He was just more committed to excitement. This is not to say Little Richard was more primitive than his compatriots. Lhamon identified Richard's particular gift as promiscuity: "The ability to jumble worlds seamlessly, white and black, straight and gay, gospel and blues and pop." If the doo-wop groups cleared space for that sense of play preceding the moment of sexual engagement, and Elvis made such play charismatically personal, Richard grabbed on to the very moment the drive took over and rode it right into his fans' flailing arms.
Richard spewed notes as if they were raging hormones, growling like a bluesman one minute, whooping like a gospel queen the next, shouting out nonsense words in a way that signified everything and nothing, entering a truly undone state. Little Richard's vocalizations enacted sexual excitement itself. Most bawdy R&B songs pointed toward sex, albeit sometimes with a giant foam finger. What Little Richard did on "Tutti Frutti," as the song was called, was to eliminate the double entendres and make matters much more direct. Blackwell enlisted an ambitious young songwriter, Dorothy LaBostrie, to sub in some lyrics thin enough that Little Richard could saturate them with libidinal chaos while not breaking any censors' rules. Only when he and the studio musicians took a break at the nearby Dew Drop Inn and Richard decided to show off by playing a very dirty number that made the queens go wild in drag bars did Blackwell hear the lunacy that he knew the singer could deliver.īut the song was obscene – all about "good booty" and what people did with it. But by the autumn of 1955 he was still mostly a Deep South sensation, and when he entered Cosimo Matassa's famous J&M Studios in New Orleans with producer Bumps Blackwell nothing was working. Unsurprisingly given the company he was keeping, Richard developed a wild act on the road and made a bunch of relatively successful rhythm and blues sides for labels like Peacock and RCA-Victor. His early life as an entertainer included tours with drag queens, minstrel shows and girls who would, as he said to his biographer Charles White in the early 1980s, "roll their bellies and stuff" – Little Egypt's granddaughters carrying exotica into the nuclear age. When a band touring through the South picked him up as a singer, his father finally granted approval of Richard's pompadour hairstyle – because that's how artists looked, after all. Inspired by gospel music and jump blues, he developed a vocal style that was, above all, loud. Richard Penniman was uncontainable from the beginning of his life in Macon, Ga., a little queer boy whose penchant for dressing "beautiful" scared his father but whose precocious piano playing saved him from utter marginalization or an even worse fate. All of them had the same basic mandate – to turn fearful feelings into fun.
Elvis came off as wiser than Holly and more innocent than Little Richard. Buddy Holly's singing embodied desire in formation: thoughts that seem unspeakable because they've never been spoken before. Little Richard represented what happens to unspeakable desires after they've been dug out of the dirt where society buried them. The Memphis King claimed the middle ground between his rivals' two extremes: the strategic outrageousness of Richard Wayne Penniman, the original Black Weirdo, bursting every seam apparently for the hell of it, but really as a way of sharing subterranean secrets of two centuries' worth of racial and sexual nonconformists and the shy, bespectacled Charles Hardin Holley, archetypal White Nerd, stumbling over his words and music as a way of pushing them into shape. , written by NPR Music's critic and correspondent Ann Powers and published by Dey Street Books in 2017.Įlvis's two greatest contemporaries were Little Richard and Buddy Holly, each standing at either end of the spectrum upon which nonsense flourished. This essay was originally published as part of the bookGood Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music Little Richard died on Saturday, in Tullahoma, Tenn.
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