'I really feel from the bottom of my heart that I am the inventor [of rock & roll],' Little Richard told us in 1990. Look back at our interview with the rock pioneer
Little Richard learned to play gospel piano from an equally flamboyant character named Esquerita, combining it with his own love of boogie-woogie in what became a blueprint for rock & roll. By his late teens he was a veteran of several traveling vaudeville revues, where he got schooled in the theatrical side of performing He cut his first sides for RCA Camden in 1951, followed by a string of singles for Peacock.
I really feel from the bottom of my heart that I am the inventor. If there was somebody else, I didn’t know than, didn’t hear them, haven’t heard them. Not even to this day. So I say I’m the architect.We didn’t have nothing to play records on, ’cause we were real poor. My mother had 12 children, so we didn’t have nothing. We had an old radio we would play late at night We would listen to WLAC out of Tennessee. Back in that time boogie-woogie was very popular.
There was a Miss Ann. She was a white lady I used to work for. She had a club in Macon filled Ann’s Tick Tock. She and her husband, Johnny, were like a to me. They had been good to me when a lot of people hadn’t. I really appreciated them, so when I got famous, I made up a song. That’s the only real person.“Tutti Frutti” really started the races being together. Because when I was a boy, the white people would sit upstairs.
Do you think the black audience at large will ever get interested in black music from a more historical perspective?. I believe that Michael Jackson’s generation will be more up on it than my generation. I believe black people love me, and I believe they appreciate me. But I’m not recording the kind of music they want to hear in this generation. I am where I am, so that’s it.Oh, they were. They were choreographed by me and by Grady [Gaines, the tenor saxophonist]. They wore makeup.
I don’t know, and it still comes. We just did Palm Springs, and it was unbelievable. People was crying, screaming. You wouldn’t believe I was the age that I am. It was just like a power, and you felt like crying. When I touched the piano, the house just went insane. I have seen ’em go a long way. I have seen people worked into frenzies. I’ve seen ’em foaming at the mouth, I’ve seen ’em fall out. I’ve seen people screamin’, cryin’, can’t stop. I’ve seen girls who just wanted to touch me, just screamin’, lookin’ at me, screamin’ and fallin’ out.Collapsed. That was at the Olympic Auditorium [in Los Angeles]. The piano fell. The stage fell. One guy broke his leg. It was pandemonium: The crowd was screaming, and they kept screaming.
Oh, it was liberated all right! It was experimental, too, ’cause we were young and hadn’t done a lot of things. Being a country boy from the South, I had been held back. My family was religious. Sometimes you couldn’t toe-tap or tap a toe or ask for mo’, and that’s for sure! And that’s the way it go! And we was po’!
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