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“A wop bop a loo bop, a tree lop bam!”
There are many ways to transcribe it, and no one can say what it means. But the way Little Richard started his “Tutti frutti” in 1955 is an exclamation so classic and unlikely that it could be seen as the rock cell’s own cell.
Read more: Little Richard is dead: 87 years old
Although it was not the first rock song, it was not Little Richard’s debut either. But it was his first great classic and one of the songs that made him one of the most important pioneers of primitive rock music.
Although it was Pat Boone who achieved even greater success with his singing of the same song. Which in every way was prettier and more styled, but fast enough to be a daring song choice for such a dominating star as groundbreaking. And Pat Boone’s success helped open doors for Little Richard, who, with his intense acting and quirky manners, was a more difficult-to-digest artist to market in the mid-1950s. Elvis Presley and Bill Haley also quickly portrayed Little Richard.
For a contemporary listener It can often be difficult to hear exactly how challenged early rock artists were in their time. Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, of course you hear their energy and stun rhythm, but they represented the pure danger of life for the decency of time, it requires some empathy to perceive.
Little Richard had a completely different kind of intensity, a voice so bright it only sounds a little unlikely. It was such an orderly expression that most had never heard of such a thing, especially outside of the rhythm and blues crowd of heavily segregated southern US states.
What he sang did not play such an important role, and the entire text of “Tutti frutti” is basically a single sequence of meaningless phrases. It sounds meaty and obscene anyway, as if the real message is in the sound itself.
Little Richard never doubted his own importance in the least. It was an unlikely revelation already in its advance, with scattered hair, high shine, cloak, and makeup. In addition to a work that was incredibly intense and a voluptuous show comparable to the biggest divas.
Typically he had appeared as a drag team at a young age, and it was androgyny both on and off stage. And he had to send the text himself, it was he himself and no one else who invented rock ‘n’ roll and gave it its final form.
He was born as Richard Penniman in Macon, Georgia, in December 1932. His father was a priest and a house-burning salesman, thus avoiding the break between the spiritual and the mundane that so many of the great artists of the 1950s faced. . Already in 1957, for the first time, he retired from profane music to study theology and sing the gospels.
In 1947, he was discovered by gospel star Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who heard fourteen-year-old Little Richard sing his songs and offered him a place as a bandit. He soon toured with various vaudeville orchestras, using the name “Princess LaVonne”, among others. In 1951 he got his first record deal and a local hit with the rhythm & blues ballad “Every hour,” but it seems to have been a huge difference between the early singles and the increasingly wild style he cultivated on stage.
Only with the third recording contract everything fell into place. “Tutti frutti” was soon followed by songs like “Long tall Sally”, “Slippin ‘and slidin'”, “Rip it up”, “Ready Teddy”, “The girl can’t help it”, “Lucille”, “Jenny, Jenny “,” Keep playing “and” Good luck, Miss Molly “. Before choosing religion like this.
When the British pop wave gained momentum in the early 1960s, Little Richard’s career also gained new momentum, and the Beatles in particular were quick to highlight him as a role model, turning his “Long tall Sally” into a early parade number.
However, it was difficult for Little Richard, keeping up with the fluctuations of the new era, and soul and funk testing never had the same impact. In the ’70s, he was stuck in the role of a retro artist, and after a handful of albums during the first half of the’ 70s, his only records of newly written material were a pair of gospel albums and a children’s album.
But on stage he was still so extravagant, well back in the years, where he behaved like a royalty with a taste for camping. It was also obvious the only time I saw him, one night at Rottneros Park south of Sunne in 1998, where his manners were much fiercer than those of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry who appeared that night.
But not for all the years he goes down in history, but for a fairly short period in the mid-1950s, when Little Richard put more light on rock music than anyone else, and also paved the way for almost all male artists. later with cape and kajal, where James Brown and Prince are the most obvious.
And the lyrics of “Tutti frutti” will continue to be mentioned among rock’s most immortal lyrics, not by virtue of what it says, but how it sounded when Little Richard sang it.
