Mix boogie-woogie with rhythm & blues and a shot of gospel, add those yips and shouts, crank the volume and speed it way up. That was Little Richard's sound
it, that thing he had? What was it that propelled him in 1955 from washing pots at the Greyhound bus station in Macon, Georgia, to being such a star that girls fainted to see him and he was paid $10,000 an hour? And from a cat that everyone laughed at, never good for anything but scrubbing dishes, into the inventor of the sound that formed a whole generation of music-makers, from the Beatles to James Brown to Elton John to the Rolling Stones? Because almost everybody agreed: he was the one.
Once turned on he never turned off, plugged into that energy 24/7. Inevitably it shook society up, and not just musically. His sexuality did that, too. He swerved around on whether he was gay or not, picking “omnisexual” as what came nearest, but he was proud to say that he had worn purple, and eyelashes, whenmen were wearing that. He was the bronze Liberace, the Magnificent One; didn’t care two cents what people thought.
The seeds of this liberating music had been in him a long time. “Tutti Frutti” had jumped around in his head since his boyhood in the slums of Macon, together with the songs of the washboard man and the high cries of the travelling grocer . His songs were his experiences: “Good Golly Miss Molly” was something his old toothless Aunt Lulu said, when they put marijuana in her tobacco pipe. Rhythm & blues, “devil music”, was not allowed at home, but whatever music he seized on, he liked.
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