American Masters: "Little Richard: The King and Queen of Rock 'n' Roll" (Minnow Films Limited, BBC, American Masters Pictures, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 3) after the Father Brown episode my husband Charles and I watched a fascinating American Masters program on 1950’s rock ‘n’ roll legend Little Richard called “The King and Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” The show, directed by James House (no writer is credited on imdb.com but I’m presuming House is responsible for much of the content as well), was a great presentation of the Little Richard story but it irked me because it positively reeked of “first-itis,” the tendency of biographers in any media to assume that the people they’re biographing were the first to do something even though it’s easy to find other people who did it before them. Little Richard himself at times seemed to be the Jelly Roll Morton of rock, claiming that it was exclusively his invention, though at other times he acknowledged his influences, or at least some of them. He admitted he had got the famous falsetto shriek – the “Woo-ooo-ooo!” that punctuated so many of his records – from women gospel singers in general and Clara Ward in particular. (He often ridiculed white singers who tried to copy this vocal mannerism, though one who could – whom Richard respected – was Paul McCartney, who always sang lead when the Beatles covered Richard.) And though the show didn’t explicitly acknowledge the influence, it did note that when Little Richard got his start in show business in 1946 (at age 13) at a notorious cabaret called the Dew Drop Inn in New Orleans, the one song he knew at the time was “Caldonia,” the star-making hit for Louis Jordan. There’s even a brief film clip from Jordan’s promotional film for “Caldonia” that shows how much he anticipated Richard’s flamboyant stage presence, especially the way he kicks his heels in the air and looks like a huge Black baby as he sings the line, “What makes yo’ big head so HARD?”

Little Richard was born Richard Wayne Penniman in Macon, Georgia on December 5, 1932, and as a child he went with his family (there were 12 children in all) to a local Black church where the piano player and musical director was a woman named Arizona Dranes. The Document label once compiled a CD of Arizona Dranes’ few extant recordings, and on a number of them you can hear the hammering piano triplets that became a fundamental part of Little Richard’s style. One thing this show did that was welcome for me was it emphasized the enormous role of the Queer community in shaping Little Richard’s persona both on stage and in his private life. Through most of his life – at least until his second and apparently definitive conversion to born-again Christianity in the late 1970’s – Richard was actively Bisexual, and his early show at the Dew Drop Inn was MC’d by a drag queen. This show even gave the censored original lyrics to “Tutti Fruitti” – the “hook” line was “Tutti fruitti, good booty,” and the rest of the lyrics made it clear the song was not only about sex in general but Gay male sex in particular. What it did not mention was, among other things, that Little Richard had had two runs at recording in the early 1950’s, for RCA Victor in 1951 and 1952 and the Black-owned Peacock label in 1953, before he signed with Art Rupe’s L.A.-based Specialty Records in 1955 and started having hits. In fact, years ago I stumbled on a cassette reissue of Little Richard’s RCA Victor recordings, and one of the eight songs he recorded for them represented an interesting road-not-taken for him: “Thinkin’ ‘Bout My Mother” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs_dpygSkkQ), a searing and openly emotional blues song in the vein of the almost totally forgotten Roy Brown. Had Little Richard remained in that vein he could have become one of the great blues artists of all time instead of the high-energy rock ‘n’ roller of the Specialty sides and the many records he made afterwards, most of which were either inferior remakes of his Specialty hits or attempts to work the Little Richard magic on other people’s songs.

It’s a running theme in Black American culture that the greatest artists are often torn between their religious beliefs and their secular desires, including the desire for commercial success in the music business, but few African-American musicians have been as openly torn between those poles as Little Richard. There’s an issue the show touched on briefly that they should have explored more fully: Richard wasn’t upset by white people commenting that his work was “music of the devil” – he’d grown up in the church and he knew very well where rock came from – but he was devastated by Black churchgoing audiences who thought his music and that of other Black performers who drew on gospel but turned its musical devices into songs about carnal rather than spiritual love was sinful and a perversion of their communities’ holiest spiritual tradition. This was a contradiction that caught a lot of Black performers, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (who resolved it by going back to gospel after her brief success as a secular artist in the early 1940’s and never looking back), Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, and it was not until Aretha Franklin recorded her great gospel album Amazing Grace in 1972 that a major Black talent who’d got her start in the church returned to sacred music and was accepted by both sacred and secular audiences. Little Richard’s first withdrawal from the world of secular music came in 1957, when a plane he was on nearly crashed (though it’s not clear how much danger he was actually in or whether his vision of a plane’s engine on fire and the back end falling off was an hallucination) and he swore an oath to God that he would forswear rock and become a minister if God spared his life. God did, and so Richard did too, enrolling in a Black divinity school and reportedly paying the entire four-year tuition in advance.

Richard became a minister, preaching sermons that judging from the clips of them presented here weren’t all that inspired and virtually ignoring his past until the early 1960’s, when he returned to Specialty Records for one last rock side (“Bama Lama Bama Loo”) and toured England, with The Beatles as his opening act when he played Liverpool. (Philip Norman’s 1980 Beatles biography Shout! has a fascinating story of that Liverpool concert in which Richard’s promoter, Don Arden, insisted that all communications with Richard had to come through him – but a glance between Richard and Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ Gay manager, undid all that and Richard was a model of cooperation throughout the show, even offering his personal microphone to one of the other acts whose own mike had failed.) Much of this show was narrated by Little Richard himself through tapes of interviews he did with journalist Charles White for an authorized biography called The Life and Times of Little Richard, the Quasar of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 1984, in which he finally acknowledged that he’d been Bisexual but insisted that all that was over because his religion now forbade it. I remember watching a TV interview with Little Richard in 1979 to promote a new album called God’s Beautiful City, which judging from the one song he performed from it was absolutely terrible: just a bland rendition of a white hymn without any of the energy of either rock ‘n’ roll or Black gospel music. Richard also insisted in this interview that at one time in his life he had “practiced unnatural affections” but he was over that, thereby alienating not only the Queer community who insists there’s no such thing as an “ex-Gay” but also the religious Right for his insistence that even though he was no longer Gay he didn’t think Queer people should be the subjects of discrimination and hatred.

For the rest of Richard’s life there were odd rumors about his private life and his religious beliefs – including a brief report that he’d converted to Judaism – and an occasional great record (like “Great Gosh A’Mighty” from the 1986 album Lifetime Friend, co-written by Little Richard and Billy Preston, another artist that had trouble reconciling the sacred and secular sides of his career and his life, and boosted by its use in the soundtrack to the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills) reminding us that this man could still shake. Needless to say, a major issue in Little Richard’s career and those of the great rock innovators generally was the way Richard and other Black artists had to deal with unscrupulous music-industry people, most of them white, and the phenomenon of white artists like Elvis Presley and Pat Boone “covering” their great songs and selling far more (and making more money) than they did. The show presents this aspect of the story in the stark black-and-white terms we’ve become accustomed to – the Black artists create and whites come in, rip them off and make all the money – though the reality is considerably more complicated and nuanced. Part of my thinking is influenced by reading Arnold Shaw’s 1977 book Honkers and Shouters, which featured interviews not only with leading artists of the rhythm-and-blues era (including the final interviews with Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker and Jackie Wilson) but also with record-company owners, including Art Rupe of Specialty. Richard targeted him as a rip-off artist who had denied him his fair share of royalties for decades, and it’s certainly true that Rupe signed him to a terrible contract that gave him only a fraction of what his music earned.

It’s also true that Rupe was just one rung above Richard along a long ladder of exploitation and he was getting screwed, too. In the late 1950’s a lot of the music business was actually controlled by organized crime, so when Richard started asking, “Who got all the money I made?,” the answer was almost certainly, “Most of it went to the Mafia.” One of Shaw’s interviewees was Al Silver of Herald and Ember Records, who told him that he knew where the Mafia was selling bootlegs of his records because certain cities were not reporting any earnings from legitimate sales even though the records were hits everywhere else in the country. Richard was understandably upset when Elvis’s publicity machine crowned him as “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” and when Pat Boone (who was interviewed for this show and recalled having to have someone write out the opening of “Tutti Fruitti” – “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a-wop-bam-boom” – so he could sing it) recorded “Tutti Fruitti” and Richard’s next song, “Long Tall Sally,” in versions so bad they achieve camp status. What Richard either didn’t acknowledge or didn’t know was that the white owners of labels that dealt in Black music actively lobbied for white artists to cover their songs – they owned the publishing rights to the songs and so could earn more from record sales of a white cover than from the original Black artist’s recording – and in his case his style was so unique that he was able to narrow the usual gap in sales between the Black original and the white cover from 10 to 1 down to three to one.

And it begs credulity, at least to me, to call Little Richard unjustly neglected when he had a surprisingly long career, he got to sell major amounts of records and appear in films (including The Girl Can’t Help It, the only time many of the great 1950’s rockers were filmed in color and for which Richard recorded the theme song, written by white jazz songwriter Bobby Troup but remodeled in Richard’s style), and he lasted long enough to get the recognition he deserved as one of the founders of rock – though not the only one. I love Little Richard and I can see why it struck white British musicians like Ringo Starr of the Beatles and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones the way it did (both were interviewed for this show and recalled the first time they heard Little Richard as a galvanic experience in their lives), but he wasn’t the only Black musician who shaped rock as we know it today. I can’t think of any Little Richard songs the Rolling Stones covered (unlike the Beatles, one of whose greatest records was their cover of Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”) and the Stones’s tastes generally ran to Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley and Richard’s greatest rival as the early king of Black rock, Chuck Berry – whose name gets barely mentioned (the only traces of Berry here are a couple of shots of still photos of Berry and Richard together) but whom I’ve always liked better because, as exciting and explosive as Richard’s music is, Berry’s always seemed deeper and richer to me. If you want names of Black R&B and early rock musicians who remain really unacknowledged and unjustly neglected, I can think of at least three: Louis Jordan (who at least got the tribute of a Broadway musical based on his songs, Five Guys Named Moe, albeit 20 years after he died and therefore too late to help him), Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and Roy Brown. Crudup and Brown wrote Elvis’s first two hits – “That’s All Right, Mama” and “Good Rocking Tonight,” respectively – and both died in the 1970’s after having failed to get the recognition Richard eventually obtained as a rock ‘n’ roll pioneer.