Happy 65th Anniversary to Little Richard’s debut album Here’s Little Richard, originally released March 4, 1957.
“I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice.” - Jimi Hendrix
Richard Wayne Penniman was born to a world of contradictions on December 5, 1932. His father was a church deacon in the Pentecostal church, while working as a brick mason by day and nightclub owner and seller of bootlegged moonshine by night. This duality reflected greatly upon Richard and played out over the course of his life (and countless other artists) in ways that are familiar to anyone who has any interest in Black music in the 20th Century.
His formative years as a Black boy in the 1930s and early ‘40s would have presented enough challenges growing up in the south in Macon, Georgia, but he was dealt a harsher set of cards than most Black boys received. With one leg shorter than the other, he presented an easy target for name-calling and worse. His unusual gait saw him labelled as effeminate and indeed his father accused him of being gay, which led to Richard leaving the family home at age 13.
The roots of Richard’s unique vocal style could be found in the church. He was blessed with a loud voice and he constantly shifted the key upwards. So loud was Richard that he became known as “Warhawk” for his hollering and howling in the church. It was not always welcomed though, as he was kicked out of church one time for his over-enthusiastic vocal proclamations. This though would turn out to be a vital piece of what made Here’s Little Richard such an astonishing and earth-shattering record when it was released in 1957.
Many times throughout his career, Little Richard referred to himself as the “architect” of rock & roll and in an NPR article written shortly after Richard’s death in 2020, Ashon Crawley reflected on what being an architect actually means. In it, Crawley talked about his professors who “emphasized imagining things as they could be if only we had the fortitude and verve to bring those things we sensed with our imaginations into being.” Furthermore, he said that architects “gather and create ideas based on what’s already there, even if what’s there is emptiness—because that emptiness, that nothingness is full with the capacity to be imagined otherwise.”
Those definitions lay clear the truth of Little Richard’s self-assessment of his impact. But beyond his vocal style with its roots in the Pentecostal church, the things that were already there for him to transform came from a group of people that often receive their dues belatedly, if at all. Having left home at 13, it wasn’t long before Richard sought out the chance to be a performer. But before he could do that, he had a part time job at the Macon City Auditorium selling Coca Cola to customers. In the process of doing so, he was able to watch the performers who passed through the city and chief amongst those was his favorite, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
If you are interested in pinpointing the first rock & roll record, you could quite easily start with Tharpe’s 1945 song “Strange Things Happening Everyday.” But irrespective of that issue, she was a major influence on Richard and even gave him his first paid gig as a musician as her opening act (at the same auditorium where he worked in Macon) after hearing him sing. As Tavia Nyong’o wrote in the Guardian shortly after Richard’s death, Tharpe may well have had an influence beyond the purely musical. Tharpe’s career was succinctly surmised by Nyong’o as a “series of rebellions against the strictures placed upon women within the church and Black people in America.” Seeing her buck the system and live her life freely (including taking same-sex lovers) despite the mountain of prejudice against her must have inspired Little Richard to become the performer and artist he was.
Further influence upon the embryonic Little Richard came when he hit the road as part of a medicine show, during which he would perform as the turbaned Mysterioso and then as the drag queen Princess Lavonne during the late 1940s. It was during this time that he learned from a South Carolina performer named Esquerita. Sporting a pompadoured quiff and an athletic piano style, the influence on Richard was easy to see. Elsewhere the joyous jump blues of Louis Jordan’s “Caldonia” (along with his pencil thin mustachioed image) must have been an influence on Richard, as his yelps and whelps punctuated the dynamic music regularly.
By the mid-1950s though, Penniman was washing dishes at the Greyhound Bus Station in his hometown Macon to make ends meet after the fatal shooting of his father. The irony of Richard stepping in to support the family as “man of the house” after being cursed for his “effeminate ways” made a mockery of the slurs thrown his way in his youth. But this job allowed inspiration to strike Richard as he took the mundanity of the situation and concocted the epochal, genre defining monster “Tutti Frutti.”
When he sent “Tutti Frutti” to Specialty Records as a raw demo, the owner Art Rupe was, understandably, blown away. As a result of the whirlwind the track created, Rupe even rejected the future legend Sam Cooke for being too pallid by comparison. In its raw form, “Tutti Frutti” was a ribald ode to anal sex where the lyric “good booty” would be replaced by the much tamer “aw rooty” in the rewrite by Dorothy Labostrie (although she would later claim that she in fact wrote the whole song).
It's easy to see why the lyric was changed. As Crawley wrote in the NPR piece mentioned earlier, in post-war America “patriotism equated to a normative family ideal, a renunciation of sexualities that were not productive for political economy.” You’d hope some 65 years later that things might be different. But the pearl-clutching, conservative stranglehold persists in large swathes of the world, so it’s doubtful things would be much different now.
“Tutti Frutti” was a success immediately—it hit #2 on the R&B chart and #17 on the pop chart and it inspired a number of moribund, anodyne and neutered versions by white performers who clung to its success and exploited it for their own gain. But in its original form, it is startling and coursing with rampaging energy and intent. Little Richard was a five-alarm fire of a performer. The whooping and hollering that had seen him kicked out of church became his calling card—he was wild, unbridled and rampant. Rampant in his blackness and sexuality.
The follow up “Long Tall Sally” did even better on the charts, hitting #1 on the R&B chart and #6 on the pop chart, reinforcing that the world had seemingly fallen in love with the man who had had misgivings about the sound he helped create. In Rolling Stone magazine, he shared that he’d sung Rock & Roll “a long time before I presented it to the public because I was afraid they wouldn’t like it.” His fears misplaced, he had simply had the imagination to see what was possible.
Of the twelve tracks on the album, six were singles (most of which had been released in the two years prior to the album) and the other six were “fillers” all in the same vein as those mega hits that had given Richard the chance to be in films like “The Girl Can’t Help It” and achieve a profile rarely seen for a Black musician in America. But the dichotomy that had been Richard’s life from birth reared its head the same year that Here’s Little Richard was released.
Having performed in Sydney, Australia he saw a fireball in the sky (which turned out to be Sputnik returning to earth’s atmosphere) and took it as a sign from God, threw his rings into the harbor and renounced the Devil’s music. This set the pattern for the rest of his career—periods of preaching and releasing gospel music (including one recorded with Quincy Jones) would be followed by periods where he embraced his blistering rock & roll past. These musical vacillations would be mirrored by similar swings in his attitude toward his sexuality.
When deep in worship to God, he would renounce his “sinful” homosexual entanglements and proclamations of the past. But at other times, he would accept that past and with it his sexuality. His further musical career never reached the dizzying heights of this collection of songs, but then what could? With Bumps Blackwell and a sterling set of musicians from New Orleans, Little Richard blew the doors off the music world and allowed all and sundry to follow him through the debris of what had come before. A music that would scare parents, threaten “decent” folks and allow the voice of the unheard to be listened to.
No matter how briefly it was achieved, the legacy this album leaves behind is permanently relevant and a blueprint for future generations.
LISTEN: