Little Richard Birthday - "The Originator, The Emancipator, The Architect of Rock & Roll!"

Little Richard fan site: littlerichard.com
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame site: rockhall.com

There is so much info and history on Little Richard, you just have to check the sites to really read his life story. A study of his life is a study of the history of Rock, Blues, Boogie-Woogie, Gospel and Funk itself. Little Richard is Rock & Roll! It has taken a long time for Little Richard to get his just due for his musical contributions and he had to make some noise (remember the awards show in the 80s?) to actually get it over the years. Here is a snippet from Wikipedia.com:

Little Richard (born Richard Wayne Penniman, December 5, 1932 in Macon, Georgia) is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. An early pioneer of rock 'n' roll, Penniman has influenced generations of rhythm and blues and rock music artists. His original injection of funk into the rock and roll beat in the mid-1950s also had a profound influence on the development of the genre.

His early recording career in the 1950s established his reputation with a mix of boogie-woogie music and rhythm and blues, heavily steeped in gospel music, but with a heavily accentuated back-beat, funky rhythm, raspy-shouted vocals, and breathlessly delivered lyrics that marked a decidedly new kind of music.

Little Richard has been credited by James Brown, who called Little Richard his idol, with, "first putting the funk in the rock and roll beat", by Smokey Robinson as, "the start of that driving, funky, never let up rock 'n' roll", by Dick Clark as "the model for almost every rock and roll performer of the '50s and years thereafter", and Ray Charles, in 1989, as "the man that started a kind of music that set the pace for a lot of what's happening today."

Little Richard's music has been used in Everything! Films, commercials, TV, you name it. They used "Long Tall Sally" in Predator in the scene when Arnold and his special forces team are about to be dropped into the deep forest across enemy lines.

Little Richard and his Band perform "Long Tall Sally" from the 1956 movie 'Don't Knock The Rock".


Good Golly Miss Molly