One of the great influencers in my life, Little Richard has died at 87. How he managed to reach this grand old age is a mystery as he really lived life to the full. I was lucky to have lived in a time when he was one of the founders of rock and roll.
I listened to Elton John describe him being musically, vocally and visually the biggest influence in his life. “Seeing him live in my teens was the most exciting event in my life at that point,” Elton John wrote.
We often talk about the 60s as the decade when music for the young came of age but if truth be known it was really the 1950s. The list is long but who could ignore Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets or Sweet Little Sixteen by Chuck Berry? It does not stop there as we also had Ain’t That A Shame by Fats Domino and Red River Rock by Johnny and the Hurricanes.
Although he never hit the Top 10 again after 1958, Little Richard’s influence was massive. The Beatles recorded several of his songs, including Long Tall Sally, and I’m Down which paid tribute to Little Richard’s shredded-throat style. His songs were covered over the decades by everyone from the Everly Brothers, the Kinks, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Elvis Costello.
Little Richard’s stage persona also set the standard for rock and roll showmanship. Prince, to cite one obvious example, owed a sizable debt to the musician. “Prince is the Little Richard of his generation,” Richard told Joan Rivers in 1989, before looking at the camera and addressing Prince. “I was wearing purple before you was wearing it!”
Born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia, he was one of 12 children and grew up around uncles who were preachers. “I was born in the slums. My daddy sold whiskey, bootleg whiskey,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970.
His father Bud wasn’t supportive of his son’s music and accused him of being gay resulting in him leaving home at 13. One of his boyhood friends was Otis Redding, and he heard R&B, blues and country while working at a concession stand at the Macon City Auditorium.
After winning a local talent show, he landed his first record deal, with RCA, in 1951. For the next five years, Little Richard’s career advanced only fitfully with none of his singles charting.
By 1956, he was washing dishes at the Greyhound bus station when he sent a tape of a song called Tutti Frutti to Specialty Records owner Art Rupe in Chicago. He came up with the song’s famed chorus, “a wop bob alu bob a wop bam boom” while bored washing dishes.
He was now up and running with Tutti Frutti peaking at number 17 on the charts. Its follow-up, Long Tall Sally, hit number 6, becoming the highest-placing hit of his career. For just over a year he released several smash hits. From Long Tall Sally to Slippin’ and Slidin, he was on the level of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and other early rock icons.
By the mid-1960s his career started to falter as the more sophisticated sounds of the 1960s replaced the raw sound that had propelled him to stardom.
In 1993, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys. His last known recording was in 2010, when he cut a song for a tribute album to gospel singer Dottie Rambo.