He was flamboyant with his pompadour hair and pencil mustache (the hair imitated by Elvis through much of his career), he was charismatic, and he was immensely talented. He was a dynamic performer, so full of energy it would wear the viewer or listener out. Many of his songs such as "Tutti Frutti," "Good Golly Miss Molly," and "Long Tall Sally." became rock music standards. Richard's roots lay in gospel, and off-and-on he would perform gospel music. He was also religious, and if I remember correctly, he had been an ordained minister.
But Little Richard hardly lived a flawless life. He would have been the first to have admitted it. It didn't matter when you are that good a musician. Much of his best work was recording for Specialty Records.
He died early today, his son, Danny Penniman, announced. No cause of death was given.
Born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5th, 1932, in Macon, Georgia, he was one of 12 children and grew up around uncles who were preachers. “I was born in the slums. My daddy sold whiskey, bootleg whiskey,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. Although he sang in a nearby church, his father Bud wasn’t supportive of his son’s music and accused him of being gay, resulting in Penniman leaving home at 13 and moving in with a white family in Macon. But music stayed with him: One of his boyhood friends was Otis Redding, and Penniman heard R&B, blues and country while working at a concession stand at the Macon City Auditorium.
After performing at the Tick Tock Club in Macon and winning a local talent show, Penniman landed his first record deal, with RCA, in 1951. (He became “Little Richard” when he about 15 years old, when the R&B and blues worlds were filled with acts like Little Esther and Little Milton; he had also grown tired with people mispronouncing his last name as “Penny-man.”) He learned his distinctive piano style from Esquerita, a South Carolina singer and pianist who also wore his hair in a high black pompadour.
Interesting he was friends with Otis Redding at this early stage in his life. Redding must have been a small child then, for there was around ten years difference in their ages. Redding was a mere 26 years old when he died in a plane crash in 1967.
As the article notes, Penniman was called "Little Richard" because of his age when he turned pro, not because of his size. He was in fact of average height for a man at 5 feet, 10 inches, not much shorter than Elvis or "Little" Stevie Wonder who as an adult stands six feet tall.
Of course, I cannot have an obit of such a great musical talent without some video:
We will never see anything like him again.
New York Times obituary:
Rock ’n’ roll was an unabashedly macho music in its early days, but Little Richard, who had performed in drag as a teenager, presented a very different picture onstage: gaudily dressed, his hair piled six inches high, his face aglow with cinematic makeup. He was fond of saying in later years that if Elvis was the king of rock ’n’ roll, he was the queen. Offstage, he characterized himself variously as gay, bisexual and “omnisexual.”
His influence as a performer was immeasurable. It could be seen and heard in the flamboyant showmanship of James Brown, who idolized him (and used some of his musicians when Little Richard began a long hiatus from performing in 1957), and of Prince, whose ambisexual image owed a major debt to his.
Presley recorded his songs. The Beatles adopted his trademark sound, an octave-leaping exultation: “Woooo!” (Paul McCartney said that the first song he ever sang in public was “Long Tall Sally,” which he later recorded with the Beatles.) Bob Dylan wrote in his high school yearbook that his ambition was “to join Little Richard.”
The paper said his lawyer revealed he had died of bone cancer.
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