All hail the King and the Architect of Rock-n-Roll and all things that modern music was, is, and will ever be. Eff what you heard and what you think you know. If you don’t know that Little Richard was the Big Bang of modern music, then yo’ ass don’t kno’ shit. Everybody after him wanted to be him; your favorite music entertainer’s favorite music entertainer wanted to be Little Richard. Whether it was Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Jackie Wilson, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who, Sly Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, Earth, Wind, and Fire, David Bowie, Prince, Michael Jackson, and anybody who came after him, they all wanted to be or were reacting in some way to the manner in which Little Richard shook up the world. Inspired to play piano after hearing the piano introduction to Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” in 1951, Little Richard took the gutbucket grit of the blues, the swing and improvisation of jazz, primal urgent desire of field hollers, and the purging though heated balm of gospel and amalgamated all of it into rock-n-roll, and the world has never been the same again. “Tutti Frutti,” “Slippin’ and a Slidin’,” “Rip It Up,” “Ready Teddy,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Lucille,” “Jenny, Jenny,” “Keep a-knockin’,” and “Good Golly Miss Molly” are the foundations of what is rock-n-roll. As the King himself said, “If I’d been white, there would have never been an Elvis Presley.” Yet, Richard was never bitter toward Elvis, or The Stones, or The Beatles, or Prince, or anyone after him. His anger was rightly focused on the industry, on the suits who stole/colonized what he did and resold it to white America as white culture while paying him only ½ a cent per record. Richard once stated, “How am I gon’ spend half a penny?” Thus, it is appropriate that the film Get on Up has Little Richard dropping knowledge/science to James Brown, telling him that once he’s successful, “And that when the trouble start. That when the devil come out. And, he ain’t gon’ be red with no fiery tail. He gon’ be white in a fancy suit. And, he gon’ look you in your eye and ask you, ‘what you want?’ And, you best not shake nor tremble. You best not blink one eye. You gon’ be ready for him then, James? You got it inside [to stand against the devil when he comes]?”
Both James Brown and local Jackson, Mississippi, musician D’Mar (Derrick Martin), a drummer and songwriter, played drums for Little Richard for seventeen years. D’Mar tells a great story about Little Richard taking him to the studio for a post-production session. The studio, as usual, was filled with white people: white musicians, white engineers, and white executives. After listening to the playback of a song, they asked Richard his opinion of it. D’Mar states that Richard said, “Derrick, what do you think about it?” D’Mar responded, “I think it sounds good.” Richard added, “Thanks Derrick,” and turned to one of the engineers and said, “I’mma need Derrick to get a production credit for his input,” and they left the studio. As they were walking down the hall, Little Richard turned to D’Mar and said, “You see that? That’s how white boys been taking credit for my work for years. Now, it’s time for black folks to get some credit as well.” Rock-n-roll was/is black folks music, and Little Richard never forgot that, often saying “R&B doesn’t mean Rhythm and Blues, it means real black.” He would add that “If you were black, you were on Camden [records], and if you were white, you were on RCA…If I was white, I would have gotten more [promotion].” R&B was a manufactured term to keep black artists in one category so that white artists, such as Presley and Boone, could cover their works and sell it to white audiences, while earning more money because white supremacy is schizophrenia. White folks can love black art as long as it is filtered through a white lens that they know or understand. That’s why it was standard policy to place pictures of white people on the covers of albums by black artists. Little Richard was not shy about telling this truth, as he told this truth his entire life, during and after his most economically successful times and while presenting an award at the 1988 Grammy’s with white artist Buster Poindexter. When arriving at the mic with Poindexter, Little Richard pointed to Poindexter’s hair and stated, “I used to wear my hair like that. Everything I do they take it from me.” Poindexter then pitifully tried to do Richard’s famous “woooo,” to which Richard added, “They can’t take that though.” Then, after the nominees were announced, Little Richard declared, “And the award goes to…me. I ain’t never received nothing! Y’all ain’t never gave me no Grammy. And, I been singing for years. I am the architect of rock-n-roll!” At that point, the audience exploded with cheers, giving Little Richard a standing ovation. During that ovation, Richard continued, “And, I am the originator. I created the ‘woooo.’” Composing himself for a moment, as if he was about to reveal the winner, Richard added, “And the winner is…still me” before finally announcing Jody Watley as the Best New Artists. But, unfortunately, for him and the truth, Little Richard was not the person that neither blacks nor whites wanted or could take seriously when engaging American racism. He wasn’t masculine enough to discuss Civil Rights.
Was he gay? Hell, Little Richard was more than gay. He was the embodiment of the duality of humanity, the sacred and the profane, the physical and the metaphysical, the X and the Y, black and white, poor and rich, the need to do all the shit that feels so good and the regret of overdoing all of it to the detriment of the soul and the body. Before Marvin Gaye and Kanye West, Little Richard retired from the stage while being the biggest star on the planet to preach the Word of God, only to spend the remainder of his life fluctuating between sin and sainthood, illuminating the spirit or pleasing the flesh. Ultimately, Little Richard became the best embodiment of what Paul wrote in Romans 7: 15 – 24.
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do I do often. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I, myself, who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good, itself, does not dwell in me; that is in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot execute that goodness. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but the evil that I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now, if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being, I delight in God’s law; but, I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?
Little Richard was either an experiment or an example of what happens when someone can know ultimate freedom and free will while also knowing ultimate discipline and submission. That tension between his flesh and his spirit, between pleasing himself and pleasing his God, is the fire of his music, the thing that exploded from stages and records and through radios and screens to change how every generation would understand music, gender, class, and race. He was a vessel for the raw energy of longing to be free to be whatever one wants to be while having the discipline to master music theory to coordinate art in the most precise manner that provided the most powerful impact. As such, regardless of anyone’s struggle to navigate the world as they see it, Little Richard never stopped struggling, regardless of whom he pissed off—be it Christians or the LGBTQ community. He was not going to be anybody’s poster child for anything. He loved life, he loved music, he loved black folks, he loved sex, he loved his vices, he loved his god, and he spent his entire life publically navigating those loves with more honesty and courage than anyone I’ve ever seen do it. So, again, eff what you heard, popular music mostly begins and ends with the sonic force that is Little Richard, the Architect and the King of Rock-n-Roll.
During episode three of The Last Dance, there is a montage of Michael Jordan’s highlights as Prince’s “Partyman” plays in the background. Prince is celebrating himself in the song while using Batman’s Joker as a meme/persona for the song, the lyrics also accurately describe Little Richard: “All hail the new king in town/ Young and old, gather ‘round/ Black and white, red and green/ The funkiest man U’ve ever seen/ Tell U what his name is/ Partyman, Partyman/ Rock a party like nobody can/ Rules and regulations, no place in this nation/ Partyman, Partyman.” While Prince owed his falsetto mostly to the combination of Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and Philip Bailey, his piano playing was a combination of Little Richard, Ray Charles (whom Prince’s father loved), and Fats Domino. (One could argue Stevie Wonder as well, but Prince owed more to Wonder’s song composition/construction than Wonder’s actual piano playing.) Yet, Prince’s flair for the different and the outrageous is a direct testament to the influence of Little Richard who was bending gender before most knew that gender could be bent. For Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and others, the primary ingredient of their flavor is Little Richard. Even when you see rappers today setting unique fashion trends and playing with gender or what it means to be male, that all returns to the towering shadow of Little Richard. Even swagger and slang, such as “ballin’,” all lead to Little Richard, as his 1958 hit “Good Golly Miss Molly,” includes the line, “Good Golly Miss Molly, sure like to ball/ When you’re rocking and rolling/ Can’t hear your mama call.” Additionally, it was Little Richard who became an unlikely supporter and defender of Hip Hop. When asked about the excessive amount of violence and sexism in Hip Hop, Little Richard replied, “How you gon’ expect someone to live in the water and not get wet?” Rather than putting the focus on rap and emcees, Little Richard rightfully placed the focus on the socio-political conditions that created the art produced by rap and emcees. Therefore, in the same way that literary theorists have worked in futility to separate themselves from Sigmund Freud, black music and all of American music must realize that the only way to understand itself is to understand why Little Richard impacted so much, even those who never wanted to be impacted by him.
To answer that last question would take a ten-page paper or a three hundred-page book, neither of which I am about to write. However, while the Motown Sound is considered the soundtrack of the apex of the Civil Rights Movement, it is the edgier, anxious, frustrated explosion of blues being birth into rock-n-roll that best parallels and explains the angst of World War II vets, such as Medgar Evers, who returned home declaring that they would no longer accept being second-class citizens. Motown and the black church may have given the Movement its words and sensibility, but blues and rock-n-roll, along with jazz, gave the Movement its fire, its “fuck you” attitude, its existential angst elocuted beautifully by Fannie Lou Hamer’s being “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” That ain’t Motown. That’s Mississippi. That’s Blues. That’s Rock-n-Roll. That’s Little Richard who was driven by the fire of being sick and tired of everyone defining him but himself. Thus, through his music, he became a one-man revolution of personal, cultural, and national change: “Wop-bop-a-loo-mop alop-bam-boom!”
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Author’s Note: C. Liegh McInnis is an English instructor at Jackson State University. His latest work includes editing a special issue on the life and legacy of Prince published by Black Magnolias Literary Journal, and his article, “Prince as the Post-Civil Rights Archetype: Navigating between Assimilation and Self-Determination,” has been published in the Journal of Popular Music and Society.