Saturday Night & Sunday Morning: Remembering Little Richard
May 11, 2020
Little Richard was never troubled much by false modesty. Practically every interview the man ever gave found him testifying to his own importance. On more than one occasion, he flat out declared, "I invented rock & roll." Another time, feeling a bit more artful, he elaborated, "I am the innovator, I am the originator, I am the emancipator, I am the architect of rock & roll!" In a stunning moment of humility, he walked that back a bit by saying, "A lot of people call me the architect of rock & roll. I don't call myself that, but I believe it's true." And nodding to the flamboyance and knowing innuendo that was long a part of his act, he gushed, "Elvis may be the King of rock & roll, but I am the Queen!"
And Little Richard also lacked for nothing when it came to confidence. When John Lennon made his first appearance on stage as a solo act at a rock & roll revival festival in Toronto in 1969, Richard argued with the promoters that he should close the show, that the former Beatle didn't have the stuff to follow him, and he would tell anyone who listened after the fact that he stole the show from John. Of course, Richard said that while secure in the knowledge that John Lennon and Paul McCartney regarded him as a hero, and both cited him as a major influence. (Listen to McCartney scream on any early Beatles side and there's no doubt he's doing his very best to ape Richard's flamethrower vocals.) Before the Beatles conquered the world, they opened a run of dates for Little Richard in England, and it's said that Lennon actually begged to hold the hand of his idol. The Rolling Stones also opened for Little Richard in their scuffling days, and Mick Jagger freely admitted that Richard was one of his first inspirations, as well as learning some valuable lessons from him on how to move on stage and work a crowd.
There's an old saying that it's not bragging if you can actually do it, and for all of Richard's bluster and extravagant self-praise, he wasn't really wrong. It's not truly accurate to say he invented rock & roll, but he fused the traditions of gospel, Southern rhythm & blues, and roadhouse piano in a new and unique way while adding a passion, intensity, and abandon that was unprecedented. Fats Domino may have gotten there first, and Chuck Berry's template proved to be a greater influence in the long run, but in its early years, Little Richard took rock & roll to a place it had never been before, and while plenty of folks would try to copy him, absolutely no one bested him.
For anyone who hated rock & roll because it was an affront to public morals (or loved rock & roll because it was an affront to public morals), Little Richard was a true cultural flashpoint. His songs were wild, rowdy, and raw, filled with pumping staccato piano, wailing saxophones, booming drums, and not-so-subtle sexual innuendo. Richard made irresponsibility sound like fun. He launched one of his greatest songs with the verse, "Well it's Saturday night and I just got paid/ Fool about my money, don't try to save/ My heart says go, go, have a time/ 'Cause it's Saturday night and I'm feeling fine!" Your parents and guidance counselors would never suggest such an attitude, but Little Richard was there to offer you all the temptation you could ask for. And at a time when African-Americans were expected to be quiet and obedient around white folks and being an out of the closet gay man was all but impossible, Little Richard was loud, flamboyant, and proud of it. He had style and flash to spare, he looked good and he knew it, and while the pronouns in his songs may have suggested he was straight, his towering pompadour, thick make-up, and outrageous demeanor made it very clear he wasn't just one of the guys.
At the same time, Little Richard's music showed clear gospel influences if you looked for them, and he was a Southern boy who was raised in the church and never entirely walked away from its teachings. Southern music, especially among African-Americans, long reflected the dichotomy of Saturday Night, where one shook off the constraints of daily life and reveled in sex, drink, and sin, and Sunday Morning, where you put on your best Go-To-Meeting clothes and pledged repentance, responsibility, and self-discipline, at least until next Saturday rolled around. From the beginning, rock & roll and rhythm & blues were filled with artists who recorded both sacred and secular music, but few were as polarized in their thinking as Little Richard, who spent much of his life wavering between his dual alliances.
Little Richard was born Richard Penniman in Macon, Georgia, on December 5, 1932. He was the third of twelve children, and was born with one leg slightly shorter than the other, giving him a walk bullies considered effeminate. The Saturday Night/Sunday Morning dilemma was part of his story from the start; his mother was a regular churchgoer and his father was a deacon, but dad also peddled bootleg whiskey to make extra money and helped run a honky tonk called the Tip In Inn. In Charles White's outrageous 1985 biography The Life and Times of Little Richard, written with Richard's full cooperation, he describes himself as a wild kid with a taste for bizarre pranks (he once gave a neighbor woman the present of a gift-wrapped bowel movement), and as he grew into his teens, he fell in with a local demimonde of gay men, drag queens, women happy to deflower young boys, and juke joints where booze, blues, and cross dressers were part of the entertainment. Richard's first musical heroes were gospel performers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, and Brother Joe May, and he didn't sing rhythm & blues (which his parents would not tolerate) until he began travelling with a medicine show in 1949, belting out the Louis Jordan hit "Caldonia," and with some reluctance performing in drag under the name Princess LaVonne. However, as he continued touring when he could and playing clubs as often as possible, he absorbed the influence of R&B stars like Billy Wright and Roy Brown, and his flamboyant style and fearless stage persona began to evolve.
Wright struck up a friendship with Richard and began showing him the ropes of life in show biz. Through Wright's contacts, Richard was signed to a record deal with RCA Victor Records, releasing his first single, "Taxi Blues" b/w "Every Hour," in 1951. "Every Hour" became a minor hit in Richard's hometown of Macon and the surrounding areas, but three other singles for the label failed to generate any action, and he was dropped. After spending time in New Orleans and Houston, Richard landed another recording contract with Peacock Records, but the two singles they released didn't fare any better. While Richard's act was powerful and energetic, his recordings for RCA and Peacock sounded relatively staid and didn't capture the combustible energy he could generate.
Richard returned to Macon and was washing dishes in the cafe at a bus station when he met a fellow aspiring musician and eccentric who was known as Eskew Reeder, Jr. or Esquerita, depending on the circumstances. Esquerita showed Richard his piano style, which was strongly percussive and had a muscular power and drive that marked the difference between rhythm & blues and the new beast known as rock & roll. Esquerita, whose life story is nearly as outlandish as Little Richard's, would make records after Richard rose to fame, and the similarity in their styles would suggest just how much Richard borrowed from his friend. However, one can honestly say that while Esquerita had the ideas that transformed Richard's style, Richard executed them with greater skill and imagination, and he could sing with a precision that Esquerita lacked.
In 1955, Richard had another shot at a recording career when Specialty Records took him on, and he was sent to New Orleans with producer Bumps Blackwell and a studio band that included Lee Allen on sax and Earl Palmer on drums, who would later become part of the network of top flight Los Angeles session players known as the Wrecking Crew. The session didn't produce anything remarkable until, during a break, Richard began messing around with a rude ditty he'd written about gay sex called "Tutti Frutti." Blackwell thought he heard a potential hit, and with a new cleaned up lyric, they laid down a rollicking performance and Specialty released it in October 1955. Nothing was the same from that moment on -- the tune shot to No. 2 on the Rhythm & Blues chart, and peaked at No. 21 on the Hot 100 survey, even though many pop oriented radio stations found it too raw for airplay and instead spun a remarkably bland cover by Pat Boone, which was a bigger hit at the time but has come to be treated like the inferior product it truly was.
In 1956 and 1957, Little Richard unleashed a string of singles that were some of the most powerful rock & roll of the day and still sound ferocious in the 21st Century, including "Long Tall Sally," "Rip It Up," "The Girl Can't Help It," "Lucille," and "Jenny Jenny." While Richard didn't make much money from the records (he would spend decades fighting the penurious but legally binding recording and publishing contracts he signed with Specialty), his gig fees were very lucrative, and he got a good payday for appearing in Frank Tashlin's superb rock & roll comedy The Girl Can't Help It. According to Charles White's book, Richard enjoyed the spoils of his new wealth, which included a fancy home in Los Angeles, brightly painted Cadillacs, expensive clothes, even more expensive jewelry, and frequent orgies where he would take on male and female partners, though much of the time he was happy to just watch.
For roughly two years, Richard enjoyed one long Saturday night, but in October 1957, Sunday Morning dawned. The combination of engine trouble on an airliner flying Richard to Australia for his first tour down under and witnessing a fireball in the sky that was later determined to have been the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 led to years of doubts and fears exploding in his mind. A few dates into the Aussie tour, Richard declared God wanted him to repent and abandon secular music in favor of gospel. He returned to the United States, and after cutting a few last sides for Specialty and playing a farewell show at New York's Apollo Theater, he settled in Huntsville, Alabama and enrolled at Oakwood College as a theology student.
If anyone doubted Little Richard's sincerity at the time, his disappearance from the pop charts, his marriage to a Oakwood co-ed, and a powerful sacred album he cut for Mercury in 1962, King of the Gospel Singers, were enough to convince most anyone he was absolutely serious. However, by the end of 1962, he was persuaded to take part in a concert tour of the United Kingdom; Richard believed he was invited to perform his gospel music, but it quickly became obvious the fans were expecting rock & roll, and he decided to give it to them. While flashes of gospel would appear in Richard's recordings, in the truest sense Sunday Morning was a thing of the past and he was back in the rock & roll game.
After several years of struggle, by the end of the '60s Little Richard was once again a popular attraction. He had limited success as a recording artist beyond his 1970 single "Freedom Blues," but his reputation as a magnetic stage performer who would appear on stage in a mirrored costume that turned him into a human mirror ball and his willingness to toss out outrageous quips in between songs made him a draw on the nightclub circuit again. And when rock & roll revival package shows that featured him alongside other first-era rock talents like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Bill Haley came into vogue, Richard was back playing arenas and Las Vegas showrooms. He was also indulging his omnivorous sexual appetites and began drinking and abusing drugs, and the line between his onstage mania and the edge of chemical fueled exhaustion became almost indistinguishable. By 1977, he was on the verge of burnout and history repeated itself -- he swore off rock & roll, and took up preaching, speaking at churches and Christian revivals about the evils of secular music and homosexuality with clear vehemence.
Curiously, Little Richard's most incendiary document about the roller coaster of his life was what brought him back to the show biz mainstream. In 1985, Charles White's The Life and Times of Little Richard was published, and Richard aggressively promoted it with radio and print interviews and television talk show appearances where the full force of his personality and the slightly unhinged charm of his storytelling took center stage. The book sold briskly, and after seeing Richard profiled on the news show 60 Minutes, filmmaker Paul Mazursky cast him as flashy record producer Orvis Goodnight in the movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills. The movie was a hit, Richard's performance was cited by many as a highlight, and a song he cut for the soundtrack, "Great Gosh Almighty," earned some radio and video play, leading to a new album, 1986's Lifetime Friend. (The second movie Richard made with Mazursky, The Pickle, wasn’t nearly as good, but anyone who is immune to the charm of his movie-within-a-movie role as the ruler of the planet Cleveland is someone dead to the true joys of life.)
While Richard's career as a live performer got a serious boost from his new exposure, it was his new emergence as an actor and a genially eccentric presence on various TV shows that gave him arguably the greatest mainstream exposure of his lifetime. Suddenly Richard was appearing on Miami Vice, Blossom, Baywatch, and even Wheel of Fortune, where he was a celebrity contestant along with James Brown and Weird Al Yankovic. In 1992, he even released a children's album through Disney, Shake It All About, where his hotwired music was suddenly reworked in family friendly form, even though it was still plenty energetic.
While Little Richard continued performing and making television appearances well into the 2000s, by the end of that decade time and the health problems that come with age were weighing more heavily on him, and in 2015 he announced he was retiring. What was ultimately most surprising about the last five years of Richard's life was his silence; he would occasionally appear to accept awards or give his testimony to religious groups, but he kept a low profile and barely spoke to the press, as the most flamboyant and self-assured man on Earth suddenly decided he had finally said enough. And what was left to be said after his journey from one of the most outré performers in the wild early days of rock & roll to an all-purpose media celebrity who was considered an acceptable children's entertainer? Despite it all, even if Little Richard had ceased to be viewed as a threat, he never seemed entirely toothless, as the untamed energy of his youth was still faintly visible when he stepped on stage or in front of a camera. And while most of the great stars of rock & roll's first graduating class, great as they were, no longer sound like a threat to the standing order of our society, Little Richard's greatest music still sounds more than a little dangerous, as if he wants to take you out for a Saturday Night adventure that will leave you genuinely changed and with plenty to explain during Sunday Morning services. All that and being the architect of rock & roll? That’s more than enough for one lifetime.
And Little Richard also lacked for nothing when it came to confidence. When John Lennon made his first appearance on stage as a solo act at a rock & roll revival festival in Toronto in 1969, Richard argued with the promoters that he should close the show, that the former Beatle didn't have the stuff to follow him, and he would tell anyone who listened after the fact that he stole the show from John. Of course, Richard said that while secure in the knowledge that John Lennon and Paul McCartney regarded him as a hero, and both cited him as a major influence. (Listen to McCartney scream on any early Beatles side and there's no doubt he's doing his very best to ape Richard's flamethrower vocals.) Before the Beatles conquered the world, they opened a run of dates for Little Richard in England, and it's said that Lennon actually begged to hold the hand of his idol. The Rolling Stones also opened for Little Richard in their scuffling days, and Mick Jagger freely admitted that Richard was one of his first inspirations, as well as learning some valuable lessons from him on how to move on stage and work a crowd.
There's an old saying that it's not bragging if you can actually do it, and for all of Richard's bluster and extravagant self-praise, he wasn't really wrong. It's not truly accurate to say he invented rock & roll, but he fused the traditions of gospel, Southern rhythm & blues, and roadhouse piano in a new and unique way while adding a passion, intensity, and abandon that was unprecedented. Fats Domino may have gotten there first, and Chuck Berry's template proved to be a greater influence in the long run, but in its early years, Little Richard took rock & roll to a place it had never been before, and while plenty of folks would try to copy him, absolutely no one bested him.
For anyone who hated rock & roll because it was an affront to public morals (or loved rock & roll because it was an affront to public morals), Little Richard was a true cultural flashpoint. His songs were wild, rowdy, and raw, filled with pumping staccato piano, wailing saxophones, booming drums, and not-so-subtle sexual innuendo. Richard made irresponsibility sound like fun. He launched one of his greatest songs with the verse, "Well it's Saturday night and I just got paid/ Fool about my money, don't try to save/ My heart says go, go, have a time/ 'Cause it's Saturday night and I'm feeling fine!" Your parents and guidance counselors would never suggest such an attitude, but Little Richard was there to offer you all the temptation you could ask for. And at a time when African-Americans were expected to be quiet and obedient around white folks and being an out of the closet gay man was all but impossible, Little Richard was loud, flamboyant, and proud of it. He had style and flash to spare, he looked good and he knew it, and while the pronouns in his songs may have suggested he was straight, his towering pompadour, thick make-up, and outrageous demeanor made it very clear he wasn't just one of the guys.
At the same time, Little Richard's music showed clear gospel influences if you looked for them, and he was a Southern boy who was raised in the church and never entirely walked away from its teachings. Southern music, especially among African-Americans, long reflected the dichotomy of Saturday Night, where one shook off the constraints of daily life and reveled in sex, drink, and sin, and Sunday Morning, where you put on your best Go-To-Meeting clothes and pledged repentance, responsibility, and self-discipline, at least until next Saturday rolled around. From the beginning, rock & roll and rhythm & blues were filled with artists who recorded both sacred and secular music, but few were as polarized in their thinking as Little Richard, who spent much of his life wavering between his dual alliances.
Little Richard was born Richard Penniman in Macon, Georgia, on December 5, 1932. He was the third of twelve children, and was born with one leg slightly shorter than the other, giving him a walk bullies considered effeminate. The Saturday Night/Sunday Morning dilemma was part of his story from the start; his mother was a regular churchgoer and his father was a deacon, but dad also peddled bootleg whiskey to make extra money and helped run a honky tonk called the Tip In Inn. In Charles White's outrageous 1985 biography The Life and Times of Little Richard, written with Richard's full cooperation, he describes himself as a wild kid with a taste for bizarre pranks (he once gave a neighbor woman the present of a gift-wrapped bowel movement), and as he grew into his teens, he fell in with a local demimonde of gay men, drag queens, women happy to deflower young boys, and juke joints where booze, blues, and cross dressers were part of the entertainment. Richard's first musical heroes were gospel performers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, and Brother Joe May, and he didn't sing rhythm & blues (which his parents would not tolerate) until he began travelling with a medicine show in 1949, belting out the Louis Jordan hit "Caldonia," and with some reluctance performing in drag under the name Princess LaVonne. However, as he continued touring when he could and playing clubs as often as possible, he absorbed the influence of R&B stars like Billy Wright and Roy Brown, and his flamboyant style and fearless stage persona began to evolve.
Wright struck up a friendship with Richard and began showing him the ropes of life in show biz. Through Wright's contacts, Richard was signed to a record deal with RCA Victor Records, releasing his first single, "Taxi Blues" b/w "Every Hour," in 1951. "Every Hour" became a minor hit in Richard's hometown of Macon and the surrounding areas, but three other singles for the label failed to generate any action, and he was dropped. After spending time in New Orleans and Houston, Richard landed another recording contract with Peacock Records, but the two singles they released didn't fare any better. While Richard's act was powerful and energetic, his recordings for RCA and Peacock sounded relatively staid and didn't capture the combustible energy he could generate.
Richard returned to Macon and was washing dishes in the cafe at a bus station when he met a fellow aspiring musician and eccentric who was known as Eskew Reeder, Jr. or Esquerita, depending on the circumstances. Esquerita showed Richard his piano style, which was strongly percussive and had a muscular power and drive that marked the difference between rhythm & blues and the new beast known as rock & roll. Esquerita, whose life story is nearly as outlandish as Little Richard's, would make records after Richard rose to fame, and the similarity in their styles would suggest just how much Richard borrowed from his friend. However, one can honestly say that while Esquerita had the ideas that transformed Richard's style, Richard executed them with greater skill and imagination, and he could sing with a precision that Esquerita lacked.
In 1955, Richard had another shot at a recording career when Specialty Records took him on, and he was sent to New Orleans with producer Bumps Blackwell and a studio band that included Lee Allen on sax and Earl Palmer on drums, who would later become part of the network of top flight Los Angeles session players known as the Wrecking Crew. The session didn't produce anything remarkable until, during a break, Richard began messing around with a rude ditty he'd written about gay sex called "Tutti Frutti." Blackwell thought he heard a potential hit, and with a new cleaned up lyric, they laid down a rollicking performance and Specialty released it in October 1955. Nothing was the same from that moment on -- the tune shot to No. 2 on the Rhythm & Blues chart, and peaked at No. 21 on the Hot 100 survey, even though many pop oriented radio stations found it too raw for airplay and instead spun a remarkably bland cover by Pat Boone, which was a bigger hit at the time but has come to be treated like the inferior product it truly was.
In 1956 and 1957, Little Richard unleashed a string of singles that were some of the most powerful rock & roll of the day and still sound ferocious in the 21st Century, including "Long Tall Sally," "Rip It Up," "The Girl Can't Help It," "Lucille," and "Jenny Jenny." While Richard didn't make much money from the records (he would spend decades fighting the penurious but legally binding recording and publishing contracts he signed with Specialty), his gig fees were very lucrative, and he got a good payday for appearing in Frank Tashlin's superb rock & roll comedy The Girl Can't Help It. According to Charles White's book, Richard enjoyed the spoils of his new wealth, which included a fancy home in Los Angeles, brightly painted Cadillacs, expensive clothes, even more expensive jewelry, and frequent orgies where he would take on male and female partners, though much of the time he was happy to just watch.
For roughly two years, Richard enjoyed one long Saturday night, but in October 1957, Sunday Morning dawned. The combination of engine trouble on an airliner flying Richard to Australia for his first tour down under and witnessing a fireball in the sky that was later determined to have been the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 led to years of doubts and fears exploding in his mind. A few dates into the Aussie tour, Richard declared God wanted him to repent and abandon secular music in favor of gospel. He returned to the United States, and after cutting a few last sides for Specialty and playing a farewell show at New York's Apollo Theater, he settled in Huntsville, Alabama and enrolled at Oakwood College as a theology student.
If anyone doubted Little Richard's sincerity at the time, his disappearance from the pop charts, his marriage to a Oakwood co-ed, and a powerful sacred album he cut for Mercury in 1962, King of the Gospel Singers, were enough to convince most anyone he was absolutely serious. However, by the end of 1962, he was persuaded to take part in a concert tour of the United Kingdom; Richard believed he was invited to perform his gospel music, but it quickly became obvious the fans were expecting rock & roll, and he decided to give it to them. While flashes of gospel would appear in Richard's recordings, in the truest sense Sunday Morning was a thing of the past and he was back in the rock & roll game.
After several years of struggle, by the end of the '60s Little Richard was once again a popular attraction. He had limited success as a recording artist beyond his 1970 single "Freedom Blues," but his reputation as a magnetic stage performer who would appear on stage in a mirrored costume that turned him into a human mirror ball and his willingness to toss out outrageous quips in between songs made him a draw on the nightclub circuit again. And when rock & roll revival package shows that featured him alongside other first-era rock talents like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Bill Haley came into vogue, Richard was back playing arenas and Las Vegas showrooms. He was also indulging his omnivorous sexual appetites and began drinking and abusing drugs, and the line between his onstage mania and the edge of chemical fueled exhaustion became almost indistinguishable. By 1977, he was on the verge of burnout and history repeated itself -- he swore off rock & roll, and took up preaching, speaking at churches and Christian revivals about the evils of secular music and homosexuality with clear vehemence.
Curiously, Little Richard's most incendiary document about the roller coaster of his life was what brought him back to the show biz mainstream. In 1985, Charles White's The Life and Times of Little Richard was published, and Richard aggressively promoted it with radio and print interviews and television talk show appearances where the full force of his personality and the slightly unhinged charm of his storytelling took center stage. The book sold briskly, and after seeing Richard profiled on the news show 60 Minutes, filmmaker Paul Mazursky cast him as flashy record producer Orvis Goodnight in the movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills. The movie was a hit, Richard's performance was cited by many as a highlight, and a song he cut for the soundtrack, "Great Gosh Almighty," earned some radio and video play, leading to a new album, 1986's Lifetime Friend. (The second movie Richard made with Mazursky, The Pickle, wasn’t nearly as good, but anyone who is immune to the charm of his movie-within-a-movie role as the ruler of the planet Cleveland is someone dead to the true joys of life.)
While Richard's career as a live performer got a serious boost from his new exposure, it was his new emergence as an actor and a genially eccentric presence on various TV shows that gave him arguably the greatest mainstream exposure of his lifetime. Suddenly Richard was appearing on Miami Vice, Blossom, Baywatch, and even Wheel of Fortune, where he was a celebrity contestant along with James Brown and Weird Al Yankovic. In 1992, he even released a children's album through Disney, Shake It All About, where his hotwired music was suddenly reworked in family friendly form, even though it was still plenty energetic.
While Little Richard continued performing and making television appearances well into the 2000s, by the end of that decade time and the health problems that come with age were weighing more heavily on him, and in 2015 he announced he was retiring. What was ultimately most surprising about the last five years of Richard's life was his silence; he would occasionally appear to accept awards or give his testimony to religious groups, but he kept a low profile and barely spoke to the press, as the most flamboyant and self-assured man on Earth suddenly decided he had finally said enough. And what was left to be said after his journey from one of the most outré performers in the wild early days of rock & roll to an all-purpose media celebrity who was considered an acceptable children's entertainer? Despite it all, even if Little Richard had ceased to be viewed as a threat, he never seemed entirely toothless, as the untamed energy of his youth was still faintly visible when he stepped on stage or in front of a camera. And while most of the great stars of rock & roll's first graduating class, great as they were, no longer sound like a threat to the standing order of our society, Little Richard's greatest music still sounds more than a little dangerous, as if he wants to take you out for a Saturday Night adventure that will leave you genuinely changed and with plenty to explain during Sunday Morning services. All that and being the architect of rock & roll? That’s more than enough for one lifetime.