Is Childhood Recaptured at Will, As Baudelaire Said, Then Little Richard Is a Genius in the Same Way That Few Others Are
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is childhood recaptured at will, as Baudelaire said, then Little Richard is a genius in the same way that few others are. In our culture, only a handful of artists have the ability to appeal to child and adult alike, that is, to actual children as well as the child who is still alive in the adult heart. Shakespeare, Mozart, Dickens, Twain, Van Gogh: you can gasp in wonder at their work whether you’re eight or eighty, just as, no matter how old you are, you’ll leap or hobble to the dance floor when “Tutti Frutti” comes on. The songs that came out of Cosimo Matassa’s studio on the corner of Dauphine and Rampart Streets in New Orleans are, for the most part, what Matassa calls “celebration songs.” He tells Todd Mouton that while songs like “Tutti Frutti” as well as Huey “Piano” Smith & The Clowns’“Don’t You Just Know It,’’Jessie Hill’s “Ooh Poo Pah Doo,” and Sugar Boy Crawford’s “Jock-A-Mo” feature phonetic vocalizations some might call nonsense lyrics, in each case the artist is using his own language to express the simple pleasures of living. “You can imagine children or adults dancing and skipping, finger-popping,” says Matassa. “All of’em move—that’s the central thing with all of those songs. Some of’em are totally child-like, but they were expressions ofjoy.These were expressions of emotion; you can’t reject those. They get too analytical about the records. And most stuff isn’t that cerebral—it’s visceral.” But to say a song is “child-like” is not to say it’s trivial, and to say an art work is fun doesn’t mean that it can’t be serious as well. A year after Little Richard co-wrote and recorded “Tutti Frutti” in New Orleans, Allen Ginsberg wrote his masterpiece “America” in Berkeley. Here the “queer Jewish commie anarchist dope fiend,” as Greil Marcus calls him in Mystery Train, “refuses the internal exile his country has offered him,” just as the gay black crippled anarchist dope fiend Little Richard does the same. Everything that Marcus says about Ginsberg’s poem can be said about Richard’s song: each “can be read alongside the Declaration of Independence” because each is “a declaration that each American must in one way or another declare independence from America, without having to surrender the slightest connection to it, before he or she can fully and freely join it.” Like Ginsberg, Little Richard “takes you off your feet and away from anything like home, makes home unrecognizable, unwanted, and then leads you back.” 164 / Kirby.