A-WOP-BOP A-LOO-BOP A-WOP-BAM BOOM!
“THE thing about Little Richard, he always made an entrance,” says David T Walker, a session guitarist who recorded with the rock’n’roll icon in the early 1970s. “He’d enter a club with bodyguards fanning him with big feathered fans. It didn’t matter where he was. It could be just a small gig, and he’d still roll out the red carpet. He was Little Richard every day. Always flamboyant. He was always himself.”
With his mile-high pompadour, layers of pancake makeup and ebullient character, Little Richard was always himself and no-one other than himself. He mixed up every kind of music he heard – popular R&B and rockabilly, jump blues and country, vaudeville and drag – and presented it all in a package that was flashy, outrageous, and sharply subversive. On his impressive string of hits in the late 1950s, he sang jubilantly and defiantly about cutting loose, ripping up a Saturday night, and most of all sex, punctuating his barely coded lyrics with orgasmic whoops and hollers. As a gay black man in postwar America, he opened rock’n’roll up to an array of voices and perspectives that still resonate today.
When he sang at the
