100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Tutti Frutti

02 True Fine Mama

03 Can’t Believe You Wanna Leave

04 Ready Teddy

05 Baby

06 Slippin’ and Slidin’ (Peepin’ and Hidin’)

07 Long Tall Sally

08 Miss Ann

09 Oh Why?

10 Rip It Up

11 Jenny, Jenny

12 She’s Got It

In September 1955 producer Robert ‘Bumps’ Blackwell set up an audition in New Orleans for Richard Penniman, a young man he’d heard about who was washing dishes in a local Greyhound bus station. The session was at Cosimo Matassa’s studio where the cream of New Orleans players hung out. But the feeling in the room that day was lacklustre: ‘So I called a lunch break and we went to the Dew Drop Inn,’ Blackwell recalled. ‘Richard saw a piano and a crowd of people: he was one of those people who’s always on stage, and he hit the piano and hollered, “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-good-God-damn!”.’ Blackwell saw the glory that is Little Richard and, as writer Barney Hoskyns observed, rock & roll had its Big Bang.

Little Richard was a misfit. One leg and arm shorter than the other, he had been sexually abused and thrown out of home; he was effeminate, polymorphously perverse … and desperate to be a star. The stage of the Dew Drop Inn was his last chance to impress the talent scout and so he let it all out: the pain of the years of being knocked down but also the incredible spirit; the appetite for excitement and adventure and sex and deliverance.

Little Richard’s music was completely new and existential – the fire and brimstone of gospel from the Adventist church of his childhood, funky New Orleans R&B, the silky pop of the ’50s, the blues and ‘somethin’ else’ as Eddie Cochrane would say.

Everything that subsequently happened in rock & roll is prefigured in that anarchic, mad, poetic absurdity full of sexual energy and desperation.

‘Tutti Frutti’ – the song Richard let fly at the Dew Drop Inn – was way too X-rated for the Top 40 so Blackwell had singer Dorothy LaBostrie pen some new words and Little Richard’s a cappella syncopated scream became ‘awopbopaloobopalopbamboom!’ Everything from the Beatles to the Stooges to Lady Gaga is prefigured in those two minutes and 20 seconds. In terms of sexuality, Richard made Presley look like the missionary position. The song topped the ‘Negro’ charts and sold half a million copies. As Richard said, ‘Tutti Frutti was a blessin’ and a lesson’. When white Tennessee crooner Pat Boone covered the song it sold a million copies and topped the Billboard Hot 100. Richard realised he had to up the ante. Next, ‘Long Tall Sally’ broke Richard into the white teen market and there was no looking back. As John Lennon said of ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘When I heard [it], it was so great I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to leave Elvis, but this was so much better.’

Elsewhere, ‘Rip It Up’ is a teenage call to arms: ‘Saturday night and I just got paid/I’m a fool about my money, don’t try to save’. Richard attacks the lyrics with a beautiful violence, timing his vocals against the drums and shredding his voice with equal parts desperation and joy. ‘Rip It Up’ is a bacchanal and an incitement to anarchy. The screaming, the craziness, the excess and the funk in rock & roll start here.

Little Richard and Blackwell struck up a creative partnership that ran for most of Richard’s career but it all started with these songs and this album. ‘I’m the Architect of rock & roll,’ said Richard. ‘The Originator, the Emancipator. Before me, there wasn’t nothin’ but a few pigs, and they didn’t have no ham, y’know?’