The first time I truly understood the kinetic, roof-raising meaning of the phrase “rock’n’roll” was when I attended a Little Richard concert in the summer of 2012. The bouffant-haired icon was 79 then. He performed at the piano from a wheelchair, frequently interrupting songs to complain of exhaustion and medical pains. In the middle of the show, obsessive concertgoers formed a long line, snaking around the dinner tables, in the hopes that Little Richard would autograph their vinyl albums and mementos (he seemed to be flattered, and occasionally cut into his set list to oblige). But even so, I finally grasped why Little Richard must have caused such a stir when he crashed on the music scene like an asteroid in the mid-1950s, cratering everything around him with his outrageous, sanctified, scandalous approach to rock’n’roll. Flanked by a dense horn section and not one but two drummers, Little Richard’s rumbling rhythm section tore through high-energy takes of his hits “Lucille” and “Tutti Frutti” like an earthquake of magnitude 10. The sheer physicality of his hard-driving, endorphin-raising musicianship was so visceral and pulse-pounding that it was the equivalent of musical smelling salts. If it didn’t immediately wake you out of whatever state you were in to tap your toes or bop your neck, you’d probably already left the land of the living.
Born Richard Penniman in Macon, Georgia, Little Richard died in Tullahoma, Tennessee on May 9 at age 87 from bone cancer. But it’s hard to imagine him in stillness, as he was the greatest high-energy, particle-colliding human force of the 20th century. He had so much charismatic energy that at times it seemed he could personally keep the electrical grid of several cities going if there was ever a power surge. One of the original framers of rock’n’roll, and arguably its chief mastermind, Little Richard was the archetypal pop star of the 1950s alongside Elvis and Chuck Berry. He should be remembered as an avant-garde innovator who re-engineered the DNA code of post-WWII popular music. Little Richard’s newfangled concept of rock’n’roll diverged from easy listening tunes and jump blues of the early ’50s. Fusing together New Orleans R&B, boogie woogie’s driving left-handed bass shuffle rhythm, and pyrotechnical gospel, he delivered a dangerous, badass music nobody had exactly heard before.
Little Richard’s breakout 1955 single “Tutti Frutti” was a visionary, future-forward concept in its heyday. Collaborating with producer Bumps Blackwell at New Orleans’ J&M Studios, Little Richard devised a harder, funkier, higher voltage rock’n’roll than earlier peers Fats Domino or Jackie Brenston. Inspired by Ike Turner’s eccentric piano, Richard approached his right-hand on the ivories as if he were playing percussion, especially in the upper registers. To match Richard’s eighth-note ferocity in his right-handed playing, drummer Earl Palmer delivered a raucous backbeat that upped the ante from the Fats Domino sessions he’d previously worked on. (Little Richard’s exuberant piano would go on to inspire the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Elton John.) Featuring honking sax and a pile-driving propulsive attack, “Tutti Frutti” smoked with greasy funk.
Little Richard’s urgent larynx, the icing on the cake of “Tutti Frutti”’s remarkable power, was a profound mix of dirt road preacher grit and combustible holy ghost power. Bearing the influence of gospel dynamos like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, and singing evangelist Brother Joe May, Richard’s singing would go on to influence fierce vocalists like Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. But his vocal trademark was his banshee falsetto whoops, surely inspired by Marion Williams of the Clara Ward Singers. So much of Little Richard’s vocal power lay in his orgasmic, gleeful blurts, yelps, howls, cries, wails, and croons—expressive sounds and explosive exhortations that somehow conveyed a truth about black life in the 1950s that mere words could never approximate. In his feelingful music, Little Richard found a magical way to gather all the furious energy of postwar America—optimism, disillusionment, soul-searching, horniness, hatred, boredom. He swirled that energy up like a twister, synthesizing and unleashing it back onto the world as an irresistible torrent of modernist black rock. Since his alchemical music illuminated the precincts of erotic, yearning feeling among teenagers in the 1950s, Little Richard was as much an avant-garde pioneer as Pollock or Parker or Warhol—and he should be considered among the greatest 20th century American innovators, in any medium.
“Tutti Frutti” was just the start of Richard’s assault on rhythmic conventions. His own backing band, the Upsetters, picked up the baton from Bumps Blackwell’s hard driving treatment, recording songs like “Keep A-Knockin’” and “Ooh! My Soul.” Richard also recorded with a studio band, often featuring saxophonist Lee Allen and drummer Earl Palmer. Palmer delivered a Latin habanera bass line and a quasi second-line drumbeat on 1956’s “Slippin’ and Slidin’ (Peepin’ and Hidin’)” and 1957’s “Lucille” features Palmer valiantly swinging on the kick drum against the 4/4 snare, an important inspiration to the advent of 1960s rock. Little Richard’s most memorable songs boasted explosive tempos, too. “Rip It Up,” “Ready Teddy,” and “The Girl Can’t Help It” may be two-minute pop songs, but they’re more like runaway trains for which there are no brakes until they crash into the final resolving chord. When Little Richard finally parted ways with his label Specialty Records in 1959, he’d already garnered nine Top 40 pop singles and at least 17 singles on the Top 40 R&B chart. Given the way his songs generated unprecedented hysterical response, Little Richard contributed to the desegregation of popular music in the 1950s, inspiring black and white teenagers to buy his records and to attend his concerts in the same venue, sometimes even in the segregated south. His crossover music pointed to new intensities of racial solidarity that offered a blueprint for a more integrated democratic culture.
When he opened his mouth, Little Richard sang like his life depended on it—and it did. Born during the Great Depression in 1932, he was bullied as a kid due to his effeminate mannerisms and on account of his physical deformity (one of his legs was longer than the other). By his late teens, Richard faced limited options: He had already attempted a showbiz career, performing in late 1940s traveling acts like Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show and on the vaudeville circuit with acts like the Tidy Jolly Steppers. At 19, Richard’s father was killed, and he returned to his hometown of Macon. There, he took an anonymous job scrubbing dishes at the local Greyhound station to help support his newly widowed mother and 11 brothers and sisters. In the effort to wrest his way out of the indefinite quagmire of low wage dead end labor, Richard connected with pop musician Esquerita, and drew liberally from his exaggerated, flamboyant style. By the mid-1950s, Richard had refashioned himself into a vision of the pop star as unpredictable provocateur and outrageous wild child. In concerts, he’d climb speaker stacks, and he’d preen around shirtless. He was always brimming to the hilt with unbridled carnal energy and an extroverted sense of fun.
The lyrics Little Richard wrote, as well as the ones he was given to or chose to sing, were rarely sophisticated. Never what you’d call a minimalist, he especially liked to sing about graphic sex. He narrated tales about libertine women like Long Tall Sally and Molly who loved to ball. But because of the repressive conservatism of the era, Richard’s subject matter was often restricted and hemmed in. The original lyric of “Tutti Frutti,” a no-filter ode to anal sex, was “Tutti frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy” before the words were preemptively censored and rejiggered for commercial distribution. And yet Little Richard’s “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom” was a coded punchline that implied the fucking the song dare not openly refer to. Little Richard’s seductive songs may have focused on first names like Lucille, Daisy, Jenny and used female pronouns. But there was no way to cover over the fact that Little Richard was the Tutti Frutti he sang about—he was not only obviously gay, but he was overtly femme. Having spent some of his teenage years on the underground drag revues in the persona of Princess LaVonne, Richard loved to wear sequins, pompadour wigs, and pretty pancake makeup. In tandem with his penchant for innovative stage lighting, he transformed himself into a compelling spectacle: he’d later emerge as a proto-innovator of the glam and glitter rock scenes.
What’s remarkable is that Little Richard committed himself to gender non-conformism in spite of profound risk, as he stared down stigmatizing 1950s forces that might have stamped him out, namely Cold War conservatism, racism, and homophobia. His courageousness didn’t exactly emerge out of a vacuum: rather, he drew on long and rich history of black, no fucks given queer and lesbian female performers who preceded him, from blues women like Bessie Smith to gospel figures like Rosetta Tharpe. He took his cues from the campy theatricality of Pentecostal black church traditions, as well as the example of flamboyant R&B musicians like Billy Wright. Even his 1957 cover of Louis Jordan’s “Keep A-Knockin’”—with its lyric “Keep a-knockin’ but you can’t come in/Come back tomorrow night and try it again”—can be re-read as Little Richard’s winking take on pre-Stonewall code for penetration. None of this queer provocation might have gone over if Little Richard wasn’t such an unimpeachable stage performer: He could storm a concert venue and take no prisoners in the audience, turning them into converts them through his uninhibited style and his ribald stage banter. R&B singer Lloyd Price once mentioned that no musician wanted to perform for three months after Little Richard appeared in a town—he would simply blow away the competition.
Little Richard sometimes played up being effeminate to make himself non-threatening to white audiences, and thereby ensure his commercial survival. But the danger of his larger-than-life queeny excess was that he could come off as a buffoon, a racial caricature that reaffirmed the terms of white supremacy, rather than rebel against it. What always underwrote Richard’s exaggerated humor, and what especially brought him sympathy with black audiences, was his seething, barely veiled rage. In and beyond the 1940s, Richard suffered as a black performer in his attempts to stage an ambitious career in the midst of legally-sanctioned segregation, and the brutal conditions of Southern poverty and prejudice. Though his records made millions in the ’50s, the music industry defiled his work by endorsing tepid, white-bread covers of his hits, sung by mediocre artists like Pat Boone, that often earned more than the originals. Richard rarely saw significant royalties, drowning in disadvantageous record contracts. Frustrated by record label shenanigans, Little Richard all but vanished from the pop industry in 1958 and retreated to the church. But the time off wouldn’t last. He re-emerged in the early 1960s, and though his hits dried up, he continued to record and he became known for his touring gigs and the occasional TV and film cameo.
All the while, Little Richard always held himself in high self-regard, bestowing himself with self-aggrandizing titles like “The Handsomest Man in Rock & Roll” and “The Innovator, the Originator, and the Architect of Rock and Roll.” The latter title wasn’t untrue. As he morphed into a master of personal branding, Little Richard offered us all an enduring lesson in how to claim your place, how to refuse to be written out of existence, in the face of white and straight and masculine supremacy. Never one to suffer fools, Richard did not hesitate to read you and tell you off, and he took any public stage as an opportunity to reaffirm his trailblazing status (like he did while presenting at the 1988 Grammys). Little Richard’s profound refusal to stay silent about his commercial exploitation, even if that refusal was sometimes drenched in campy sarcasm, made him funny, endearing and tragic at the same time.
Perhaps it was ironic, then, that Little Richard practiced a freedom in his sound and visual imaging that he didn’t always access in everyday life. Riddled by personal demons that partly stemmed from the internalized homophobic residue of growing up in the South and being stigmatized as a freak, Richard would take himself in and out of the closet throughout his professional career, careening between poles of sin and salvation. After he reportedly converted to the Seventh Day Adventist church in 1958, he married a woman, Ernestine Campbell, a relationship that lasted four years. He was allegedly involved in a questionable, pre-#MeToo relationship with 16 year old dancer Audrey Robinson. By the ’70s, he stalled his career by becoming addicted to heroin, cocaine, and angel dust. He recovered from the drug abuse by entering into an arch-religious conservative phase in and beyond the 1980s. In the 1990s he made conflicting, contradictory statements about his sexual preferences. And in 2017, he gave a depressing interview to Three Angels Broadcasting Network in which he seemed to claim it was unnatural to be gay and transgender. Little Richard served as a figure of liberation to millions of people for seven decades even though he couldn’t necessarily liberate himself.
And still, Little Richard’s exuberant energy can never die. He transformed the molecular structure of pop, which means that his stylistic and musical innovations seemed to virally replicate themselves across the decades. It makes no sense to even try to track his influence: for starters, there’s James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Sam Cooke, Billy Preston, the Beatles, Freddie Mercury, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Otis Redding, Prince, Sylvester, André 3000, Katy Perry, Mykki Blanco, Young Thug, Janelle Monáe, Bruno Mars, King Princess, and Harry Styles, to say nothing of fictional creations like Chris Tucker’s loudmouth Ruby Rhod character in Luc Besson’s 1997 film The Fifth Element. Little Richard is everywhere, and he will always serve as an inconvenient reminder to rock purists that black queer aesthetics remain at the essential beating heart of rock’n’roll. His career also confirms the enduring power of the black southern femme queen in the foundational history of American culture. In fact, I like to think of Richard’s entire existence as the black sissy’s revenge on the normative mainstream—he penetrated the entire world of music. Rock will never by default be the exclusive domain of white straight men, despite many attempts to make it so, if only because Little Richard nuked that normal in 1955.
Even chameleonic British pop star David Bowie grew up dreaming of being a baritone saxophone player in Little Richard’s band. In his autobiography, producer Nile Rodgers tells the story about how he helped craft Bowie’s 1983 synth-funk bop “Let’s Dance.” Rodgers says that Bowie wanted the song to sound like a photograph he’d once seen of Little Richard getting out of a red Cadillac wearing a red suit—for Bowie, that outfit defined the essence of rock’n’roll and it explains his lyric “put on your red shoes and dance the blues.” Red shoes also harken back to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy, played by Judy Garland, learns that she has to click her heels three times before she can return home to her family in Kansas. Always a friend of Dorothy as it were, Little Richard has clicked his heels and gone home to Jesus—surely he’s somewhere over the rainbow by now. But his fabulousness, symbolized by glittery red slippers that serve as a reminder of the spectacular and queer roots of rock, will stay with us forever. Through his exuberant brilliance, Little Richard showed us the way to the other side, that place of multicultural possibility and democratic oneness where all the colors might co-exist. At the end of the day, everybody’s just walking in Little Richard’s shoes.
