Little Richard... An Immeasurable Influence

Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard 87, died Saturday May 9, 2020 after battling cancer. who combined the sacred shouts of the black church and the profane sounds of the blues to create some of the world's first and most influential rock 'n' roll records? Little Richard did not invent rock 'n' roll. He recorded his first hit, "Tutti Frutti" - a raucous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up but its meaning hard to miss But Little Richard, delving deeply into the wellsprings of gospel music and the blues, pounding the piano furiously and screaming as if for his very life, raised the energy level several notches and created something not quite like any music that had been heard before, something new, thrilling and more than a little dangerous. "He was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock 'n' roll." Little Richard was "dynamic, completely uninhibited, unpredictable, and wild." His live performances were electrifying. "He'd just burst onto the stage from anywhere, and you wouldn't be able to hear anything but the roar of the audience "He'd be on the stage, he'd be off the stage, he'd be jumping and yelling, screaming, whipping the audience on." Rock 'n' roll was an unabashedly macho music in its early days, but Little Richard, who had performed in drag as a teenager, presented a quite different picture onstage His influence as a performer was immeasurable. It could be seen and heard in the flamboyant showmanship of James Brown, who idolized him (and used some of his musicians when Little Richard began a long hiatus from performing in 1957), and of Prince, whose ambisexual image owed a major debt to his. Little Richard's impact was social as well. " "Especially being from the South, where you saw the barriers, having all these people who we thought hated us showing all this love." They still had the audiences segregated" at concerts in the South in those days, but that when Little Richard performed, "most times, before the end of the night, they would all be mixed together. "It seemed that nothing could stop Little Richard's drive to the top - until he stopped it himself. He had one last Top 10 hit: "Good Golly Miss Molly," recorded in 1956 but not released until early 1958. By then, he had left rock 'n' roll behind. He became a traveling evangelist. He entered Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Ala., a Seventh-day Adventist school, to study for the ministry. He cut his hair, got married and began recording gospel music. For the rest of his life, he would be torn between the gravity of the pulpit and the pull of the stage. "Although I sing rock 'n' roll, God still loves me," he said in 2009. "I'm a rock 'n' roll singer, but I'm still a Christian."