As a child, my family and my church spent an extraordinary amount of time warning my friends and me to avoid “devil music.” Near the top of the list were the songs of Little Richard. And like every Southern child at the time, I immediately scoured stores for his recordings so I could taste the forbidden fruit.
News of his death this past week sent me back to all the amazing memories of 1950s and 1960s music. How could any member of my generation forget the thrill of early rock’n’roll, when an entire subculture was built around it? And we loved it all the more because the World War II generation hated it.
It was music that had a pulse. It brought people to their feet. It had an authentic rhythm, unlike the contrived music that came before. It spoke to the realities of life, not the denial of life.
And we often forget today that the authenticity of Little Richard’s music happened precisely because it came out of the African-American experience in the rural South.
When Little Richard’s music was new, we youngsters understood that it described life as something that could be both red-blooded and joyful. And it did so despite the wrenching experiences that had produced it — the horrible discrimination and poverty imposed upon an entire race by Jim Crow laws.
Little Richard’s quarrelsome family life is easily familiar to anyone aware of the Deep South’s history in the 1950s. They were etched by discrimination and steeped in a tradition of secular blues-based music that often was at war with its respectable gospel cousin.
Little Richard’s own father was horrified by his son’s flirtations with “devil music” and threw him out of the house at age fifteen on suspicion the boy was gay.
But Little Richard’s hard childhood stood in bold contrast to the upbeat music he produced. His sudden emergence into American life in the 1950s — many people feel he practically invented rock’n’roll — had the feel of a joyful outburst of a culture kept too long in the dark that had now broken free into sunlight.
That outburst was screamed out in the first line of Little Richard’s first hit, “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a-wop-bam-boom!” His song, “Tutti Frutti,” would be followed by many more hits like “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and “Long Tall Sally.” All of them seemed to compel teenagers to get up and dance. Quite a few adults, too.
Little Richard’s hometown of Macon, Georgia, went on to produce even more great musical artists who drew many different styles from their rural Georgia roots — artists like Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers. Even the pioneering recording studio, Capricorn Records, began as a Macon operation.
They all added to one of the great American cultural contributions to the world, the unique forms of music that arose from the African-American experience. And Little Richard in particular still stands out today as someone who found joy in darkness, who sang jubilant riffs in the face of bigotry, and who helped transform the blues into rock’n’roll.
© Robert Craig Waters 2020. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. For this and other writings: http://www.robertcraigwaters.com
Robert Craig Waters 