was a famous female impersonator and performer named Patsy Vidalia. He played the Dew Drop Inn, in New Orleans, where the m.c. He studied the flashy showmanship of Atlanta-based performers like Roy Brown, who had a hit with “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and he adopted the pompadour and pancake makeup of the jump-blues singer Billy Wright. He was serving his musical apprenticeship in the last days of these minstrel shows he also inhabited a world of strippers and drag queens and brash comedians. He sang, sometimes wearing a red evening gown, under the name Princess Lavonne, in Sugarfoot Sam’s Minstrel Show. Throughout his teens, he was in and out of outfits like Buster Brown’s Orchestra (where he got the name Little Richard) and the Tidy Jolly Steppers. Reeder, Jr., better known as Esquerita, he adopted a pounding, mesmeric style. He first learned to play the piano in church, but after hearing Ike Turner’s recording “Rocket 88,” and studying the style of S. Richard was a poor student but, musically, he was a fast learner. When Richard was a teen-ager, he was thrown out of the house and went to live with Ann and Johnny Johnson, a white couple who ran a local venue, the Tick Tock Club. But, in his father’s eyes, he was unbearably effeminate and not to be tolerated. His earliest musical influences included Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Brother Joe May, the “Thunderbolt of the Middle West.” Even as a child singer, Richard was known for his high range and incredible volume. “The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak.”Īs a boy, Richard was raised in the Pentecostal Church and sang gospel on Sundays with a family group called the Penniman Singers and another group called the Tiny Tots Quartet. “They thought I was trying to twist and walk feminine,” he once told Rolling Stone. One of Richard’s legs was shorter than the other, making him a source of mockery among other children. His father was a brick mason and a bootlegger. Richard Penniman was born in 1932 into a large, poor Christian family, in Macon, Georgia. Calling on multiple voices, it tells a revolutionary, ecstatic, sometimes heartbreaking story. One of the underrated books in the pop music library is “ The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock,” an authorized biography/oral biography, by Charles White. There is more voltage in one of those three-minute performances than there is in a municipal power station. Rather than watch the news–––it can wait––go to YouTube and watch Little Richard’s performances of “ Tutti Frutti,” “ Long Tall Sally,” “ Rip It Up,” “ She’s Got It,” “ Lucille,” “ Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “ The Girl Can’t Help It,” “ Good Golly Miss Molly.” Banging boogie-woogie time with his right hand and singing miles beyond anyone’s idea of a “register,” he is a human thrill ride. He once looked into a television camera and, with affection, told Prince, “I was wearing purple before you was wearing it!” Little Richard was an original, and he did not hesitate to remind his students of their debt. Try to imagine James Brown, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Elton John, and Prince without his electrical charge. Try to imagine Muhammad Ali without Little Richard’s winking persona, his swing and swagger (“I am the King!”). The trail of light that he left behind was, and is, everywhere. In the years that followed, he’d dip in and out of show business, and there were some inspired moments, but he was a comet, not a planet. The core of Little Richard’s career was brief-he recorded an incandescent string of hits in the mid-fifties and then went off to rediscover his faith. “Rip It Up” will get you out of the chair. But please do play his music and watch his performances: “Tutti Frutti” will lift your heart. A different President might take the time to commemorate the passing of a great American, one who shaped the culture and its national sound. He was eighty-seven and had been in failing health. This Saturday morning, the news came that Richard Wayne Penniman-Little Richard-had died. One of the most foolish things that you can do is to begin the day by checking the news. Photograph from Michael Ochs Archives / Getty The core of Little Richard’s music career was brief, but his influence was, and is, everywhere.
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