Little Richard: 20 Essential Songs

Usually, Little Richard needed no support: He provided enough vocal power for an entire quartet. “The Girl Can’t Help It” is the exception that proves the rule. On this title tune for the 1956 Jayne Mansfield movie, Richard indulges in a call-and-response with anonymous support, shouts that only ratchet up the madness of a two-and-a-half-minute-long catcall. The beat swings – the roll tips a hat to the fact that it was originally slotted for Fats Domino – but Richard pushes his vocals into the red and it’s this full-throated wail that lends the record the air of unbridled sexuality.

There’s an implied violence lying within the title of “Rip It Up,” Little Richard’s second R&B chart-topper. Despite this promise of mayhem, “Rip It Up” actually contains a little bit of breathing room. Richard doesn’t scream his vocal – the opposite, actually; he floats his falsetto on the chorus – and the band swings with ease, turning this into a single that actually grooves. His peers took a different tack – Elvis Presley’s version rocks harder, the Everly Brothers turned it into a hop – but Little Richard’s swing shows his facility with jump blues, an endearing trait for a rocker who always seemed to operate at full tilt.

Little Richard’s impact on rock & roll is so unmistakable that his role in the development of soul is sometimes overlooked. “He has done so much for our music,” Sam Cooke said in 1962, and Otis Redding (as we’ve seen) was every bit as much of a fan. Comparing this performance to the versions of “Send Me Some Lovin'” that both soul greats would cut, in their own distinctive styles, shows the different directions that Little Richard’s influence could lead. You can hear traces of his caressed consonants and curlicued vowels in Cooke’s velvety smooth delivery, and when he notches up the intensity it’s like he’s sketching a blueprint for the style of soulfully raggedy pleading that Redding would perfect.

Not to slight the dynamic interplay between Lee Allen’s tenor sax and Alvin “Red” Tyler’s baritone, but “Jenny Jenny” is a less a song than a miracle of modern American engineering, a hyperkinetic streamlined delivery system for the most precious of all postwar commodities: Little Richard woos. That sound traveled across the ocean to Liverpool. “I could do Little Richard’s voice, which is a wild, hoarse, screaming thing, it’s like an out-of-body experience,” said Paul McCartney, who was indeed one of the man’s best imitators. “You have to leave your current sensibilities and go about a foot above your head to sing it.”

“Lucille” is pure madness – the drums pound and the horns wail, driving their refrain into submission. In the hands of a guitarist, this brassy blare would be called a riff, and that’s precisely what resulted when the song was covered over and over again, by the likes of such heavy rockers as Status Quo, AC/DC and the Sonics, but it sounded plenty heavy in the hands of the Beatles, too. Nothing topped the original, though, and that’s all due to Little Richard, who cries like a man possessed with carnal yearning that, no matter how much he begs and pleads, he knows will never be fulfilled.

John Bonham ripped off Earl Palmer’s intro to “Keep A-Knockin'” for Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” – a tacit acknowledgement that this 1957 single is rock & roll. Purportedly an answer song to Smiley Lewis’ laid-back 1955 shuffle “I Hear You Knockin’,” “Keep A-Knockin'” is nothing but noise. After Palmer backs into a hard-driving shuffle, Little Richard yells for his guest to just go away, and after that, it’s a competition between Richard and his saxophonist to make the loudest racket. Rock & roll never sounded louder, better or more pure than this.

Illustrating T.S. Eliot’s maxim that mature artists steal rather than imitate, Little Richard lifted a catchphrase that a Southern DJ named Jimmy Pennick used to exclaim for his song title, and nicked Ike Turner’s piano intro from Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88.” “I always liked that record,” Richard recalled, “and I used to use the riff in my act, so when we were looking for a lead-in to ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly,’ I did that and it fit.” But of course, “Good Golly, Miss Molly” never sounds like anything less than Little Richard, his voice pushing dangerously into the red on each line, and each time he exclaims the title you’d think he just thought it up on the spot.

“Elvis may be the King of Rock & Roll,” Little Richard once declared. “But I am the Queen.” He could be cagey or frank about his sexuality, sometimes in the same breath – “I believe I was the founder of gay,” he once told John Waters, while admitting nothing. But from his towering, sculpted pompadour and fluttering mascara-enhanced peepers to his orgasmic whoops and un-macho physical exuberance, Richard was an unmistakable pioneer of rock & roll androgyny, and “Ooh! My Soul” may be his most flirtatiously gender-bent frolic on wax. He barrels through the verses like a hot-dogging star running-back, then cutely squeals the title like a coquettish cheerleader. “Ooh! My Soul” is the sound of Little Richard seducing himself, its post-climactic giggle confirming that he finds his own charms irresistible.

Little Richard cut two versions of the Lieber/Stoller classic in 1955. The conventional first take tracks closely to the original Little Willie Littlefield recording, but on the latter he stamps the song with his personality, breaking into a shout of “hey hey hey hey” that’s echoed by an enthusiastic chorus. Before the second take was released in 1959 (around the same time Wilbert Harrison scored a hit with his own coolly strolling version), Richard would record a song called “Hey Hey Hey Hey,” about “goin’ back to Birmingham,” with the same introductory seven-note guitar lick and drum roll as “Kansas City.” And that’s how Little Richard not only made “Kansas City” into a Little Richard song, but collected royalties from the Beatles when they covered it.

In 1956, Fats Domino started to have hits with revivals of old popular tunes, taking the 1940 song “Blueberry Hill” toward the top of the R&B and pop charts. Little Richard followed his lead in 1959, reaching back 50 years for the Tin Pin Alley chestnut “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” It’s a limber, nimble thing, goosed along by honking horns and propelled by an insistent shuffle. As fun as the rhythm is, the single is all about the singing. Grinning and mincing, Richard walks right along the edge of camp: He’s not sending up a beloved chestnut, but he is giving it a sly wink.

“Bama Lama Bama Loo” is the first of Little Richard’s attempts to get back to where he once belonged. After a spell hopping between labels in the early Sixties, he returned to Specialty in 1964 and released this bit of raving nonsense. With its gibberish and screams, the song was clearly intended to evoke “Tutti Frutti” and it misses that mark because he’s a little bit older and a little less wild. Canny guy that he is, Richard turns aging into an asset, letting the rhythms slow slightly so they settle into a thick shuffle that grooves.

It didn’t cross over to the pop charts, but “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got but It’s Got Me” became Little Richard’s last major R&B hit in late 1965 – and fittingly, the song’s sensibilities belong to Sixties soul, not Fifties R&B. A church-y slow-burner so languid it was split in two for its single release, “I Don’t Know” finds Little Richard tackling the deep soul emanating from such Southern outposts as Stax/Volt. Not surprisingly, this earthy milieu brings out the best in Richard. He connects to his gospel roots in a way he never quite did on his seminal Specialty sides, proving that he could testify with powerful passion.

Little Richard was pretty much exiled during his mid-Sixties stint at Okeh, attempting to navigate the shifting tides of soul. He eked out a meager hit with “Poor Dog (Who Can’t Wag His Own Tail)” but much better was the electrifying “I Need Love.” It went nowhere, failing even to crack the R&B charts, but the seven-inch finds Richard riding an uptempo Southern soul groove in the vein of Otis Redding. He makes this splashy sound his own, giving it a snazzy showbiz spin as he modulates his delivery, building to choruses so explosive they’re cathartic.

Like many old-time rock & rollers, Little Richard was given an opportunity to connect to a new audience at the turn of the Seventies. When he signed to Reprise in 1970, he declined to revive the spirit of his old hits – a temptation Fats Domino did not resist – and dove headfirst into the thick, funky mess of the era. Deeply Southern in its groove, “Freedom Blues” is part civil-rights rallying cry, part paisley-colored sign of the times. What’s striking isn’t simply Richard’s impassioned performance, but how he marshaled counterculture signifiers into a single that still packs a wallop.