What follows is an excerpt from W.T. Lhamon Jr.’s Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (1990). Thanks to the author for giving First permission to reprint his revelatory writing on the lore of Little Richard.
You doin’ something no one can.
–Little Richard to Miss Ann
One of the most obscuring claims critics make about the origins of rock music is that individual genius conceived it. Talent was significant, surely, but such theses serve stars rather than understanding. They also deter acknowledgment of how significantly rock ‘n’ roll development of American folklore. For instance, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ‘n’ Roll passes on as authoritative Little Richard’s account of how, since his family disapproved of rhythm ‘n’ blues, “Bing Crosby, ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ and Ella Fitzgerald were all I heard. And I knew there was something that could be louder than that, but I didn’t know where to find it. And I found it was me.” (Winner 52)
What he does not say, of course, is that before it was in him, them was in the milieu of after-hours bars, minstrel shows, gay clubs, carny midways, folk patois, blues lyrics, road bonding, and the postwar leisure of Northern soldiers bored in Southern towns. Little Richard found rock in its social roots, which he cultivated. Rock was not his invention any more than it was Chuck Berry’s or Elvis Presley’s. It was a hybridization of pop and folk seeds, for which Richard Penniman was a medium favoring the folk much as Berry favored the pop germs.
One of the most compelling cases for situating the origins of roll in folk culture rather than in personal genius took place in Orleans shortly after noon on 13 September 1955, when legend asserts the opposite, that rock rained out of a blue sky. That day Little Richard went to lunch after a disappointing morning’s recording session, wowed the lounging musicians at the Dew Drop Inn with an obscene ditty he had polished in gay clubs across the South. It was a protoversion of “Tutti Frutti” and it truly sounded like nothing else either on the radio airwaves or in the studio that morning. Its surprising sound was disconnected from the current pop modes. Where then did it come from?
It was deeply entwined with surviving minstrel modes and homosexual closet humor. The sound, the style, the delivery are all audible in the music Esquerita, one of his cronies from that time, was making. Esquerita[6] (puns on “esquire-ita” and “esquire-eater” and “excreter”) is Eskew Reeder, Jr., from Greenville, South Carolina. He has vouched that every part of Little Richard’s act from pompadour to countertenor final syllables, manic piano triplets to Pancake 31 make-up, was all conventional in the gay dubs of Southeastern cities between 1947 and 1955 (Billy Miller 5). Little Richard confirms that Esquerita taught him piano, especially his characteristic treble phrasing (Charles White 30).
At first hearing, Esquerita’s wild album, Esquerita, sounds more like Little Richard than Little Richard does. But then the extremity of his performance emerges as something that was probably there before he met Little Richard (as both have said) rather than parody of the latter’s success. Esquerita’s “oooohs” sound like sheets of stainless steel tearing in the wind. His bawdy lines remain bawdy (“Hey, Miss Lucy, you’re too fat and juicy for me”), unleavened by Little Richard’s punning wit. Audiences first hear how important the connections were between Little Richard and his roots. Then they notice how significant were the singer’s changes in his sources. The two perceptions are complementary and equally valid.
Another direct source of folklore and repertoire for Little Richard was Louis Jordan. His “Keep A Knockin” is the model for Little Richard’s song of the same title, especially confirmed since Charles White’s account of Littlc Richard’s recording sessions notes that Jordan’s line, “I’m drinkin’ gin and you can’t come in,” was deleted from Little Richard’s final release (229).That line was the single major difference in lyrics between Little Richard’s and Jordan’s version of this old blues standard associated with Storyville, the New Orleans brothel district. Indeed, David Evans has pointed out that “Keep A Knockin” was a folk song from a prostitute’s point of view; she is with a john in her stall, so cannot let in the knocker, but urges him to try again tomorrow night (Letter 1).
Here then is another pertinent example of the multiple signification in black performance tradition . These songs repeatedly offer opportunity for performers to bootleg taboos into clean, well-lighted places. Delight in such scatting, in such soiling, was older than the minstrel shows which had conveyed it in America, but in making it new, in perfecting its libidinal excess, Little Richard built out of it both a meteoric career and the super-charged form of rock ‘n’ roll associated with him and with New Orleans.
The considerably tamer version of”Keep A Knockin” by Louis Jordan (Charly Records CRB 1048) inadvertently demonstrates yet another feature of the changes such speeding fifties forms made in their folk lodes. Cliff White’s liner notes to this album claim that there was an earlier recording of the song by James Wiggins in the late 1920s, and David Evans reports that Clarence Williams first copyrighted it, preceding many subsequent recordings of the song across the whole spectrum of taste from jazz through country music (Letter 1). Yet this late reprinting of the Louis Jordan version, originally recorded 29 March 1939–when Little Richard Penniman was still only five years old–credits “Mays / Penniman / Williams” for its composition. Here then is an example of a song slowly rising through the oral tradition but suddenly acquiring a rendition so definitively popular that it monopolizes attention and thus so powerful that it reverses chronology. The power of the electronic media, which Little Richard exploited at their fifties inception, arrogate proprietary rights to anonymous lore. Thus individual performers stamp their private names onto traditional anonymity. But what was lore remains lore, beneath the bogus credits.
What then was Penniman’s own contribution, or, what was it that he and his producer Bumps Blackwell exploited to make him perhaps the greatest rock ‘n’ roll stylist? His talent was promiscuous. Personally unmoored, he easily slurred beats, quavered all around notes, and, most significantly, jumbled extant styles. That was how he appealed so widely across American racial and sexual barriers simultaneously. The ability to jumble multiple worlds seamlessly–white and black, straight and gay. gospel and blues and pop–enriched his music even if only subliminally. And it later dictated his remorse about his career.
His legendary claims about himself include being born in Macon, Georgia, on Christmas 1935, taking his diminutive name eight years later while singing in hometown schools and churches, and being disowned at thirteen. In fact, however, he was born well before Christmas, on 5 December, and well before 1935, in 1933. His was not a second coming, nor was he any longer a teenager in 1955 when he broke into the public eye. Moreover, schools and churches were only two of his less important venues. More telling in his music were the minstrel shows and bawd revues he played for the ten years preceding “Tutti Frutti.”
If Richard left home at thirteen to live with the white club owners. Ann and Johnny Johnson, as Langdon Winner reports, Charles White’s biography confirms neither the move nor even their exist[7]. In any case, at age fourteen or fifteen Penniman left home, whether his mother’s or Miss Ann Johnson’s, and began a career of one-night stands with a series of hucksters, carny circuses, and minstrel shows.
The tides of these shows are themselves an evocative folk exhibit. Following a Doctor Nobilio’s advice, the youth joined Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show (which sold snake oi] for $2 a bottle). Then he quit selling dubious cures to sing blues in B. Brown’s Orchestra[8] which followed migrant laborers across South Florida’s muck farms around Lake Okeechobee. Then came a stint as a transvestite, billed as Princess Lavonne, “the freak of the year,” he said, in a show called Sugarfoot Sam from Alabam. Little Richard described this act as a “minstrel show–the old vaudeville type of show. . . That was the first time I performed in a dress” (Charles White 24). This was clearly a significant period in the development of little Richard’s repertoire, a time when he would go to any length to win an audience. While he was with Sugarfoot Sam he met Esquerita, who taught him some of his piano style and, significantly, a mutual trademark which Esquerita calls their “obligato holler.” (Little Richard later taught Paul McCartney this falsetto OOOOOHH! when the Beatles warmed up audiences in Hamburg for him during the early sixties.) “When I met him,” Esquerita has said about Little Richard, “he was dancin’ with a table and chair in his mouth. . .He used to stand up and dance and balance a chair in his mouth then put the table or. top” (Billy Mil1er 5).
The King Brothers Circus, the Tidy Jolly Steppers, the L. C. Heath Show, and the Broadway Follies were four subsequent traveling shows in which Penniman developed his transvestite act across the South. Nor was he alone. Even before Esquerita taught him piano, Little Richard has said there were mentors in Madames Kilroy and Merle as well as fully pancaked–and very popular–rhythm ‘n’ blues performers like the influential Hilly Wright.[9] This minstrel lore ballasts the gospel fervor and blues inflections in his style. Most importantly, the enforced double-talking patois of the underground taught Little Richard to signify different meaning to different audiences at once.
He learned to be a many-faceted fetish, to play the minstrel Sambo, and to project the artificial figure who survives by being exactly what perceivers want him to be.[10] To this end, Little Richard has stressed his crippled status to many interviewers (Charles White 6, 7). He thus reinforces the connection between his act and its indirect origin in the dance of Jim Crow, the black and crippled hostler said to have inspired T.D. Rice’s impersonation at the beginning of American blackface minstrelsy (Rourke 80). But we do not look to Little Richard for exegesis of his performance. Rather we turn northeast about fifteen miles from Macon to Milledgeville to reread Flannery O’Connor’s “The Artificial Nigger,” which she published the same year her neighbor released “Tutti Frutti.”
When her rustics granted the statue “all the mystery of existence,” they interpreted that mystery in ways that ratified their preconceptions, without any reference to the reality behind or inhering in the image. O’Connor showed therefore something that Little Richard and Bumps Blackwell instinctively used and confirmed. The backgrounds, educations, interests, and proclivities of Blackwell, Penniman, and O’Connor could hardly be more radically different. Their mutual use of the artificial figure’s radically disconnected status therefore demonstrates the ultimate condition of the black image at the end of the American minstrel tradition. It was free-floating and ripe for use.
Like so many other performers of these years, from writers to Supreme Court justices, O’Connor shows how the image of the Negro in post-minstrel America had become so detached from specific anchors that it was a Rorschach blot, on which people flung their fantasies. At some level, Little Richard recognized this seeming vacuum. What’s disturbing in his work is that, like nearly all the black minstrel performers before him, he was not so passive as the watermelon-eating statue in O’Connor’s fiction, but active. He crafted his own image to emphasize his own indignity. He chose to project a self that allowed, even provoked, the audience’s private interpretations.
The singer’s volatile relations with several folk domains all over his region from 1947 to 1955 taught him that the Sambo role could hide and express meaning simultaneously. From housebroken happiness to libidinal eruption, the meanings audiences caught in it were what they needed to catch. Of great interest, however, is that none of his Sambo complexity is recorded prior to “Tutti Frutti” in late 1955. On not one of the four previous recording sessions Little Richard did with RCA and Peacock did he make compact the many parts he was working. He must have thought the Sambo foolery was too rude, dangerous, or threatening to display in the mainstream, despite his nightly strutting of it in minority culture venues from Macon to Miami.
What he was recording, rather than performing, before 1955 was above all safe. For the large public, he contained his burgeoning counterlore behind conventional surfaces. Indeed, despite the hints of an eccentrically plastic voice, his early sessions produced merely the era’s usual jump blues sententious and sometimes mother-ridden lyrics. I love my mother, he confessed in “Thinkin’ ’bout My Mother,”January 1952, like nobody else–“She formed me as she fed me, when I couldn’t even feed myself” (Every Hour with Little Richard [Camden LP 420]).
He recorded those feelings, and his vacillating career later confirmed that he truly meant them, but they were not the whole story and certainly not the moods by which he chiefly lived. The problem was that he did not yet trust the underground emotion and countcrlore that were creating his persona and which, in turn, he would shortly redirect. Either he did not trust them, or he feared them. In any case, he rightly suspected the treachery at the center of the minstrel-Sambo joking. It would gain him access to the mainstream because it seemed harmless, but it was not. In fact, no other American folkway had a more complex history or bore more evocative energy. That a gamut of performers from Amos and Andy through Elvis Presley and Flannery O’Connor to Little Richard all squeeze under the umbrella of the postminstrel Sambo indicates the sheer span of the term’s meaning for America in the fifties. In short, no other native lore had more meaning, certainly not in the year of Earl Warren’s integration enforcement decree.
Therefore, by September 1955, just a few months after the Chief Justice had ordered blacks and whites together with all deliberate speed, Little Richard had gathered up all the lore, stigmata, and accoutrements of the old Tambo and Bones walkarounds. He had supplemented that with elements from the blues and sideshows and medicine spiels, had compressed them into one persona, and had paraded that act–testing it–around all the home regions of the old minstrel troupes. But he had not brought it out of the hole to the mainstream surface, yet.
He surfaced with it only when he met Bumps Blackwell, the conservatory-trained producer whom Specialty Records sent to New Orleans to record him. All the evidence indicates it was Blackwell who had the initial confidence in Little Richard’s relationship to the lore. Moreover, that Blackwell had the shaping instinct is clear because Little Richard never made a successfully complex record without Blackwell’s collaboration. Conversely, Little Richard’s experience was absolutely necessary. The songs written by others which Blackwell brought him successfully confirm his catchy style, are energetic indeed, but remain lorelorn. Having later also worked with Sam Cooke at the crucial moment he moved into the pop world from gospel, Blackwell is often said to have helped assimilationists bleach their blackness. The charge is too simple. He helped them deliver product. Some of it was empty, but he also found ways to push profound aspects of black lore into the white mainstream.
What Blackwell heard Little Richard sing at the Dew Drop Inn during that legendary 13 September lunch, knew enough to process, and tried to reproject was:
Tutti Frutti, good booty
If it don’t fit, don’t force it
You can grease it, make it easy…. (Charles White 55)
Blackwell claims he immediately knew that Little Richard’s song had the energy Specialty Records wanted. So he gave the task of sublimating the words to Dorothy La Bostrie, who wrote new lyrics suggestively heterosexual. Nevertheless, they retained the fey hint in the title, and particularly in “Sue” (who knew just what to do) and “Daisy” (who almost drove him crazy}, for Sue and Daisy were gay argot for transvestites.
What Blackwell heard was similar to what Chuck Berry’s producer, Leonard Chess in Chicago, heard in the protoversion of “Maybellene,” and what Sam Phillips, Presley’s producer in Memphis, heard lurking behind the blues tradition–but unrecorded even there. They believed, too, that it would stun, express, and enrich the consonant empathy of the emerging baby boomers. Little Richard, then, was part of a common, national movement. But if there is more uncommon vitality in his “Tutti-Frutti” and in the rest of his best songs than in Presley’s or Berry’s or even Bo Diddley’s, it is because Little Richard tapped further into more underground lores than the others did.
The difference all the producers could sense and were hoping to document was the difference between the conventional jump blues Little Richard recorded for RCA in the beginning of the fifties, released on LP as Every Hour with Littlt Richard, and the rock sound of”Tutti-Frutti,” at the midpoint of the decade. Beyond the significant reinforcement that Chess, Phillips, and Blackwell gave their singers to be true to their formative lore, the difference was essentially dimensional. The RCA jump blues songs like “Every Hour” and “Thinkin’ ’bout My Mother” were treacle with the thinnest sort of commercial relation to the audience. But ”Tutti-Frutti” and most of Little Richard’s hits tapped into several vital folk groups at once. For instance, the puns on “Sue” and “Daisy” titillated uninitiated audiences simply as references to good opposite-sex partners. At another level in those days of desegregation, Daisy and Sue were racially moot names unlike “Maybellene,” who sounded specifically black in Chuck Berry’s scenario. Was Little Richard probing the delights of miscegenated sex? At a third level, and to other audiences, Daisy and Sue were knowing referents to drag queens in the clubs where Little Richard had presented himself as Princess Lavonne.
In seeming to sanitize “Tutti-Frutti,” so it might penetrate suburban bedrooms, Blackwell, La Bostrie, and Penniman had instead sublimated it with small nodes of latent excitement. Most audiences probably did not suspect any of this–“You don’t know what she do to me,” Little Richard admitted as he sang–but the singer knew, Blackwell knew, and so did the musicians in Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio, where they were recording.
Their performance took on a licentious exuberance commensurate to their release from restraint. Having found a strategy for eluding the censors, public and private, their speed and joy in the song memorialize both their freedom and the trick the song pulls off: ramming its underground reality to the mainstream airwaves. This is the quintessence of the sort of complex Samboing Little Richard enacted.
Although “Tutti-Frutti” is the most famous of Little Richards songs because its mania far surpassed anything white listeners and most black audiences had heard, it actually did not yet beam all the fervid sureness of his next years hits–“Rip It Up,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” and especially “Long Tall Sally.” This first time out, Penniman was still one quarter expecting lightning to strike from on high at any minute. Blackwell reports, for instance, that Little Richard was so embarrassed the first time he sang the original “grease it” lyrics to Dorothy La Bostrie that they could only induce him to perform facing away from her toward the wall. He did not yet have confidence in the sufficiency of his songs. Out of the closet into the corner: such are the unsuspected stages of a man’s growth–and a music’s. Little Richard did not know that the rocking moment he was winching up from the underground would have an an intensity immunizing it against authority–so long as the song lasted, so long as it built its own armature.
What audiences hear in Little Richard’s definitive versions of rock songs is just this capsulated moment between duties and responsibilities. His songs enact a joy of love that is but a moment long
Good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball.
And when you rock ‘n’ roll, I can’t hear no mama call.
{“Good Golly, Miss Molly,” emphasis added)[11]
Little Richard actually stretched his moment out less than two years, until late 1957 when he did hear something like his Mama call. Then he renounced rock for Bible study and preaching. This stage in turn lasted a full seven years–with lapses in Europe to train the Beatles–until his rock comeback in 1964, when he trained Jimi Hendrix. The orthodoxy of the mother church and the joyful release of his rock songs are the opposite poles between which his career always oscillated. He never synthesized nor repressed either side. These poles in Little Richard’s music drove him back and forth, each whipping the other into more extreme expression.
His heyday songs between 1955 and 1957 explore the terrain of liberty enjoyed only in such foreshortened freedoms as shore leave, sexual ecstasy, and carnival revelry. The best of these singles was his second hit with “Long Tall Sally” and ”Slippin’ and Slidin”‘ on opposite sides, released March 1956. “Long Tall Sally” is an incredibly energetic tableau with a curious origin in three lines scrawled on a doily by Enortis Johnson, a scrubbed and plaited innocent of sixteen or seventeen. She had walked to New Orleans from Opaloosa, Mississippi, in order to raise money for her aunt. Her lines were as follows:
Saw Uncle John with Long Tall Sally
They saw Aunt Mary comin’
So they ducked back in the alley.
“Aunt Mary is sick,” she said, “and I’m going to tell her about Uncle John” (Charles White 61). From this unpromisingly poor and vengeful beginning, Bumps Blackwell and Little Richard Penniman fashioned one of rock’s most richly tolerant songs, with understanding for all parties. This fashioning occurred in the studio, with Blackwell pressing for speedy delivery of the line he liked, “they ducked back in the alley,” trying to make it so fast that Pat Boone would never be able to “get his mouth together” to cover it. One can hear this speeding up on the alternate early versions. The first was recorded 29 November 1955 (available on a bootleg, Redita LP-101). It is roughly half the tempo of the great Specialty release recorded 10 February 1956.
If Blackwell was trying to outspeed the competitors–a standard strategy in musical revolution as prominent in bebop’s development as in rock ‘n’ roll–Little Richard was pursuing additional dimensions in the material. He was pumping minstrel and gay lores into it. “Long Tall Sally” is an acting script, a quick treatment of visual actions, lightly directed by the scenic directions for players’ movement and behavior on the flipside. They slip and slide in both songs. They peep and hide. They hope not to be life’s fools anymore. Alternatively, one can understand this record as Crescent City cubism with accounts of adultery seen simultaneously fron multiple perspectives. Taken together, the songs on both sides sympathize with the cheaters, the cheated, and the hardly passive or innocent onlookers–the omnipresent surveillance. Moreover, several layers of identity mask the characters in “Long Tall Sally,” as befits a tale that all the musicians collaboratively assembled. As Blackwell reports, “we pulled stuff from everybody” (Charles White 62).
Traditional black folk figures scamper through this song in scandalous antics. Uncle John is a stock figure in black lore from the “John cycle” of tales about a slave who outwits the authorities. On this level, the song’s Aunt Mary is a good wife, not unlike the Mary Rambo who counsels and shelters Ralph Ellison’s invisible youth in Harlem, inspiring him with her kitchen rendition of “Back Water Blues.” But “Aunt Mary” is also gay argot for a possessive queen. So she operates on at least two levels, apparent nurturer and drag possessor. In any case, Uncle John in this song is ducking out on Aunt Mary’s authority, whatever she represents. It’s Long Tall Sally, “built for speed,” who “got everything that Uncle John need.” But where did Sally come from? Nightmare to every Aunt Mary, Sally is the newly noticed, old, subtraditional freak. Not only long, tall, and speedy, she’s “bald-headed.” As such, she’s figuratively phallic, flashing in and out of alleys in the hand of Uncle John, that trickster. That is attractive enough in the male-bonding context of the studio where all this cropped up mutually among these men, but there is more. In the transvestite shows of Little Richards apprenticeship, baldheadedness was preparation for one’s wigs. Clearly Sally is a freak, the same term the singer had applied to his own incarnation as Princess Lavonne. Long Tall Sally, in addition to her other meanings, is therefore a transvestite fantasy figure slipping and sliding through life’s niches. She delights the nephews and seduces the uncles.A transsexual variant of Sambo, and just like this new rock form which her surfacing embodied at this mid-fifties moment of family breakdown, she represents whatever anyone wishes her to represent. She bears variant and deviant fantasies. She is as new as rock ‘n’ roll. She is as old as the oral tradition, old enough to be a stock runaway tease, as in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ”Pneumonia Blues” from the 1920s, which someone in the recording studio had surely heard:
I went slipping ’round corners, running up alleys too
Watching my woman, trying to see what she goin’ do. (Sackheim 72)
As an observant nephew and our stand-in, Little Richard plays this scandal every way against the middle. He is far removed from the innocence of Enortis Johnson and her simple, single original attitude, which he has dusted over the song’s surface, like sugar on a doughnut. On the one hand, he identifies strongly with John’s escape; if Penniman tells us of John’s fun once, he relates his own fun half a dozen times. On the other hand, hanging over the joy is the song’s first line like a guillotine primed to fall, thus increasing the excitement: “Gonna tell Aunt Mary about Uncle John.” Thus he enacted the censor, the tattletale, as well as the cheater and releaser.
“Long Tall Sally” knotted up in four verses all the contrary tensions of Little Richard’s career. In his life, he tried to relax his contrary impulses by switching from one to the other, from censor to solid sender, mama’s boy to phallic performer. But in “Long Tall Sally,” as in his other strongest rock songs, his success depended on the way Blackwell helped him compound that tension into his rich Sambo persona.
At the climax of this capsulated period, when the rock charts were filled with his hits about the joyous moment, Little Richard delivered “Miss Ann,” in June 1957. This song shows perhaps best of all how deeply he mined lore’s lodes. The first line of its first couplet is a seemingly suggestive tickler in which Richard gasps to Miss Ann, “you’re doin’ somethin’ no one can.” And audiences are free to impose a sexual interpretation on the line, as the performer’s Sambo strategy prompts. However, the song illustrates the use of that strategy to express and repress meaning simultaneously. The minstrel tradition had presented an artificial image of Negroes that seemed detached from significance even while the image smilingly conveyed modes o black culture into nooks of consciousness blacks were segregated from entering straightforwardly. Just so, Little Richard’s Sambo strategy made him seem the very figure of nonsense–to this day critics usually discuss his lyrics as baby-talk meaninglessness, wop bop a loo bop-when in fact he was projecting folk substance. That is, Miss Ann’s doing what no one can was not only exact, in fact it was hoary. It seemed empty, it seemed nonsense, but it was not.
The encyclopedists of children’s lore, Iona and Peter Opie, writing only a few years before Penniman sang his song, reported the use of the same rhyme in a riddle verse from the English “storehouse of popular memory”:
Little Bird of Paradise
She works her work both neat and nice;
She pleases God, she pleases man,
She does the work that no man can.( 82- 83 )
The Opies find its earliest printed instance appearing as a devotional riddle in a manuscript and show it published at regular intervals thereafter right up to the 1939 version they cite.
Both the English riddle and Richard’s sly variant on it imply that the song’s subject is performing promiscuously. But both riddle and song surprise us. The answer to the riddle is that only a bee can busily please the Maker while providing man with both wax and honey. And the Miss Ann of the song is no counterpart to the pleasing, spinning, balling women and or freaks who populate Little Richard’s other rock songs. Here the singer probably refers to the white woman, Ann Johnson, who mothered him as a young teenager (Winner 52). She was serving both God and man by nurturing him when he was young and homeless. A further dimension stems from the common use of “Miss Ann” to refer to a maid’s white female employer, and by extension to all white women.[12] And the song came as close as he dared to talk about God in a rock song, for when he was with Miss Ann, he sang, he was “living in paradise.” Little Richard was once again bootlegging interracial love into the radios and pop charts of the fifties. All this he chocked into the confines of the blues form.
Of Little Richard’s hits, “Miss Ann” most patently follows the AAB stanza pattern of the down-home blues and its middle two stanzas are straight from the stanza storehouse. Stanza two of “Miss Ann” is for instance Blind Lemon Jefferson’s fifth stanza in his first blues, “Got the Blues,” recorded probably in March 1926.[13] Both singers like to hear their lovers–“good gal” (Jefferson) and “Miss Ann” (Little Richard)–call their name, as they say in the A lines. Their B lines are virtually identical. First Jefferson sang “She don’t call so loud, but she call so nice and plain.” Then Little Richard substituted “can’t” for Jefferson’s “don’t” and “sweet” for Jefferson’s “nice.” Whether or not Little Richard had heard Jefferson’s recorded variant, he certainly was drawing on blues tradition, just as he pulled the riddle in stanza one from an ancient English oral tradition.
The poles of his career remain those of black folklore. Little Richard Penniman is a perfect example of folklorist Roger Abrahams’s figure, “the man of words.” As preacher and singer, Little Richard has used language to mediate visions unavailable in the sanctuary of orthodox reality or even the opportunistic media, except at ripe moments such as the mid-fifties. His songs were literally good booty. They were the repressed stuff of underground lore, which he made charismatic for public consumption. In Little Richard those lores found a vehicle prepared to bear their chocked energy. He transferred that energy from its underground holes, putting it in capsulated form on vinyl, where it now resides as a public storehouse, which the whole culture continues to use and occasionally pauses to decipher.
Notes
[Ed. Note: Notes are numbered as they are Deliberate Speed, where Lhamon’s writing on Little Richard is folded into a longer chapter in that book.]
6 “First I was Prof. Eskew Reeder, then at Capitol I figured one name would add to the mystique. ‘Is he Spanish?'”
7 White says that he left the Johnsons out of the biography becasue Penniman asked him to, saying they were “not important in his life” (phone conversation 11 July 1989)
8 David Evans suggests that “B. Brown” may be Buster Brown, who came from near Macon and who recorded some blues hits in the 1950s. Brown played harmonica” (Letter 1)
9 See Billy Wright, The Prince of the Blues (Route 66 KIX 13). This part of Little Richard’s education only surfaced when Penniman cooperated with biographer White, thirty-five years after the fact.
10 In addition to Constance Rourke’s chapter on minstrelsy, “That Long-Tail’d Blue,” for the minstrel tradition as it devolved into the twentieth century see Paul Olivers’s chapter three, also called “The Lonb-tailed blue:Songsters of the Road Shows” in Songsters and Saints.
11 “Good Golly, Miss Molly” written by Robert Blackwell and John Marascalco, courtesy of Jondora Music.
12 David Evans, letter to author, 1.
13 David Evans (77-78) and Jeff Todd Titon (114-119)