard sang the old Webb Pierce song “I Ain’t Never.”
Being Little Richard wasn’t always a smooth ride. There were years of drugs, years when it felt like the world was forgetting.
Maybe that helps explain March 2, 1988, when Little Richard and Buster Poindexter took the podium of the 30th annual Grammy Awards to present the Best New Artist statuette.
They opened the envelope and Richard said, “And the best new artist is . . . . me!
“I have never received nothing. Ya’ll ain’t never give me no Grammy. And I’ve been singing for years. I am the architect of rock and roll.”
The audience loved it — and yes, the actual winner, Jody Watley, did eventually get announced.
The day after, in a nearby hotel room, Little Richard made a fashionably late entrance in full makeup, wearing a tux and sunglasses, and explained a little bit about what happened.
“I was talking to Buster and some of the artists and I just wasn’t feeling that thing you’re supposed to feel,” he said. “I was thinking, oh God, we’ve got to give the people something. Someone has to brighten up this situation.
“And I heard this voice saying something low like, ‘Richard, Richard, [the Grammys aren’t] gonna call you any more.’ Buster said, ‘Just read the cards,’ but the card should have said ‘me.’ So that’s what I said.
“People expect Little Richard. The show needed a shot in the arm.”
As for his best new artist Grammy, he joked, “I’m going to go by and pick up mine today.”
If Little Richard slipped and slid in and out of the rock ’n’ roll world over the years, he sounded attuned to it on that March afternoon.
“What’s touching to me today is when I watch Michael Jackson,” he said. “In my 45 years, I’ve never seen an artist like this guy. He makes me dizzy looking at him.
“Prince is also a genius. Bob Seger is a great rock singer and a group like U2, coming from nowhere — I appreciate their singing about Dr. King. Springsteen and Bob Dylan, they do beautiful things.”
What he valued most, he added, was uplifting messages, which naturally became the point at which the rock ’n’ roller clasped hands with the preacher.
“Whatever I do,” he said, “I give a message. Even when I’m singing about frying turnip greens [‘Rice, Red Beans and Turnip Greens,’ Peacock 1628, recorded 1953], I like for everything to be positive.
“We live in a time of chaos, when men’s hearts are failing from fear. We are looking for someone to stand up, to show them what highway to enter.
“I believe all churches should teach the 10 Commandments. If we live by them, we will have a better world. They should be taught to all races, creeds and colors.
“It hurts when you put yourself up on a pedestal that you’re not deserving of. We’re all sinners. We all do wrong. Can’t no one point a finger at anyone.
“That’s the reason you have to be careful what you say and do. I’m very cautious in what I say and do and who I say it to. As I live every day, I believe in treating people right. I believe that’s God’s Holy Sabbath.”
And that it was time for an amen.
“Sorry, I have to go now,” he said. “I’ve been offered a documentary. Commercials have been offered to us. Tell ’em I’m willing and able. I’d love to do ‘em.
“I just finished the album where I do ‘Rock Island Line.’ It’s got the ‘whooooo,’ too. Did you notice that everything I say rhymes? I try not to be Little Richard all the time, but it’s hard, because it’s my personality.”
Amen.
