Little Richard

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  • Little Richard
    Little Richard
    Little Richard

    “All around the world, rock ’n’ roll is here to stay,” Little Richard sings on the hit “All Around The World.” But by the time his self-titled sophomore LP was released in 1958, Little Richard himself was on his way out of the soaring genre: The 25-year-old had just retired from rock ’n’ roll to join the ministry and make gospel records (getting out of his record deal was just a bonus). His record company Specialty, of course, had other ideas and forged ahead with gathering this array of mostly previously released singles from the pioneering rocker. As an LP, it didn’t do much. But the singles—and they are almost all singles, with nine A-sides and three B-sides on the album—were huge. They span a four-year period, from 1956 to 1959, and while they offer just a fraction of the singer-songwriter’s famous onstage theatrics, the fervent, teeming energy of the era still seeps through the rollicking songs — many of which Little Richard either wrote or adapted so fully that he had a writing credit for. The wails, the growls, the yelps that would be cribbed by the singer’s peers are all etched into wax, proof positive of a dynamism so electric that it helped create a century-defining genre. “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and “Lucille” are probably this album’s two best known entries in rock’s canon, both songs that Little Richard originated and have since been covered by just about every act imaginable. But the iconic rocker’s pop-music fingerprints stretch across the release: “Keep A Knockin’” and its influential opening drum fill; his unrecognizable, crowd-participation-inducing riff on Leiber and Stoller’s “Kansas City”; and “Ooh! My Soul,” just one of many Little Richard songs performed by The Beatles. “The Girl Can’t Help It” even has explicit influence stretching into the 21st century as the source sample for Fergie’s “Clumsy.” Within these 12 songs lie the DNA for countless ensuing performances and recordings, most of which might never even recognize Little Richard as an influence. It is, beyond being an exuberant listen, a foundational text in popular music.

  • Here's Little Richard (Deluxe Edition)
    Here's Little Richard (Deluxe Edition)
    Here's Little Richard (Deluxe Edition)

    Vividly described as “rock ’n’ roll’s stem cells” in 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, Little Richard’s untempered, exuberant debut contains the musical DNA for far more than just the shape of rock to come. The 1957 album contained a number of songs that were already hits, like “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally,” and others that would soon climb the charts, like “Jenny, Jenny” and “True, Fine Mama”—the deluxe edition, released in 2017, includes 22 alternate takes from the original sessions. What you won’t find is much pathos or balladry: Even the bluesiest and saddest entries are still electric, with juke-joint-ready tempi and a vocal dynamism that never lets up. Here’s Little Richard arrived just under two years after “Tutti Frutti” got popular music all shook up. Little Richard’s often imitated, never duplicated performance of a song—apocryphally much more profane prior to its recording, though it was plenty suggestive in its final version—became a jukebox sensation, one of the biggest of rock music’s Big Bangs captured in about 15 minutes of studio time. Specifically, Little Richard’s piano style—even, rather than swung, eighth notes—and percussive singing created a template for thousands of songs to come. “Long Tall Sally” followed, with its breakneck tempo (it clocks in at a brisk two minutes and seven seconds) intended as a direct rebuke of the singer’s legions of white imitators—specifically Pat Boone, though Elvis covered both songs as well. No one could match Little Richard’s vivacity, his ability to channel the wildest, sweatiest, most fun night you’ve ever had, right through the microphone and into your veins—on the classic “Rip It Up,” which spawned a million songs about having money to burn on a Saturday night, on “Jenny, Jenny,” with the singer at his most charming, on the sock-hop mainstay “Ready Teddy,” he’s unstoppable, a force barely contained by the New Orleans studios where he was screaming and crooning in turn. Bob Dylan and everyone else were hanging on his every word: “He took speaking in tongues right out of the sweaty canvas tent and put it on the mainstream radio,” as Dylan put it. “He even screamed like a holy preacher—which is what he was.”

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About Little Richard

Many rock 'n' roll hits of the '50s might now sound almost tame. But even decades after they were first pounded out, Little Richard's singles have lost none of their shrieking-and-shouting intensity. And if they still feel like two-minutes-and-change jolts of pure joy today, they were blasts of liberation for teenagers in a decidedly more buttoned-up era. Macon, Georgia’s Richard Wayne Penniman, who died on May 9, 2020, brought the ecstatic belting of Baptist gospel into pop, blending it with the foot-stomping beat of the electrified blues. His gender-bending flamboyance shocked moralists while giving a voice to outsiders, scorching a path toward David Bowie's glam androgyny and Prince's gleefully pansexual revolution; the rip-it-up force of songs like "Lucille" and "Tutti Frutti" carried an unmistakable sexual charge. Those glorious torrents of wop-bop-a-loo-bop were barely concealed code for everything you didn't talk about in polite society, while also hitting you as pure ecstatic pop release. Meanwhile, his cross-cultural popularity was a battering ram against music's ruthlessly enforced racial barriers. Attacking his piano with an infectious sense of mayhem, Little Richard blurred the sacred and the profane into a scandalously beautiful roar.

HOMETOWN
Macon, GA, United States
BORN
December 5, 1932
GENRE
Rock

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