How Little Richard changed the world

The legacy of the singer, who died last week, goes beyond music and helped change our attitudes to race, sex and class

Daniel Finkelstein Tuesday May 12 2020, 5.00pm, The Times

Awomp-bomp-A-loo-Mop Alomp-Bomp-Bomp! Can I ask you to try something? When you have a moment, go to your music streaming service, or just use YouTube, and search out Little Richard’s original 1955 recording of Tutti Frutti.

It’s two and a half minutes of pure joy, never letting go its grip from the moment those extraordinary opening words burst from its singer’s lips. It’s exciting, raw, real. Then look for the same song, recorded soon afterwards, but this time by Pat Boone, the pop singer. It is almost unimaginably awful. Cringing and laughing are the only appropriate reactions.

I ask you to play them in that order because of a striking fact, and an opinion that flows from it.

The striking fact is that Boone had the bigger hit with Tutti Frutti. In February 1956 his version became a gold record and charted nine places above Little Richard’s original.

And the opinion? When you listen to these two versions you are listening to the future and the past. You are right at the hinge of cultural history. In his book on the birth of rock’n’roll, David Kirby describes the recording of Tutti Frutti like this: “It’s like the skinniest part of the hourglass. Everything that came before flows into this narrow pass, and the world we live in today flows out the other side.” For all the talk of the 1960s cultural revolutions and political upheavals, the hinge of postwar history was the mid-1950s. The hinge was this.

Pat Boone’s version of Tutti Frutti — a sanitised, smoothed out, white murder of an urgent, spontaneous, imperfect African-American sound — is the beginning of a retreat. Little Richard’s version is the start of the advance. Who listens to Boone’s Tutti Frutti now? In 2007 Little Richard’s recording was chosen by a Mojo magazine panel to feature in its 100 Records that Changed the World. They placed it at number one.

So last week saw the death of an outrageous, even preposterous, man who was actually of profound importance. Here’s how Little Richard changed the world. The reaction of teenagers like John Lennon and Paul McCartney when they first heard Little Richard was typical. They knew they had heard something that was true and that there was no going back. Mark Lewisohn, a Beatles historian, explains that for Lennon, in particular, it seemed that everything in his life to that point had been a contrivance. This was reality. Its immediacy, its energy, was life itself. The adult world thought rock was a fad that would pass. For a brief period they thought it would be eclipsed by calypso. They didn’t understand that rock was a way of looking at the world; that it presented an argument. What mattered was feel and spontaneity, that rules could be broken, that social barriers were artificial. The idols of rock might rise and fall but the spirit of rock would never go away. And with it came four revolutions. First, and most obviously, rock was a race revolution. Neither Little Richard nor Chuck Berry were political in the conventional sense but their political influence was profound.

In his authorised biography (which is part-memoir, part-portrait by Charles White) Little Richard looks back on the Fifties and Sixties as an African- American from the Deep South and yet doesn’t mention Martin Luther King. One of the great outrages that fuelled the civil rights movement — the lynching of Emmett Till — took place less than three weeks before the recording of Tutti Frutti, and it doesn’t get a mention either.

However, Little Richard’s music was crucial in the desegregation of America and the change in attitudes towards racism that accompanied it. What had been known as (and explicitly sold as) “race music” crossed into the mainstream pop chart with songs like Tutti Frutti. Gradually it became impossible to prevent mixed bands, or mixed dancing. Black and white television had basically been white television, and rock challenged that too.

No wonder the Alabama White Citizens’ Council protested that “rock’n’roll is part of a test to undermine the morals of the youth of our nation. It is sexualistic, unmoralistic and brings people of both races together.”Because rock, of course, was “sexualistic” too.

The second rock revolution was the sexual one. The term itself was slang for sex. It shocked contemporary morality. In their book 1956: The Year That Changed Britain, Francis Beckett and Tony Russell suggest that the early 1950s may have been years “when more people married as virgins than at any time before or since”. Rock began an openness in talking about sexual behaviour and acknowledging our sexuality that has changed art and politics deeply.

Little Richard was himself bisexual. His attitude to this was beyond merely ambivalent. There were times in his career when he returned to the church, became a preacher and announced that God had saved him from the devil that had made him gay. He insisted that his 1984 memoir include a lengthy sermon against homosexuality.

Yet there were times when he was perhaps the most “out” of all public figures. He showed what was possible. Even his own foolish words can’t entirely deny him a place as a pioneer of recognition and equality for gay people.

Rock was also both an age revolution and a class revolution. It didn’t act on its own, of course. Without postwar prosperity and demographic change there would have been no teen culture. And Mark Lewisohn identifies the importance of the 1957 decision to abolish national service to the feeling of freedom and power among young people in Britain. Without it, during Beatlemania some of the group would have been in the army.

But rock was accessible, something that could be played and enjoyed without education or training or even much money. And it was something the coming generation could understand that their parents found bewildering, making it more potent still.

Race, sex, class and age. These revolutions are all unfinished but before Tutti Frutti they hadn’t even begun. Rock was a capitalist uprising against the established order, it was commerce and the consumer sweeping away barriers and hierarchies. Arguably Little Richard was a more powerful force for change than any politician.

The classic 1956 rock’n’roll film The Girl Can’t Help It begins with the main character flicking the screen and the narrow frame becomes much wider. Next he calls for the black and white to turn to colour and it does. And then comes the sound of Little Richard.

This is the story of the modern era. Except that the sound of Little Richard came first. [email protected]