Little Richard died this morning at the age of 87. A true original and one of the great originators of rock and roll, really of American popular music as a whole. He'd been on my wish list to cover in this series for a long time, did a little tentative work on it when I did my Chuck Berry playlist and learned a lot about him when I read Jonathan Gould's Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life, which contains a pretty substantial little mini-biography of Little Richard in illustrating how big an influence he was on Redding.

Little Richard deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Baby
2. True, Fine Mama
3. Can't Believe You Wanna Leave
4. Miss Ann
5. Oh Why?
6. She's Got It
7. Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey
8. I'll Never Let You Go (Boo Hoo Hoo Hoo)
9. Chicken Little Baby
10. Wonderin'
11. The Most I Can Offer (Just My Heart)
12. Lonesome And Blue
13. Directly From My Heart
14. I'm Just A Lonely Guy (All Alone)
15. Early One Morning
16. Just A Closer Walk With Thee
17. Search Me Lord
18. Joy Joy Joy
19. Going Home Tomorrow
20. Only You
21. Goodnight, Irene
22. Dancing All Around The World
23. I Don't Want To Discuss It
24. The Rill Thing
25. Sanctified, Satisfied Toe-Tapper
26. It Is No Secret (What God Can Do)
27. I Found My Way

Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 from Here's Little Richard (1957)
Tracks 7 and 8 from Little Richard (1958)
Tracks 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 from The Fabulous Little Richard (1959)
Track 16 from Pray Along With Little Richard (1960)
Track 17 from Pray Along With Little Richard (Volume 2) (1960)
Track 18 from The King Of The Gospel Singers (1961)
Tracks 19, 20 and 21 from Little Richard Is Back (And There's A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On!) (1964)
Track 23 from The Explosive Little Richard (1967)
Track 24 from The Rill Thing (1970)
Track 25 from The Second Coming (1972)
Track 26 from God's Beautiful City (1979)
Track 27 from Lifetime Friend (1986)
Track 22 from Directly From My Heart: The Best of the Specialty & Vee-Jay Years (2015)

As one of the great artists of the first rock'n'roll era, when singles reigned as the most important format, Little Richard's albums might be considered a secondary concern -- in fact he's maybe the first artist I've ever seen whose Wikipedia discography page lists the singles at the top at the albums below them. But the majority of Little Richard's body of work is actually pretty well contained in proper albums -- he only released a lot of standalone singles in the early '50s before he became a star, and in the '60s when only a handful of them charted. But pretty much all the original recordings ofthe important world-changing smash hits he made in the '50s can be found on his first 3 albums -- and the majority of the songs on those albums was a hit, I included almost every song on those records that wasn't on the singles charts. I enjoyed finally hearing "Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey" after years of hearing Daniel Stern refer to the song in Diner.

Little Richard was at the height of his fame in 1957 when he had a religious awakening and began exclusively recording gospel music for a few years, although the rock and roll he'd already recorded at that point continued to be appear on new charting singles and albums well into 1959. We'll never know how differently rock music history might have formed if he'd kept right on at that 1955-'57 pace for even just a few more years. But obviously, Little Richard has always been one of the foremost examples of a popular music innovator who never quite got everything he deserved -- sure, he's in the Hall of Fame and he probably made a comfortable living, but the guy probably should've made billions.

I included stuff from his three early '60s gospel albums as just a taste -- it actually surprised me how different he sounds on them, but then occasionally he'll put a little of that wild Little Richard energy into something like "Joy Joy Joy" and just come alive. He returned to secular music in the mid-'60s, and recorded a mixed bag of studio albums over the next 3 decades -- sometimes originals and blues and rock standards he hadn't covered before, but sometimes gospel or Disney songs or re-recordings of his '50s hits. One of the surprises of his '70s albums is that some of the best stuff is the extended instrumental jams like the 7-minute "Sanctified, Satisfied Toe-Tapper" and the 10-minute "The Rill Thing," where you hear him just get to cut loose on the keys on these simple relaxed grooves. I ended things on a weird note with "I Found A Way," a very slick and almost quasi-hip hop track Little Richard co-wrote for his last album of new material in 1986, it felt appropriate to kind of show the wrote strange and surprising range of his catalog with that.

Jimi Hendrix famously played in Little Richard's backing band The Upsetters for a stint in the mid-'60s, and after his death a lot of recordings were erroneously labeled as featuring him. But the two Little Richard tracks that we know have Jimi Hendrix on them are "I Don't Know What You've Got (But It's Got Me)" and "Dancing All Around The World," and both are fantastic. The former was released in 1965 soon after the session for both songs, and was Little Richard's only Hot 100 entry in the second half of the '60s. The latter was only released later on, on compilations like 2015's Directly From My Heart: The Best of the Specialty & Vee-Jay Years, which I used extensively in this playlist to source tracks from albums that aren't on Spotify in their entirety.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 09, 2020 at 1:47 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.