Little Richard
'I am the architect of rock and roll.' — from the stage of the 1988 Grammy Awards
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and associates ⏳🌊
- FamilyLeva Mae Penniman
The mother who raised twelve children, and the one to whom he promised in 1984 that he would keep his faith.
- InfluenceSister Rosetta Tharpe
The gospel singer who, in Macon in 1947, first put the fourteen-year-old on a stage and pressed a performance fee into his hand.
- ProducerBumps Blackwell
At J&M Studio in New Orleans, he recognized the promise of “Tutti Frutti” and guided the recordings of his heyday.
- RivalryPat Boone
His smoothed-over covers of Richard's songs outpaced the originals on the pop charts, coming to symbolize the imbalance between the Black and white charts.
- InfluencePaul McCartney
He picked up his falsetto whoop when the Beatles opened for him in 1962, and called him his idol all his life.
- MemberJimi Hendrix
He played guitar in his band in 1964–65 and, after taking part in recordings, left the band following a falling-out.
I. The boy from Macon · 1932–1951
(Birth) He was born in December 1932 in Macon, Georgia. Born Richard Wayne Penniman, he was the third of twelve children of his mother, Leva Mae, and his father, Charles 'Bud' Penniman. His father was a church deacon and a bricklayer who supplemented the family income by selling bootleg liquor. Small for his age, he was called 'Little Richard' from childhood, and because one leg was slightly shorter than the other, he walked with an unusual gait. Other children mocked that walk and his effeminate mannerisms. (Church) His sound came from the church. The family moved among African Methodist, Baptist and Pentecostal congregations, but he was drawn most to the heat of Pentecostal worship, where clapping and shouting ran together. He himself often told how he banged on pots and front steps around the neighborhood, singing so loudly that the neighbors scolded him. In 1947 the gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, about to perform at the Macon City Auditorium, heard him sing, brought him onstage, and afterward pressed money into his hand. It was the first fee he had ever been paid. (Leaving home) His father could not accept his son's mannerisms and inclinations. In his mid-teens he was thrown out of the house, and Ann and Johnny Johnson, a white couple who ran a club in Macon, took him in. He then drifted across the South with medicine shows (traveling troupes that used song and dance to sell remedies) and itinerant companies, sometimes performing in drag. On tent stages and street corners he learned how to hold an audience even before he learned how to sing.
II. The wandering singer · 1951–1955
(Debut) His first break came through meeting Billy Wright, a blues singer working out of Atlanta. Wright's high, swept-up pompadour and heavy makeup became, almost unaltered, Richard's own stage look. In 1951, on Wright's introduction, the Atlanta radio host Zenas Sears connected him with RCA Victor. The rhythm and blues sides he cut that year got local airplay but stirred no national response. The voice on them still belonged to a decorous blues singer. (Father) In early 1952 his father was shot dead in front of the business he ran. To help the household that had lost its breadwinner, he washed dishes at the Greyhound bus station in Macon. He later said that, standing over stacks of dishes, he would spit out the things he could not say to his boss's face as meaningless shouts, and that this became the first sound of “Tutti Frutti.” (Houston) In 1953 he signed with Peacock Records in Houston and recorded with the vocal group the Tempo Toppers, with little to show for it. He quarreled bitterly with the label's owner, Don Robey, over money, and Richard claimed Robey had beaten him. Back in Macon, he formed a band, the Upsetters, with drummer Charles Connor and others, and toured the clubs of the South; on those stages he honed his own way of pounding the piano and shouting. In early 1955, at the urging of the singer Lloyd Price, he sent a demo tape to Specialty Records in Los Angeles. After putting it off for months, the label's owner, Art Rupe, finally called him into the studio.
III. The New Orleans explosion · 1955–1957
(Recording) In September 1955, Specialty producer Bumps Blackwell took him to Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studio in New Orleans. The first session was competent but flat. During a break, at the nearby Dew Drop Inn, he sat at the piano and belted out “Tutti Frutti” with its obscene lyrics, and Blackwell knew at once that this was the sound he had been looking for. The songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie rewrote the words so they could be broadcast, and the song was cut in a few takes at the tail end of the session. The single, released that fall, climbed to No. 2 on the R&B chart. (Covers) Success cast a shadow. When a cover (a new recording of a song by a different singer) by the white singer Pat Boone climbed higher on the pop chart than the original, Richard and Blackwell later recalled, they deliberately sang the next song, “Long Tall Sally,” at a breathless clip to make it hard to imitate. In 1956 Elvis Presley, too, recorded “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up” and “Ready Teddy” one after another. Richard himself earned less than a cent in royalties per record, and he said years later that he had sold the publishing rights (the right to manage a song's copyright income) to “Tutti Frutti” for $50. (Stage) Into early 1958 the hits kept coming with “Lucille,” “Jenny, Jenny” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and he appeared in films such as “The Girl Can't Help It.” In the South, where segregation was the law, ropes were strung through the venues to divide Black and white audiences, and he recalled that excited fans climbed over the ropes and danced together. In England a young David Bowie bought a saxophone because he wanted to play in his band, and in Minnesota the teenage Bob Dylan wrote in his high school yearbook that his ambition was to join his band.
An obscene improvisation from the Dew Drop Inn, it became a song fit for radio in LaBostrie's hands. A shout that began at the dish sink of the Macon bus station became, at J&M Studio, the first battle cry of rock and roll.
- The song opens on nothing but his voice, without instruments. The first 2 seconds, in which he fires off nonsense syllables like a drummer before the band crashes in all at once, are the doorway into the song.
- Follow his right hand at the piano. Instead of the lilting long-short rhythm of blues piano (the shuffle), he splits the beat evenly and hammers down chords, giving the whole song a relentless drive.
- Drummer Earl Palmer and bassist Frank Fields, both New Orleans session players, lay down a solid floor without flashy ornament. In the break, Lee Allen's tenor saxophone bursts out in a short, rough solo.
- Near the end of each verse comes a piercing whoop that shoots up into falsetto. That sound, born of Pentecostal shouting, was later picked up wholesale by Paul McCartney.
- The whole thing runs under 2½ minutes. Its simple form, short verses on the same frame repeated until the end, gives the recording the feel of a single, almost live rush.
This is the song he and Blackwell recalled deliberately speeding up, after Pat Boone's cover outran the original, so that it would be hard to copy. It reached No. 1 on the R&B chart, becoming his first chart-topper.
- Notice the speed at which the lyrics pour out. It is the delivery of someone tattling to a friend about a neighbor's ruckus, pressing on without pausing for breath. Heard alongside Pat Boone's placid cover from the same year, the difference is stark.
- The song's skeleton is the blues form that repeats a twelve-bar chord progression (12-bar blues). What was new was pushing that familiar frame with an extreme tempo and voice.
- In the middle break, the saxophone lets out a short, low, raspy howl. Giving the solo to the saxophone rather than the guitar is a hallmark of New Orleans recordings of this period.
- Compare the version Paul McCartney sang on the Beatles' 1964 recording. McCartney reproduced almost exactly the falsetto whoop he had learned from Richard.
His first full-length album, gathering the Specialty singles that had piled up since 1955. In one place you can hear how the heat of the stage was preserved in the studio.
- The video on this card is the track “Rip It Up.” A song about the release of a Saturday night after payday, it shows, set beside Elvis Presley's cover from the same year, how far forward the piano and the shouting sit in the original.
- “Slippin' and Slidin'” is a shuffle at a comparatively slow tempo, showing that he stood squarely in the tradition of New Orleans rhythm and blues.
- In slow songs such as “Can't Believe You Wanna Leave,” long held notes and vibrato take the place of shouting. This is where his grounding as a gospel singer comes through most clearly.
- Most of the tracks run a little over 2 minutes. As a collection of singles made for radio and the jukebox, every song is short and compressed.
A song desperately calling after a woman who has left, released at the height of his career. It belongs to the period that drummer Earl Palmer often cited, along with his own recordings, when talking about how rock and roll drumming changed.
- From the opening, the bass and saxophone repeat the same figure as if they were one body. This short, recurring phrase (the riff) drives the entire song.
- Listen to the heavy hits on the second and fourth beats of the drums (the backbeat). Earl Palmer recalled that because Richard's piano chopped the beat evenly, he too ended up matching it with a straight rhythm instead of a lilting shuffle.
- The vocal swings between pleading and scolding. Listen for how the pitch and grit change each time he calls out the same name.
- At the end of each verse the band briefly catches its breath and then pushes back in, so that even within a simple structure, tension and release keep repeating.
IV. The fireball and the seminary · 1957–1962
(Australia) In October 1957 he set out on a tour of Australia with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. During a show he saw a huge fireball streak across the night sky and took it as a warning from God. It was just after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik 1. He cut the rest of the tour short and announced that he was leaving rock and roll. The story that he threw his expensive rings into a river as a sign of his resolve comes from him alone; no one else has confirmed it. (Seminary) Back home, he enrolled at Oakwood College, a Seventh-day Adventist school in Huntsville, Alabama, to study for the ministry. Meanwhile Specialty kept releasing the recordings he had left behind, and his name never disappeared from the charts. In Macon his manager, Clint Brantley, handed the empty tour dates to a newcomer, James Brown, and Otis Redding, another Macon native, sang for a while with the Upsetters, following his style. The place he left became, in effect, the starting point for the next generation of soul singers. (Gospel) In 1959 he married Ernestine Harvin, whom he had met at a church event; the marriage ended in 1964. During this period he recorded only gospel (the sacred songs of the Black church). His 1961 Mercury record, arranged and produced by Quincy Jones, made it plain that his raw shout had belonged to the church all along. But the public was waiting for that voice to sing rock and roll again.
A single that Specialty released after he had already left rock and roll for seminary. It captures a strange period when the songs of a singer who had abandoned the stage were still racing up the charts.
- Richard is said to have claimed that he borrowed the piano introduction from “Rocket 88,” the 1951 record by Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner. It is a passage that shows how early rhythm and blues runs into rock and roll.
- The delivery is that of a man chattering, giddy-voiced, about a girl who loves to dance. There is less shouting than in his other songs, and the pleasure of riding the rhythm comes first.
- In the saxophone-solo break, the piano steps back and keeps hammering out chords to lay down a floor. Listen to how the two instruments trade places, front and back.
- In 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival covered the song on the album “Bayou Country.” It is interesting to compare how the guitar, in place of the piano, generates the same drive.
V. The king returns · 1962–1976
(Britain) In the fall of 1962, at the invitation of promoter Don Arden, he set out on a tour of Britain. His plan to sing only gospel collapsed in the face of a lukewarm house, and he let loose his old hits once more. At New Brighton, near Liverpool, and at the Star-Club in Hamburg, West Germany (today's Germany), the still-unknown Beatles opened for him. Paul McCartney learned from him the shriek that soars into falsetto (a sound made by tightening the throat to sing higher than one's natural range), and Richard loved to boast that he had taught it. Billy Preston, the sixteen-year-old organist in his band, also first met the Beatles at this time. On his 1963 British tour, the Rolling Stones shared the bill. (Hendrix) From around 1964 into the following year, his band included a young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix played on the 1965 recording “I Don't Know What You've Got,” but clashed with Richard's camp over lateness and his stage attire, and left the band. Richard said Hendrix had tried to outshine the star; Hendrix is said to have complained that he was never properly paid. (Drift) The records he released while moving from Vee-Jay to Okeh to Reprise embraced soul and funk, but never regained his old chart standing. Instead he came back to life as a showman in Las Vegas and on rock-festival stages, wearing suits studded with mirror shards and climbing on top of the piano. At the 1969 Toronto Rock and Roll Revival he shared the stage with John Lennon. By the mid-1970s, however, he was deeply hooked on cocaine and heroin, as he himself later confessed.
A slow soul ballad written by Don Covay, with Jimi Hendrix on guitar. It was the king of rock and roll's attempt to prove himself anew in the age of soul.
- Because of its length, the single was split into Part 1 and Part 2 across the A- and B-sides. It was a rare break with the single format of the day, when running past 3 minutes was hard to do.
- Hendrix's guitar holds things up from behind, chopping chords into small pieces with no flashy solo. For anyone expecting the explosive sound of later years, it is surprisingly restrained.
- The vocal starts out talking as if preaching, builds steadily, and bursts into a shout. It is a man in the grip of love pleading his case to his beloved, and it follows the arc of a sermon from the pulpit exactly.
- Over a long, sustained organ bed, the horns slowly swell. Unlike his early hits, this is a recording with plenty of room to breathe.
A track from the album “The Rill Thing,” released on Reprise and recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Calling for freedom and unity amid the civil rights and antiwar mood of the times, it was his biggest hit of the 1970s.
- In place of the galloping beat of the 1950s, a heavy, choppy funk rhythm lies underneath. It is a trace of his effort to take in the Black music of a new era.
- The horn section blows short, sharp, clipped notes that tighten the rhythm. It has the hard, dry sound characteristic of Muscle Shoals recordings.
- The song addresses not a lover but everyone listening. In a catalog made up mostly of love songs, it strikes a rare socially minded tone.
- As the song goes on, the shouts multiply, building toward the end like the climax of a gospel revival.
VI. Between pulpit and stage · 1977–1994
(Conversion) In 1977 his brother Tony died suddenly of a heart attack. Around the same time, he claimed that his longtime associate Larry Williams had pulled a gun on him over a drug debt. Calling rock and roll the devil's music, he left the stage once again and went around preaching while selling Bibles that included Black history. In 1979 he released the gospel album “God's Beautiful City.” (Confession) In 1984 came the authorized biography by Charles White, “The Life and Times of Little Richard.” In it he spoke with startling candor about his sexual identity, his drug use and his life behind the scenes. That same year his mother, Leva Mae, died, and he said he had promised her that he would keep the faith. He also filed a lawsuit for an enormous sum against Specialty and others to recover unpaid royalties, but did not get the result he had hoped for. (Comeback) In October 1985, in Los Angeles, the car he was driving slammed into a utility pole and he was badly injured. In January of the following year, while still recuperating, he became one of the ten inaugural inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That same year he appeared in the film “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” and “Great Gosh A'Mighty,” written with Billy Preston, climbed to No. 42 on the pop chart, his first hit in years. He now said that faith and rock and roll could go together. At the 1988 Grammy Awards, appearing as a presenter, he brought down the house by proclaiming himself the architect of rock and roll, and in 1993 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Written with Billy Preston while he was recovering from his car accident, the song appeared in the film “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.” It carries his new resolve to reconcile faith and rock and roll.
- The subject is praise of God, but the form is unmistakably rock and roll. Gospel gratitude and the gallop of 1950s-style piano are layered in a single song.
- The glossy drum sound and electronic keyboards of the 1980s are spread throughout. Set beside his 1950s recordings, it lets you hear clearly how the sound of the times had changed.
- It is the voice of a man in his mid-50s, but the falsetto shrieks and rough hollering are intact. Compare the shout that erupts at the end of each verse with those of his early songs.
- In the film it accompanies a scene of him singing at the piano himself. Watching it, you can see that his movement on stage is part of the song.
VII. The last shout · 1995–2020
(Elder statesman) From the 1990s on, he turned up on talk shows, in commercials and even on children's records, embraced as a jovial elder of rock. As an ordained minister he also officiated at the weddings of fellow entertainers. Elton John recalled that seeing him perform as a teenager made him dream of a stage act built on pounding the piano standing up. That the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival had all sung his songs was now told as a kind of rock genealogy. (Decline) After hip surgery in the late 2000s, he more and more often sang sitting down. In 2013 he announced his retirement from the stage. In his last years he leaned ever harder on his faith, at times renouncing, in the language of religion, the life and sexual orientation of his youth. Some were disappointed by those words, but his life had moved between church and stage from the very start, and in the end he could never wholly give up either one. (Rest) On May 9, 2020, he died of bone cancer in Tullahoma, Tennessee. He was 87. He was buried in the cemetery of Oakwood University in Huntsville, where he had studied for the ministry as a young man. Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Elton John posted tributes one after another, and Bob Dylan wrote that he had been the star that guided him as a boy. And so the shout of the young man who once washed dishes at the Macon bus station came to be remembered as the starting signal for a generation.
Lesser-known stories
Behind his stage look and his piano stood forgotten forerunners. The high, swept-up pompadour and heavy makeup came from the Atlanta blues singer Billy Wright, and he never hid it. He also revealed, in Charles White's biography, that he had learned his way of storming the piano's upper register from Esquerita, a singer from South Carolina. Yet when Esquerita finally released a record in 1958, the world took him for a Richard imitator. The direction of influence was remembered in reverse. Bumps Blackwell recalled that the original lyrics of “Tutti Frutti” were so sexually explicit they could never have been broadcast. Lyricist Dorothy LaBostrie, in short order, turned them into harmless words like the name of an ice-cream flavor. As the song came to be heard as a cheerful children's tune, its original form survived for years only in the footnotes of biographies. Each time he returned to the faith, he barely mentioned the drag performances of his youth. But in the 1984 biography he himself revealed that in his teens, with traveling shows, he had performed in women's clothing under another name. It shows that his later exaggerated makeup and gestures were not mere eccentricity but an extension of the stagecraft he had absorbed on those stages. When he left the stage in 1957, his manager Clint Brantley handed his remaining tour dates to the unknown James Brown and his group. Otis Redding, also from Macon, likewise got his start by following his vocal style. That two giants of soul music began in the space he left behind is an unexpected legacy of his retirement, one usually passed over quickly in his story.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Rhythm and blues
(Meaning) A direct transliteration of the English Rhythm and Blues, abbreviated as R&B. The term spread widely in 1949, when the American music magazine Billboard renamed its Black music chart from race records to this. (In rock) Music that Black musicians of the 1940s–50s made danceable by adding strong rhythm and horns to the blues. Rock and roll was born almost entirely from it, and Little Richard's early recordings first found success on this chart. Think of it as blues with the rhythm laid on hard, the way the same schoolyard suddenly turns thrilling in gym class when you stop just walking and start running to a beat.
Gospel
(Meaning) The English gospel comes from an Old English word meaning good news, and refers to the Christian gospel (福音, blessed tidings). (In rock) The music of praise sung in African American churches. Its hallmarks are handclaps, shouts and call and response, in which a leader sings and the congregation answers. Little Richard's high shrieks and his sermon-like, building delivery both came from this music. Picture stadium cheering, where a cheerleader calls out and the stands shout back in one voice, and you will get the feel of that call and response. (Elsewhere) In English, gospel truth means something that is unquestionably true.
Shuffle
(Meaning) The English shuffle means to walk dragging one's feet, and the long-short, uneven gait gave this rhythm its name. (In rock) A rhythm played with a lilt, dividing each beat not into two equal halves but into long-short. Most blues and early rhythm and blues used it, but Little Richard pushed a straighter, harder rhythm by pounding the piano in even subdivisions. If the clip-clop, clip-clop of a running horse is the shuffle, the even tick-tock, tick-tock of a clock is straight rhythm. (Elsewhere) Mixing a deck of cards, or the feature in a music app that plays songs in random order, is also called shuffle.
Backbeat
(Meaning) From the English backbeat, meaning the beat that falls toward the rear (back) of the bar. (In rock) In music in four, the practice of striking not the first·third beats but the second·fourth beats hard on the snare drum (the small drum that cracks sharply). Most of rock and roll's body-jolting feel comes from this. Count one, two, three, four while clapping, and clap loudly only on two and four: the meter is the same, yet you suddenly want to move. That is the backbeat.
Cover
(In rock) Recording or performing anew a song first released by another artist. In 1950s America, when a white singer smoothed out a Black singer's hit and re-recorded it, radio often played that version more, and it outsold the original. Pat Boone's covers of Little Richard's songs are the classic example. It is like friends at a school talent show singing their favorite singer's song in their own way, except that once it is sold as a record, it competes with the original. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, the cover of a book, or a lid or sheet that covers an object, is also called a cover.
Falsetto
(Meaning) The word gaseong (假聲) means 'false' (假) 'voice' (聲). The Western name falsetto likewise comes from the Italian falso, meaning fake. The name itself says that this is not one's natural voice but a contrived high sound. (In rock) A sound produced by thinning the vocal folds to sing far above one's usual range. Little Richard threw sharp falsetto shrieks into his songs here and there to whip up excitement, and the sound was passed on to Paul McCartney and countless others who followed. The way a boy's voice flips when he playfully mimics a very high voice, that is falsetto.
Publishing rights
(Meaning) In English it is called publishing. The name comes from the business, in the days before records, of printing a composer's songs as sheet music and selling them. (In rock) It is the right to manage the copyright of the song itself, collecting and distributing money every time that song is used on a record, on the air, in concert or in another artist's cover. It is separate from the money a singer earns for performing the song, so if you sign this right away to someone else, you lose a large share of the income no matter how famous the song becomes. It is like selling the rules of a board game you made with a friend to someone else for next to nothing, only to watch that person make money every time they sell another copy of the game. (Elsewhere) In everyday use, publishing means bringing out books or magazines.