Here's Little Richard

Sound DNA

• Rock
• Rock & Roll

• raw
• frenzied
• urban

About

Vividly described as “rock ’n’ roll’s stem cells” in <i>1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die</i>, Little Richard’s untempered, exuberant debut contains the musical DNA for far more than just the shape of rock to come. The 1957 album contained a number of songs that were already hits, like “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally,” and others that would soon climb the charts, like “Jenny, Jenny” and “True, Fine Mama”—the deluxe edition, released in 2017, includes 22 alternate takes from the original sessions. What you won’t find is much pathos or balladry: Even the bluesiest and saddest entries are still electric, with juke-joint-ready tempi and a vocal dynamism that never lets up. <i>Here’s Little Richard</i> arrived just under two years after “Tutti Frutti” got popular music all shook up. Little Richard’s often imitated, never duplicated performance of a song—apocryphally much more profane prior to its recording, though it was plenty suggestive in its final version—became a jukebox sensation, one of the biggest of rock music’s Big Bangs captured in about 15 minutes of studio time. Specifically, Little Richard’s piano style—even, rather than swung, eighth notes—and percussive singing created a template for thousands of songs to come. “Long Tall Sally” followed, with its breakneck tempo (it clocks in at a brisk two minutes and seven seconds) intended as a direct rebuke of the singer’s legions of white imitators—specifically Pat Boone, though Elvis covered both songs as well. No one could match Little Richard’s vivacity, his ability to channel the wildest, sweatiest, most fun night you’ve ever had, right through the microphone and into your veins—on the classic “Rip It Up,” which spawned a million songs about having money to burn on a Saturday night, on “Jenny, Jenny,” with the singer at his most charming, on the sock-hop mainstay “Ready Teddy,” he’s unstoppable, a force barely contained by the New Orleans studios where he was screaming and crooning in turn. Bob Dylan and everyone else were hanging on his every word: “He took speaking in tongues right out of the sweaty canvas tent and put it on the mainstream radio,” as Dylan put it. “He even screamed like a holy preacher—which is what he was.”

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits