The story of Little Richard

A loud boy from Macon

Richard Wayne Penniman was born in Macon, Georgia, on the fifth of December 1932, the third of twelve children. His father, Charles, known as Bud, was a brick mason and a church deacon who also sold bootleg moonshine and later ran a nightclub called the Tip In Inn. His mother, Leva Mae, belonged to Macon's New Hope Baptist Church. His first name was meant to be Ricardo, but a mistake turned it into Richard. The family lived in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood. He was small and skinny, so his family called him Lil' Richard. A complication at birth may have left one of his legs shorter than the other, which gave him an unusual walk, and other children teased him for seeming girlish.[1] [2] [3]

Music came first through the church. Two of his uncles and his grandfather were preachers, and the family passed through Baptist, Methodist and Pentecostal congregations. Richard loved the Pentecostal churches best, for the dancing, the shouting and the live music. His voice was so loud, and he kept pushing the key so high, that he was once stopped from singing in church, and people called him War Hawk. At home he banged out rhythms on the steps, on tin cans and on pots and pans until the neighbors complained. When he was about ten he went around telling people he was a faith healer, singing gospel to the sick and touching them. Some said they felt better, and a few even paid him.[1] [2]

His heroes were gospel singers. There was Brother Joe May, a thunderous singing evangelist who made Richard want to become a preacher, and Mahalia Jackson, Marion Williams and the Clara Ward Singers. His favorite of all was Sister Rosetta Tharpe. At Hudson High School he was a weak student, but he learned alto saxophone in the marching band. He also got a part time job selling Coca Cola at the Macon City Auditorium, where he watched stars like Cab Calloway. In October 1947 Tharpe herself heard the fourteen year old singing her songs before a show there. She invited him on stage to open for her, and afterwards she paid him. It was his first time performing outside a church, and it convinced him to become a professional.[1] [2]

Home life was harder. His family treated rhythm and blues as the devil's music, and his father was harsh with a son who seemed different. Richard later said his father beat him when he caught him wearing his mother's makeup and clothes. As a teenager he left home, or was thrown out, and accounts give his age as thirteen or fifteen. In a 1985 television interview he said his father had wanted seven sons and felt Richard had spoiled that because he was gay. A white couple named Johnson, who ran a club in Macon, took him in, and he began performing in their club. He and his father never fully repaired the relationship.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Medicine shows, murder and the dish sink

Around 1949 Richard hit the road with traveling medicine shows, where acts entertained crowds between sales pitches for miracle cures. One showman, Doctor Nubillo, wore a turban and cape and exhibited what he claimed was the dried body of a devil's child. He told Richard he would be famous, and he inspired the turbans and capes Richard later wore. On another show Richard learned his first secular song, Louis Jordan's Caldonia. He also performed in drag under the name Princess LaVonne. In 1950 he joined Buster Brown's Orchestra, and the story goes that Brown was the one who billed him as Little Richard. He worked the minstrel and vaudeville circuit in and out of drag.[1] [2]

Settling in Atlanta, he went to the Royal Peacock and other clubs, and he was dazzled by the blues shouter Billy Wright, a flashy, openly gay performer. Wright taught him showmanship, and Richard copied his tall pompadour, his loud clothes and even his brand of pancake makeup. Wright introduced him to the disc jockey Zenas Sears, who recorded him at his radio station. That led to a contract with RCA Victor in 1951. Richard cut eight sides, and a blues ballad called Every Hour became a hit in Georgia. His father proudly put it on the jukebox at his club. None of the records charted nationally, though, and in February 1952 Richard left the label.[1] [2] [3]

Then came tragedy. In 1952, when Richard was nineteen, his father was shot dead outside a bar in Macon. He was about forty. Years later Richard told Rolling Stone that the man who killed his father had been his own best friend. With eleven brothers and sisters and a widowed mother, Richard became a breadwinner. He signed with Don Robey's Peacock Records in Houston in 1953 and formed a band called the Tempo Toppers, but again nothing charted. When he complained to Robey about money, the two came to blows, and Robey knocked him out. By 1954 he was back in Macon, broke and washing dishes at the Greyhound bus station.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Two things in Macon changed his music. The first was a pianist from South Carolina named Esquerita, a gospel trained wild man with heavy makeup and a towering pompadour. Richard said Esquerita influenced him deeply and showed him things on the piano. The second was a new, harder band he called the Upsetters, with the teenage drummer Charles Connor from New Orleans and the saxophonist Wilbert Smith. At first they had no bass player, so Connor pounded his bass drum extra hard to fake one. Richard's manager was the Macon promoter Clint Brantley. Around this time Richard met a young group called the Famous Flames and pointed their singer, James Brown, toward Brantley as well.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The session that changed everything

On the advice of the singer Lloyd Price, Richard mailed a demo tape to Price's label, Specialty Records in Los Angeles, in February 1955. Months went by. Then the owner, Art Rupe, who wanted an answer to Ray Charles, called back. He lent Richard the money to buy his way out of the Peacock contract and paired him with the producer Robert Blackwell, known as Bumps. In September 1955 Blackwell took him to Cosimo Matassa's small J and M studio in New Orleans, with some of the city's best session men, many of them from Fats Domino's records. The drummer was Earl Palmer and the tenor saxophonist was Lee Allen. The first hours went nowhere. Richard sounded polite, and Blackwell was disappointed.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

During a break the two went to the Dew Drop Inn, a nightclub where Richard had played before. There he jumped on the piano and tore into a song he had been singing in clubs for a while, a raunchy number called Tutti Frutti. Blackwell knew at once it was a hit, but the words were far too dirty for radio. So he called in a local songwriter, Dorothy LaBostrie, to write clean lyrics. She reportedly did it in about fifteen minutes. There was no time to teach the song to a session pianist, so Richard played it himself. On the fourteenth of September 1955 they cut it in three takes, taking roughly a quarter of an hour.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tutti Frutti came out that autumn and exploded. It opens with Richard alone, shouting a burst of nonsense syllables that he said was based on a drum pattern, and then the band crashes in. It reached number two on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart early in 1956 and crossed over to the pop chart, eventually selling a million copies. Musicologists point out that Richard's piano pounded out even eighth notes instead of the swinging shuffle of older rhythm and blues, and that pulse became the basis of the rock beat. Decades later, a panel of musicians in Mojo magazine voted it number one among the records that changed the world, calling it the sound of rock and roll being born.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was a bitter side. White radio in 1956 preferred safer versions, and the clean cut singer Pat Boone rushed out his own gentle Tutti Frutti. It climbed the pop chart higher than Richard's original. Richard later said the industry used white singers to keep him out of white homes, joking that kids hid his record in the drawer and kept Boone's on the dresser. He and Blackwell decided to fight back with a follow up so fast that Boone could not copy it. The business side was unkind too. Richard later said he sold the publishing on Tutti Frutti for fifty dollars, leaving him about half a cent a record.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Eighteen months of thunder

The answer to Pat Boone was Long Tall Sally, recorded in New Orleans on the seventh of February 1956. Its working title was The Thing. Blackwell said the idea came from a scrap of lyrics a young girl had written, and a local songwriter named Enotris Johnson shares the credit. Richard sang it at breakneck speed. It went to number one on the rhythm and blues chart for six weeks, reached number six on the pop chart, and became the best selling single Specialty ever released. It was followed that year by Slippin' and Slidin', Rip It Up, Ready Teddy and The Girl Can't Help It. Rip It Up gave him another rhythm and blues number one.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The hits kept coming in 1957. Lucille, built on a heavy, chugging rhythm Richard said came from a train his band was riding, topped the rhythm and blues chart. Jenny, Jenny and Keep A Knockin' both reached the pop top ten, and Keep A Knockin' opened with a drum pattern by Charles Connor that John Bonham later borrowed for Led Zeppelin. In March 1957 Specialty released his first album, Here's Little Richard, the label's first long player. It reached number thirteen on the Billboard album chart, his highest ever, and in 2025 the magazine Uncut named it the greatest album of the 1950s. Then came Good Golly, Miss Molly, released in January 1958.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

On stage Richard was something nobody had seen. With a band now led by saxophonist Grady Gaines, he stood at the piano, lifted his leg onto the keys, climbed on top of it, ran off and back on, and threw souvenirs into the crowd. He wore capes and suits covered in colored stones and sequins, plus makeup and a towering pompadour. He later said he played up the flamboyance so white men would not think he was after white girls. Offstage he was strict. In those years he did not drink, smoke or take drugs, and he fined band members who did. Alan Freed put him in films like Don't Knock the Rock, and he sang the title song in the Jayne Mansfield comedy The Girl Can't Help It.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His shows also chipped away at segregation. In the South, halls kept Black and white fans apart, often with one group upstairs on the balcony. Richard later remembered how young white fans would jump down from the balcony to dance on the main floor, and how the crowd ended up mixed. His arranger H. B. Barnum said Richard opened the door and brought the races together. Segregationist groups warned on television that rock and roll brought the races together, and they meant it as a threat. Richard claimed a 1956 show at Baltimore's Royal Theatre was the first time women threw their underwear on stage at a performer. Fans kept trying to leap from the balcony to reach him.[1] [2] [3]

Money and fame arrived together. Richard moved to Los Angeles, bought a large house in a formerly white neighborhood next door to the boxer Joe Louis, and brought his mother west. Around 1956 he began a relationship with Audrey Robinson, a sixteen year old college student from Savannah, who later became known as the stripper and socialite Lee Angel. By his own later account, his private life already involved voyeurism and group sex, which Robinson denied. In 1955 he had been arrested in Macon for voyeurism, spent three days in jail and was briefly banned from performing in the city. The tension between that life and his religious upbringing was about to snap.[1] [2]

Walking away from rock and roll

In October 1957 Richard toured Australia with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. According to his own story, on a flight between Melbourne and Sydney he looked out and saw the engines glowing red hot, and he felt angels were holding the plane up. Then, at the end of a show in Sydney, he saw a bright red fireball streak across the sky. He was later told it was probably the Soviet satellite Sputnik, but he took it as a sign from God. In the middle of the tour he stunned everyone by announcing he was quitting rock and roll for the ministry, and he flew home ten days early.[1] [2] [3]

After a farewell show at the Apollo Theater and a last Specialty session, Richard enrolled at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, a Seventh day Adventist school, to study theology. He became a vegetarian and toured as a preacher with the Little Richard Evangelistic Team, alongside the saxophonist turned Adventist Joe Lutcher. Specialty kept releasing songs he had already recorded, including Good Golly, Miss Molly, which reached the pop top ten, and his version of Kansas City. Richard later admitted that money played a part in his exit. He had discovered that Specialty had cut his royalty rate, and he finally gave up his royalties to get out of the contract.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In October 1957 Richard met Ernestine Harvin, a secretary from Washington, at an evangelical rally, and they married in July 1959. Some accounts give her name as Ernestine Campbell. They adopted a baby boy, Danny Jones, the son of a late church associate. Danny stayed close to his father for life and often worked as his bodyguard. The marriage did not last. They divorced in the early 1960s, and sources disagree on the exact year. Ernestine said the pressure of his fame wrecked it. Richard said it was his neglect and his sexuality. His religious period had cracks from the start. He left Oakwood after exposing himself to a male student, and in 1962 he was arrested in Long Beach, California, for spying on men in a bus station restroom.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Richard kept singing, but now it was gospel. He cut records for End Records, and then for Mercury, where his old producer Bumps Blackwell was working. In 1962 Mercury released King of the Gospel Singers, produced by a young Quincy Jones, who later said Richard's voice impressed him more than any singer he had worked with. His childhood hero Mahalia Jackson wrote the liner notes, saying he sang gospel the way it should be sung. A gospel single, He Got What He Wanted, became a hit in Britain. It was a hint that audiences across the Atlantic had not forgotten him at all.[1] [2] [3]

The Beatles, the Stones and Jimi

In 1962 the British promoter Don Arden persuaded Richard to tour Europe, telling him his records were selling well there. Richard thought it was a gospel tour and brought a teenage organist named Billy Preston. On the first night he sang only gospel and was booed. The following night he watched Sam Cooke, on the same bill, win the crowd over, and his competitive streak woke up. He and Preston warmed up in total darkness, and he tore into Long Tall Sally. The audience went berserk. At the Granada in Mansfield, the show ended early when fans rushed the stage. Rock and roll's prodigal son was back, though he would later call it backsliding.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Beatles manager Brian Epstein asked Arden to let his young band open for Richard, and in October 1962 the Beatles supported him at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton. In November they shared the bill again at the Star Club in Hamburg, where Billy Preston first met them. Richard coached them on his songs and later said he taught Paul McCartney his trademark high whoop, a sound he himself had taken from the gospel singer Marion Williams. John Lennon remembered the band sitting backstage listening to Richard read from the Bible. The Beatles played Long Tall Sally all the way to their final paid concert in 1966, and the tape of that show ran out during it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In the autumn of 1963 Richard was called in to rescue a British package tour that was selling poorly. It featured the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley and a new band called the Rolling Stones. His presence saved the tour. Mick Jagger watched his moves every night and later called him the biggest inspiration of his early teens. Richard then got his own Granada television special, The Little Richard Spectacular. It drew so much fan mail, about sixty thousand letters, that it was broadcast twice more. In 1964 he openly returned to rock and roll with Bama Lama Bama Loo, a British top twenty hit. In America, though, it barely charted.[1] [2] [3]

By late 1964 a young guitarist called Jimi Hendrix had joined Richard's touring band, the Upsetters. Hendrix played on the 1965 soul single I Don't Know What You Got, But It's Got Me, and his first known television appearance, on a Nashville show called Night Train, was with Richard's band. But the two clashed. Richard objected to Hendrix turning up late, to his clothes and to his stage tricks, and Hendrix complained about money. In July 1965 Richard's brother Robert fired him, while Hendrix wrote home that he had quit because he had not been paid for five and a half weeks and was owed a thousand dollars. Hendrix himself said in 1966 that he wanted to do with his guitar what Richard did with his voice.[1] [2] [3]

For the rest of the sixties Richard bounced between labels. His old Specialty friend Larry Williams produced two albums for him at Okeh, including a live record that put him back on the album chart. Richard later called Williams the worst producer in the world. He felt labels kept pushing him toward a Motown sound and did not respect him. In America he was often stuck on the Chitlin Circuit of small Black clubs, while in England and France he still filled big halls. He also said some Black disc jockeys shunned him because he insisted on playing to integrated crowds. Williams, now acting as his manager, told him to focus on live shows, and that advice paid off.[1] [2]

Revival, cocaine and a gun

As the sixties ended, Richard became a festival sensation. Larry Williams booked him into Las Vegas, and inspired partly by Hendrix, he went even wilder, with mirrored vests and androgynous makeup. At the Atlantic City Pop Festival in 1969 he was said to steal the show from Janis Joplin, and he did the same at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, where John Lennon was the headliner. Talk shows with Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett followed. In 1970 Reprise Records signed him and released The Rill Thing, whose single Freedom Blues was his biggest hit in years. In May 1970 he was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.[1] [2] [3]

None of the other Reprise singles did much, except a swampy song called Greenwood, Mississippi, written by the guitarist Travis Wammack, who later led Richard's band. Richard guested on records by Delaney and Bonnie, Joe Walsh and Canned Heat. In August 1972 he co headlined the London Rock and Roll Show at Wembley Stadium with Chuck Berry. He announced himself as the king of rock and roll, arrived with only five musicians and struggled with poor lighting and bad microphones. When he climbed on his piano and stopped singing, parts of the crowd booed. He also appeared in the concert film Let the Good Times Roll, which captured a sweaty, fierce performance.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the sequins, Richard's life was falling apart. The man who had once fined his band for drinking was now drinking heavily and smoking marijuana. By 1972 he was addicted to cocaine, and he later joked that they should have called him Lil Cocaine. By 1975 he was also using heroin and the drug known as angel dust. He said the habits cost him up to a thousand dollars a day and that he lost his reasoning. In 1975 he still toured the world and scored a small hit with Bachman Turner Overdrive, and in 1976 he recut eighteen of his hits for the K Tel label. But he was exhausted.[1] [2] [3]

In 1977 everything came to a head. Larry Williams, his old friend and also an addict, turned up with a gun and threatened to kill him over a drug debt. Richard called it the most frightening moment of his life, though he also said he hoped Williams loved him. That same year his brother Tony died of a heart attack, a nephew he loved like a son was accidentally shot, and two close friends were murdered. Richard gave up drugs, alcohol and rock and roll all at once and went back to preaching, selling a Black Heritage Bible and releasing a gospel album, God's Beautiful City, in 1979. Williams himself was found dead of a gunshot wound in 1980.[1] [2] [3]

Preacher, actor, legend

In 1984 Richard sued Specialty Records, Art Rupe and the publishers of his old songs for 112 million dollars in unpaid royalties. The case was settled out of court in 1986. That same year, 1984, the writer Charles White published an authorized biography, The Life and Times of Little Richard, full of startlingly frank stories about sex and drugs. It put him back in the spotlight. His mother, Leva Mae, died in 1984 after an illness, and he had promised her that he would stay a Christian. From then on he tried to reconcile both sides of himself, saying rock and roll could be used for good or evil depending on its message.[1] [2] [3]

In October 1985 Richard had just finished filming a guest spot on Miami Vice when he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his sports car into a telephone pole in West Hollywood. He broke his right leg and several ribs and suffered head and facial injuries. The recovery took months, and he missed the first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in January 1986, where he was one of the ten original inductees. He sent a recorded message instead. Early in 1986 he was back on screen, playing a neighbor in the hit comedy Down and Out in Beverly Hills and singing Great Gosh A'Mighty, a song he wrote with his old organist Billy Preston.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Great Gosh A'Mighty reached number forty two on the Billboard Hot 100, and it led to the 1986 album Lifetime Friend on Warner Brothers. Richard called its songs messages in rhythm, and it included a gospel rap. Mostly, though, he became a beloved television character, praised for his comic timing. At the 1988 Grammys, presenting the award for best new artist, he threw away the script and declared himself the architect and the originator of rock and roll. Five years later, in 1993, the Grammys finally gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award. That same year he played at President Clinton's inauguration.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The nineties made him a family entertainer. He recorded The Itsy Bitsy Spider for a children's AIDS charity album, which led to a Disney children's record, Shake It All About, in 1992, where Keep A Knockin' became a string of knock knock jokes with kids. In 1994 he sang the theme for the cartoon The Magic School Bus and performed a rewritten Lucille for a Muppet on Sesame Street. He opened WrestleMania Ten at Madison Square Garden with America the Beautiful, and the wrestler Johnny B. Badd was modeled on him. Ordained as a minister in 1970, he officiated at celebrity weddings, including that of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last shows and the long goodbye

In 2000 NBC aired a television film, Little Richard, with the actor Leon in the title role, based on the Charles White book. Richard kept touring hard through the 2000s, mostly in America and Europe. In 2006 he released a duet of the Beatles' I Saw Her Standing There with Jerry Lee Lewis, and at the 2008 Grammys he, Lewis and John Fogerty played together. Fogerty remembered being stunned that at seventy five Richard could still hit those high falsettos. Richard also preached at the funerals of friends like Wilson Pickett and Ike Turner, and in 2006 he married twenty couples at once in a single ceremony.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

His body began to fail. Around 2007 sciatica in his left leg forced him onto crutches, and in November 2009 he had his left hip replaced. After that he could only perform sitting at the piano. At a June 2012 show at the Howard Theatre in Washington, he was carried on stage and told the crowd he was in pain twenty four hours a day because broken bone from the surgery was still inside him. He still played for about an hour and a half, and Rolling Stone called him full of fire. He had Christian books handed out to the audience and warned them the world was close to ending.[1] [2] [3]

In late September 2013, at a Recording Academy event in Atlanta with CeeLo Green, Richard revealed he had just had a heart attack. He said he had asked his son to make the room ice cold and had taken a baby aspirin, and his doctor told him that saved his life. Around the same time he told Rolling Stone he was done performing, and he played his final concert in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 2014. He lived quietly in a hotel penthouse in Nashville. In 2016 Bootsy Collins asked fans to pray for him, and rumors spread that he was dying. Richard answered through his lawyer that he was not, and that he was still singing.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2017, appearing clean shaven and without makeup in a wheelchair on the Christian network Three Angels Broadcasting, Richard once again condemned gay and transgender people as living against God's plan. It was the latest turn in a lifetime of contradictions about his own sexuality, which he had described at different times as gay, as omnisexual and as something he had been saved from. His last public appearance came in October 2019, when he received the Distinguished Artist Award at the Tennessee Governor's Arts Awards in Nashville. On the ninth of May 2020, after two months of illness, Little Richard died of bone cancer at his family home in Tullahoma, Tennessee. He was eighty seven.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The architect

His brother, sister and son Danny were with him when he died. Tributes poured in. Bob Dylan wrote that Richard had been his shining star and guiding light as a boy, and Dylan's high school yearbook had listed his ambition as joining Little Richard. Paul McCartney said he owed a lot of what he did to Richard, who liked to say he had taught Paul everything he knew. Mick Jagger called him the biggest inspiration of his early teens, and Elton John, who had opened for him in 1966 in the band Bluesology, called him his biggest influence. Little Richard was buried at the Oakwood University cemetery in Huntsville, Alabama, the school where he had studied to be a minister.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The list of musicians he shaped is enormous. Otis Redding, another Macon boy, sang with the Upsetters and said he entered music because of Richard. James Brown credited Richard's band with putting the funk into the rhythm. Jimi Hendrix learned showmanship in his band. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Led Zeppelin all covered or borrowed from him. David Bowie said hearing Tutti Frutti was like hearing God. Prince's look and sound owed him a clear debt, and Richard liked to point out that he was wearing purple first. Rolling Stone ranked him eighth among the greatest artists of all time.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

He was also a pioneer as a person. He was a Black, openly flamboyant, makeup wearing man who became a star in the segregated South of the 1950s, and his shows brought Black and white teenagers onto the same dance floor. Lemmy of Motorhead once marveled at how hard it must have been to be gay, Black and singing in the South. In 2023 the documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything, directed by Lisa Cortés, explored his contradictions and his influence on artists from Prince to Lil Nas X, and it earned a Grammy nomination. As of 2026, many historians call him what he always called himself, the architect of rock and roll.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Little Richard

Little Richard and Bumps Blackwell. Robert Blackwell, called Bumps, produced Tutti Frutti after hearing Richard's dirty version at the Dew Drop Inn, and he co wrote and produced Long Tall Sally, Rip It Up, Ready Teddy and Good Golly, Miss Molly. He later produced Richard's gospel sides at Mercury, became his manager, and stayed with him into the seventies. In 1985, the year he died, he released a single demanding that the industry pay Little Richard.[1] [2] [3]

Little Richard and Art Rupe. Art Rupe, founder of Specialty Records, signed Richard in 1955 and bought out his Peacock contract. Rupe built the label on his hits, but the contract left Specialty owning the music. Richard said he sold the Tutti Frutti publishing for fifty dollars, gave up royalties to leave in 1959, and sued Rupe for 112 million dollars in 1984. Rupe lived to be one hundred and four.[1] [2]

Little Richard and Esquerita. Eskew Reeder, known as Esquerita, was a gospel trained pianist from South Carolina with heavy makeup and a sky high pompadour. Richard met him in Macon and said Esquerita influenced him and taught him piano, while also claiming he inspired Esquerita. Reeder later played on Richard's records and co wrote Freedom Blues. He died of AIDS complications in 1986.[1]

Little Richard and Billy Wright. The Atlanta blues singer Billy Wright, an openly gay showman, was Richard's first real role model as an entertainer. Wright taught him stagecraft, the tall pompadour and pancake makeup, and connected him to the disc jockey who led to his first record deal. Even late in life Richard admitted Wright was doing it first, though he insisted he started rock and roll himself.[1] [2] [3]

Little Richard and Ernestine Harvin. Richard met Ernestine at an evangelical rally in October 1957, during his first religious turn, and married her in July 1959. Some sources name her Ernestine Campbell. They adopted a son, Danny. They divorced in the early 1960s. She blamed the pressures of fame, he blamed his neglect and his sexuality, and she denied he was gay.[1] [2] [3]

Little Richard and Larry Williams. Larry Williams met Richard in New Orleans in 1955 and followed him onto Specialty with hits like Bony Moronie. In the sixties he produced Richard's Okeh albums and managed him, though Richard later called him the worst producer in the world. In 1977, both deep in drugs, Williams threatened him with a gun over a debt. Williams died of a gunshot wound in 1980.[1] [2]

Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix joined Richard's Upsetters in late 1964 and recorded one single with him in 1965. His first known television footage shows him in Richard's band. They fought over lateness, clothes, stage antics and pay, and in July 1965 Hendrix was fired, or quit, depending on who told it. Hendrix said he wanted his guitar to do what Richard's voice did.[1] [2]

Little Richard and Paul McCartney. Long Tall Sally was the first song McCartney sang in public, and the Beatles played it until 1966. Richard met the band in 1962, when they opened for him in England and Hamburg, and said he taught Paul his high whoop. McCartney wrote I'm Down as his own Little Richard song and, after Richard's death, said he owed him a lot of what he did.[1] [2] [3]

Little Richard and Pat Boone. Pat Boone's polite cover of Tutti Frutti outsold Richard's original on the pop chart in 1956, and he also covered Long Tall Sally. Richard resented how the industry used Boone to keep his own records out of white homes, but he also admitted Boone helped make his songs more popular. Boone himself said he never wanted to record Tutti Frutti.[1] [2] [3]

Little Richard and Charles Connor. Charles Connor joined the Upsetters as an eighteen year old drummer and played on Keep A Knockin', Lucille and other hits. Some credit his rhythms as the root of Richard's famous shouted opening, and James Brown called him the first to put funk into the rhythm. After three decades apart, the two reunited on stage in Sweden in 1990.[1] [2]

Little Richard and Mick Jagger. When Richard rescued a sagging British tour in 1963, the young Rolling Stones were on the bill, and Mick Jagger watched his moves every night to learn how to work a crowd. Jagger called him his first idol and the originator. Richard liked to say the Stones started with him, and he was there when they entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.[1] [2]

Little Richard and Danny Jones Penniman. Danny was adopted by Richard and Ernestine as a one year old, the son of a late church associate. He stayed close to his father for life, often working as his bodyguard. It was Danny who turned on the air conditioning during Richard's 2013 heart attack, and he was at his bedside in 2020 and confirmed his death to the press.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Little Richard

• His first name was supposed to be Ricardo, but a mistake turned it into Richard. Richard Wayne Penniman was meant to be named Ricardo. An error switched it to Richard, and his small frame soon earned him the family nickname Lil' Richard.[1]
• As a boy he sang so loudly in church that he was stopped and nicknamed War Hawk. Richard said he was always pushing the key higher. His screaming and hollering got him banned from singing at one church, and the neighborhood called him War Hawk.[1]
• At about ten years old, he told people in Macon he was a faith healer, and some paid him. Inspired by Pentecostal churches, the young Richard sang gospel to sick neighbors and touched them. He recalled that some said they felt better and gave him money.[1]
• As a teenager he sold Coca Cola to concertgoers at the Macon City Auditorium. His part time job for promoter Clint Brantley let him watch stars like Cab Calloway and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who later invited him on stage.[1] [2]
• Before he was famous, he performed in drag under the name Princess LaVonne. On the minstrel and vaudeville circuit around 1949 and 1950, Richard worked both in and out of drag, sometimes billed as Princess LaVonne.[1]
• His famous turbans and capes were inspired by a medicine show doctor who displayed a so called devil's child. Doctor Nubillo wore a turban and cape and exhibited what he claimed was the dried body of a horned baby. He told Richard he would be famous.[1]
• The record boss Don Robey once knocked Richard out during a fight over money. Richard signed with Robey's Peacock label in 1953. When he complained about payments, a scuffle broke out and Robey knocked him out.[1] [2]
• His early band had no bass player, so the drummer pounded his kick drum to fake one. Charles Connor, the Upsetters' teenage drummer, thumped his bass drum extra hard to create what he called a bass fiddle effect.[1] [2]
• Tutti Frutti was recorded in three takes that took about fifteen minutes. On the fourteenth of September 1955, with time running out, Richard cut the cleaned up song in three takes, keeping his original piano part.[1] [2]
• Decades later, Tutti Frutti's co writer was still earning about five thousand dollars every few months from it. Dorothy LaBostrie, who rewrote the lyrics, was still receiving royalty checks averaging five thousand dollars every three to six months in the 1980s.[1] [2]
• Long Tall Sally's working title was The Thing. The follow up to Tutti Frutti was first titled The Thing and was cut three times before Art Rupe was satisfied. It became Specialty's best selling single ever.[1] [2]
• A co writer of Long Tall Sally was only confirmed after her death in 2015. Enotris Johnson, a local songwriter, is credited on Long Tall Sally and Jenny, Jenny. Her role was uncertain until her family confirmed it after she died.[1] [2]
• An NBC censor approved Long Tall Sally in 1956 because he could not make out the words. According to Brian Ward's history of rhythm and blues, the censor could not judge the song's propriety since he could not understand what Richard was singing.[1]
• Richard bought half of Lucille from a co writer who was in prison. First pressings credited only Albert Collins. Richard bought half the rights while Collins was held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Its chugging beat came from a train.[1]
• Good Golly, Miss Molly borrowed its piano intro from Ike Turner's Rocket 88. Richard said he had long used the Rocket 88 riff in his act and it fit the new song. He got the title phrase from a Southern disc jockey named Jimmy Pennick.[1]
• John Bonham copied the drum intro of Keep A Knockin' for Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll. Charles Connor played the four bar opening on Richard's 1957 hit. Earl Palmer used the same beat on Eddie Cochran's Somethin' Else.[1] [2]
• The Girl Can't Help It was originally meant for Fats Domino. Bobby Troup's title song for the 1956 Jayne Mansfield film was first lined up for Domino and was not written as a rock song. Richard's version hit the UK top ten.[1]
• In the 1950s, the wild man of rock did not drink, smoke or take drugs, and fined bandmates who did. Richard was a teetotaler during his first fame. Only in the mid sixties did he start drinking, and by 1972 he was addicted to cocaine.[1]
• He bought a house next door to heavyweight champion Joe Louis. After his hits, Richard moved to a formerly white neighborhood of Los Angeles, living beside Joe Louis, and brought his mother out west.[1] [2]
• Quincy Jones said Richard impressed him more than any other singer he worked with. Jones produced the 1962 gospel album King of the Gospel Singers. Mahalia Jackson wrote in its notes that Richard sang gospel the way it should be sung.[1]
• His 1963 British TV special drew about sixty thousand fan letters. The Little Richard Spectacular for Granada Television became a ratings hit, and the flood of mail led to two more broadcasts.[1]
• Jimi Hendrix's earliest known TV footage shows him in Little Richard's band. In July 1965 Hendrix appeared on the Nashville show Night Train, backing singers Buddy and Stacy on Shotgun as part of Richard's ensemble.[1]
• Otis Redding won a talent show fifteen weeks running singing Little Richard's Heebie Jeebies. The contest in Macon paid five dollars. Redding later sang with Richard's old band the Upsetters and said Richard was his inspiration.[1]
• Richard said he learned his famous whoop from the gospel singer Marion Williams. In 2010 Richard said the Beatles opened for him at the Star Club and that his signature falsetto whoop came from Williams.[1]
• Elton John decided to be a rock and roll pianist after watching Richard stand on a piano. In 1966 the young Reginald Dwight's band Bluesology opened for Richard in London. They later recorded a duet, The Power, in 1993.[1]
• Ritchie Valens was known as the Little Richard of San Fernando before he became famous. Richard's influence reached young singers everywhere, and Bob Dylan wrote in his high school yearbook that his ambition was to join Little Richard.[1]
• He sang the theme song of the cartoon The Magic School Bus. In 1994 he recorded the theme for the PBS series. The same year he sang a rewritten Lucille about the Muppet Rosita on Sesame Street.[1] [2]
• The wrestling character Johnny B. Badd was based on Little Richard. The gimmick was created in 1991 by booker Dusty Rhodes and played by Marc Mero, who went from villain to fan favorite in WCW.[1]
• In 2006 he married twenty couples in a single ceremony. As an ordained minister, Richard officiated at a mass wedding for contest winners in Vinton, Louisiana. He also married Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.[1] [2] [3]
• His favorite makeup shade was pancake number thirty one. At a 2013 Recording Academy event Richard reminisced about Atlanta nightclubs, his hero Billy Wright and discovering his favorite shade of pancake makeup.[1]
• A strict vegetarian in later life, he loved fried peanut butter sandwiches like Elvis. In 1998 he told the Los Angeles Times he avoided salt and pork, drank Postum like his mother, and deep fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches himself.[1]
• A heart attack in 2013 was eased by a baby aspirin and an ice cold room. Richard said he asked his son to turn the air conditioning up and took a baby aspirin. His doctor told him it saved his life.[1]
• In his last years he sent his old stage outfits to the Smithsonian. Rolling Stone reported in 2013 that Richard was spending his time designing clothing and donating his old outfits to the Smithsonian.[1]
• The tape of the Beatles' last paid concert ran out in the middle of Long Tall Sally. At Candlestick Park in 1966 the Beatles closed with Richard's song. Their press officer's thirty minute tape ended during its second verse.[1]
• Kennedy Davenport made Little Richard the first male character ever impersonated in RuPaul's Drag Race Snatch Game. She played him in season seven, making him the first male figure ever impersonated in that famous challenge.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.