He became a Bible salesman, began recording religious songs again and, for the second time, disappeared from the spotlight. By the end of the 1960s, sold-out performances in Las Vegas and triumphant appearances at rock festivals in Atlantic City and Toronto were sending a clear message: Little Richard was back to stay.īy his own account, alcohol and cocaine began to sap his soul (“I lost my reasoning,” he would later say), and in 1977, he once again turned from rock ’n’ roll to God.
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He went on to tour relentlessly in the United States, with a band that at one time included Jimi Hendrix on guitar. Among his opening acts were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, then at the start of their careers. He was lured back to the stage in 1962, and over the next two years he played to wild acclaim in England, Germany and France. “I’m a rock ’n’ roll singer, but I’m still a Christian.” “Although I sing rock ’n’ roll, God still loves me,” he said in 2009. He cut his hair, got married and began recording gospel music.įor the rest of his life, he would be torn between the gravity of the pulpit and the pull of the stage. He entered Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Ala., a Seventh-day Adventist school, to study for the ministry. By then, he had left rock ’n’ roll behind.
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He had one last Top 10 hit: “Good Golly Miss Molly,” recorded in 1956 but not released until early 1958. I am leaving show business to go back to God.’” I got up from the piano and said, ‘This is it. “It looked as though the big ball of fire came directly over the stadium about two or three hundred feet above our heads. White, referring to the first satellite sent into space. “That night Russia sent off that very first Sputnik,” he told Mr. One night in early October, before 40,000 fans at an outdoor arena in Sydney, he had an epiphany. “Tutti Frutti” had sold half a million copies but had netted him only $25,000. Without anyone to advise him, he had signed a contract that gave him half a cent for every record he sold. As he told the story, he was exhausted, under intense pressure from the Internal Revenue Service and furious at the low royalty rate he was receiving from Specialty. He was at the height of his fame when he left the United States in late September 1957 to begin a tour in Australia. Still, it seemed that nothing could stop Little Richard’s drive to the top - until he stopped it himself. As the rock historian Richie Unterberger put it, “He was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock ’n’ roll.” Chuck Berry and Fats Domino had reached the pop Top 10, Bo Diddley had topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, and Elvis Presley had been making records for a year.īut Little Richard, delving deeply into the wellsprings of gospel music and the blues, pounding the piano furiously and screaming as if for his very life, raised the energy level several notches and created something not quite like any music that had been heard before - something new, thrilling and more than a little dangerous. Other musicians had already been mining a similar vein by the time he recorded his first hit, “Tutti Frutti” - a raucous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up but its meaning hard to miss - in a New Orleans recording studio in September 1955. Little Richard did not invent rock ’n’ roll.
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His lawyer, Bill Sobel, said the cause was bone cancer. Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard, who combined the sacred shouts of the black church and the profane sounds of the blues to create some of the world’s first and most influential rock ’n’ roll records, died on Saturday in Tullahoma, Tenn.