On 29 October 1955, Billboard—then the leading music industry magazine—included a release by the little-known Little Richard in its “Reviews of New R&B Records.” These were ranked in order: at the top came Piano Red’s jump boogie “Gordy’s Rock,” followed by the Cadillacs’ tricksy doo-wop song “Speedoo;” sixth down, “Tutti Frutti” was awarded 76 points—”Good” in Billboard terms, “a cleverly styled novelty with nonsense words delivered rapid-fire. The singer shows a compelling personality and an attractive vocal style.”
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This partial hedging of bets indicates that although the anonymous reviewer—no doubt skilled in the pop and R&B idioms of the day—detected some potential, they didn’t quite know what to make of the song. There was no sense that this would be a record that entered the pop charts, which were, at the end of October 1955, still dominated by solo singers and close-harmony numbers, with a smattering of more uptempo rock ’n’ roll tunes—usually covers by white artists.
“Tutti Frutti” was Little Richard’s first single for Specialty, a New Orleans-based independent label that by 1955 had become a major player in the R&B market. It was recorded at the city’s J&M Studios, which, under the ownership of Cosimo Matassa, had been the engine room for hits by Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis and Lloyd Price. The New Orleans sound was very current in October 1955, but “Tutti Frutti” was as different from the city’s insinuating, sly groove as it was a departure from the Specialty roster of R&B, blues and gospel.
Like the whole record, they represent a sophisticated synthesis of Black music past and present, a history and a tradition that Richard had lived.
From the first eruption to the final exclamation, “Tutti Frutti” had a harsh, relentlessly driving sound, with an unrestrained vocalist who punctuated the simple lyrics with gospel shrieks and weird outbursts. The song was barely explicable, but Specialty owner Art Rupe took a punt: “The reason I picked it wasn’t solely for the tempo. It was because of the wild intro, it was different—you know, Be Bop A Lop Bop, all that in front. You didn’t hear things like that much on a record. I just thought it was a record that would sell very well in our Black market.”
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“A wop bop a loo mop a lop bam boom.”
The song’s hook is just ten syllables, eight short and two long, although Richard is so eager to get going that he elides the first ‘A’ in the intro. They add up to nothing but apparent nonsense—”a cleverly styled novelty”—but, like the whole record, they represent a sophisticated synthesis of Black music past and present, a history and a tradition that Richard had lived. Although only twenty-two in autumn 1955, he had already been performing for nigh on a decade, traveling backwards and forwards through the byways of the American South.
‘Wop’ was the second word in the term ‘doo-wop,’ a major trend in Black American music during 1955. A vocal style that ranged from street-corner glossolalia to smooth ballads, it contained sounds and syllables that appeared to make no sense individually but which contributed to a full, percussive overall sound. The Cadillacs’ “Speedoo” was only the latest example, while the Platters’ “The Great Pretender”—released on November 3 that year—would become one of 1956’s biggest pop hits.
The word “bop” had a long history in Black American music. It originated in scat singing—the often humorous and sometimes deliberately unsettling use of rhythmic vocal syllables, which went all the way back to ragtime. After Louis Armstrong’s 1926 recording of “Heebie Jeebies,” improvised scat singing became a major trend in the late 1930s, on records by Slim & Slam, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway—the latter of whom Richard saw play live in the 1940s, when he was working at the Macon City Auditorium.
Slim Gaillard was an avatar of the style, with his wild rhymes, surreal vocal explorations and warm, tricksy style. Together with bassist Slam Stewart, he hit big in 1938 with the tongue-twisting “Flat Foot Floogie,” a much-covered classic. The follow-up was “Tutti Frutti”—an entirely different song to Richard’s—which made #3 in the charts. In 1945, he re-recorded it in a fuller band version, featuring a bebop-style trumpet solo. It was, as the title suggested, about eating ice cream: “Don’t like vanilla, strawberry voodoo…”
‘Bop’ also had a specific post-war use, referring to the new, dissonant type of jazz that valued powerful riffs, complex melodic treatments and lightning-fast improvisation by featured virtuoso soloists like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Thanks to the big swing bands, jazz had become mainstream pop. Not caring if it threw off the casual listener, bebop was directly opposed to this perceived dilution, becoming a byword for wild esoterica. In 1955, the emergent hard rhythm and blues style was often called “bebop.”
Little Richard’s chant continues in rhyming variations, like a Slim Gaillard scat improvisation: ‘mop,’ ‘a lop.’ The final two syllables are something else, however: ‘bam’ and ‘boom’ have the force of a fist, a blow, an explosion—a caption from a superhero comic—and they leave no doubt as to Richard’s intention. Growing up in Macon, Georgia, he had not only seen the stars of the day passing through the city, he had also been exposed to anonymous, unrecorded street performers, who became imprinted on his brain.
“I remember Bamalama,” he told his biographer Charles White, “this feller with one eye, who’d play the washboard with a thimble. He had a bell like the schoolteacher’s, and he’d sing, ‘A-bamalam, you shall be free, and in the mornin’ you shall be free.’ See, there was so much poverty, so much prejudice in those days. I imagine people had to sing to feel their connection with God. To sing their trials away, sing their problems away, to make their burdens easier and the load lighter. That’s the beginning. That’s where it started.”
Born on 5 December 1932, Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children—and by far the most troublesome. With his right leg shorter than his left, he was partially disabled and, as he soon discovered, not the most normal male, becoming a target for the local boys because of his preference for playing with girls. He recalled that he felt like a girl and, after his first homosexual experience at a young age, Richard was known, as he remembered it, as “a sissy, punk, freak, and faggot.”
Richard sang all the time, both inside and outside church, and predominantly gospel. When he was around thirteen or fourteen, he got a part-time job at the Macon City Auditorium, where he saw the major performers of the day. One day, he caught the attention of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who was performing at the venue. Hearing Richard sing before the show, she invited him to open for her and paid him $40. It was his first time in front of a big audience—and his first pay check—and he took to it like a duck to water.
Matters were difficult at home, however. His father constantly criticized Richard for his appearance and his effeminate friends, calling him “only half a son.” To escape his father’s regular beatings, Richard took off and joined a traveling troupe called Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show. His wanderings had started, and they began in the folk origin of America’s popular entertainment. Beginning in the late 1880s, medicine shows evolved out of the old minstrel shows and usually involved about eight to ten people, maybe a couple fewer, with musicians, comics and dancers who were often, but not always, Black. The songs—often variants on blues tropes—were interspersed with comic skits, bawdy double entendres and ruthless put-downs of the inevitable hecklers. A fast tongue and a good sense of how to read the crowd were all-important, as were the hard-sell commercials for whatever product the show was promoting—usually some cure-all concoction, cheaper than in the shops.
After a stint with B. Brown and His Orchestra, Richard joined Sugarfoot Sam’s minstrel show, which was the first time he appeared in a dress. After short-lived stints with aggregations like the Tidy Jolly Steppers, Richard ended up in Atlanta with the Snakes Variety Show. There he met his first big inspiration, the blues singer Billy Wright, whose first record, “Blues for My Baby,” was a big R&B hit in autumn 1949.
Like Richard, Wright was born in 1932 and had also worked as a female impersonator in the medicine shows—among the very few places that were sympathetic to gender or sexual deviance during that period. A star at seventeen, Wright specialized in dramatic blues sides. Openly gay, he was flamboyant and unashamed when Richard met him, and made a considerable impression. Richard was so taken by his make-up, he began to use it himself.
It was through Wright that Richard got his hairstyle and his first recording contract, with RCA. In the space of just one year, between November 1951 and 1952, he released four singles, all of which show a strong vocal presence, including on occasion a certain sibilance, although they remain firmly within the blues/jump R&B style. “Every Hour” got some local airplay, but none of the releases made the R&B charts. The title of his third single might well have described his situation: “Ain’t Nothin’ Happenin’.”
After encountering the pianist Esquerita in the bus station in Macon, Richard started to focus on the piano. A skilled instrumentalist, Esquerita influenced his slightly older friend in his use of shock piano: rapidly repeating, very loud passages, with chords in the high register. His outrageous appearance—heavy make-up, sequined sunglasses, hair teased right up high—also reinforced Richard’s tendencies in that direction, as did their shared interest in male-on-male action.
The Macon bus station, where Richard worked, washing dishes, was a venue that allowed him to explore his penchant for homosexual encounters, voyeurism and orgies. In one of the frank declarations of his homosexuality in his memoir, he remembers: “I used to sit around the all-night restaurant at the Greyhound bus station in Macon, watching people come in and trying to catch something—you know, have sex. I’d sit around there till three or four in the morning. Wasn’t nothing else to do, ’cos everything was closed.”
By the age of twenty, Richard was thoroughly steeped in the secret codes of the gay underworld, with its own patois and upside-down world. Richard’s recollections of his experiences in the entertainment underbelly of the Deep South are full of this sliding between gender and sexuality, of men who address each other as ‘she’ and ‘her,’ or the ubiquitous ‘Miss Thing.’ Doubly outcast in 1950s America, Black homosexuals simply got on with it and did as they pleased.
After a brief spell at Peacock Records, Richard formed a new group called the Upsetters to play hard-driving R&B. His third attempt at having a recording career happened as the result of him meeting another R&B star, Lloyd Price, who had had a smash in 1952 with “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studios in New Orleans. Although it stayed in the R&B charts for half a year and sold over a million copies, it didn’t make the pop charts—such was the climate of the time. Nevertheless, it was an era-defining record.
When Richard met him in Macon, Price was still a big star. Struck by the fact that he had a black-and-gold Cadillac, Richard struck up a conversation with the singer, who told him to send a tape of his material to his label owner, Art Rupe, at Specialty Records in Los Angeles. After sending off a demo of two songs, Richard sweated it out in Macon, waiting for a response from Specialty.
The Upsetters were on the road in Tennessee when the call came from Specialty to meet in New Orleans. Instructed by Rupe to find another Ray Charles, Specialty A&R man and producer Bumps Blackwell had finally got round to playing the demo tape and knew that he was hearing star quality.
On 13 September 1955, Richard arrived at J&M Studios in Rampart Street. He was following in the illustrious footsteps of Lloyd Price and Fats Domino, but there was culture shock on both sides. The musicians were taken aback by his appearance—the singer wore “his hair in the air and a lot of mascara and stuff,” saxophone player Red Tyler remembered—while Richard himself was inhibited by the atmosphere. He remembered that the band thought him crazy and that Blackwell wanted him to sing the blues—not his bag.
Over two days they recorded eight sides, which were very much in the contemporary blues/R&B mode, albeit slightly behind the curve. They are not without merit—there is some great guitar in “Wonderin”—and Richard is as riveting a vocalist as ever, but they weren’t what Blackwell was looking for. As he remembered it: “The problem was that what he looked like, and what he sounded like didn’t come together. If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out.”
So much recording in this period was done on feel. Sharp A&R men and label owners could taste the change in the air, but they didn’t know what it was until they heard it. They were seeking something that had yet to be done, that was still to be caught. Sam Phillips had done it the year before, when he heard Elvis Presley fooling around with an old blues tune, and now Bumps Blackwell was about to have his eureka moment.
Nobody had considered “Tutti Frutti” a candidate for being recorded, despite the fact that it was a live favorite. Rather underwhelmed by what they had recorded so far, the musicians and the producer took a break in the nearby Dew Drop Inn. Richard found the bar’s piano and, with a ready audience, accessed his inner ham.
Honed in the dives and drag bars of the American South and informed by his thorough knowledge of the sexual underground, Richard’s lyrics were a deliberate provocation: “Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy…” In the volatile climate of 1955, they were also a barrier to any kind of wider exposure. Blackwell knew that a verse about sodomy would create such a storm as to kill both the record and Richard’s career. Substitute lyrics were needed if the record was ever to get a chance of airplay.
By his sheer presence in 1955, he opened up a world of difference, revealing a subterranean realm of great complexity and great vigor that was beginning to claim its time.
Attending the session was a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie. When Blackwell asked her for some alternative lyrics, she balked. At the same time, Richard was too ashamed to record the song in its original form. After some ferocious persuasion from Blackwell, everyone went back to the studio, while LaBostrie cobbled together some blues phrases. It was crunch time: after two days on this try-out, Richard felt the opportunity was slipping away. Sitting down at the piano, he went hell for leather.
The recording was quick and explosive: fifteen minutes, two takes, and that was it. The musicians were confused: they thought it sounded either stupid or completely uncommercial. Bumps Blackwell got it, however. A couple of days after the session, he wrote to Art Rupe, comparing “Tutti Frutti” to Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” in terms of crossover potential; that week, “Maybellene” was at #5 in the Billboard Top 100, its highest position. This was a major breakthrough: an authentic slice of Black R&B shading into the big beat of rock ’n’ roll.
The popularity of Black R&B with white teenagers engendered a huge backlash in the media and among local lawmakers in 1954 and 1955. America was still a highly segregated country, founded on racism, and to many people this new and unexpected turn of events threatened nothing but miscegenation. Both Billboard and Variety—the house magazines of the American music and entertainment industries respectively—conducted campaigns against what they deemed to be distasteful music.
In its April 1955 story about the new music—typified as rock ’n’ roll rather than R&B—Life magazine observed the growing controversy created by the adoption of this Black musical form by white teenagers: “In New Haven, Conn, the police chief has put a damper on rock ’n’ roll parties and other towns are following suit. Radio networks are worried over questionable lyrics in rock ’n’ roll. And some American parents, without quite knowing what it is their kids are up to, are worried that it’s something they shouldn’t be…But hardly a teen-ager afoot had time to listen.”
With its roots in R&B, rock ’n’ roll was becoming a ubiquitous symbol of the generation gap. Most adults did not understand its codes, its sound or its origins. It was the first instance in about twenty years—since the start of swing in the mid-1930s—that contemporary Black American styles had a direct influence on the pop charts, and it happened at a time when the campaign to end segregation and demand equal rights was building up a head of steam in the political sphere.
Nineteen fifty-five was the year of Emmett Till’s brutal murder in Mississippi, a terrible event that galvanized the Black community into protest. It was after attending a meeting that addressed this case that Rosa Parks would refuse to give up her seat to a white person on the bus—a stand against segregation in the public transit system that would became a national cause célèbre. Things were on the move in the country, and they spilled over into pop music.
This was the climate into which “Tutti Frutti” emerged. Specialty catalogue number SP-561-45 caught the lightning on seven inches. Even in its bowdlerized state, the essential elements of “Tutti Frutti” were all there in the title phrase and hook line—ten syllables that held a powerful, albeit hidden, meaning for its performer. In 1952, Richard’s father had been shot and killed just outside the bar that he ran, the Tip In Inn. Richard was forced to become the family breadwinner and took on a mundane job. He hated being subservient and answered back in a coded curse.
“I was washing dishes at the Greyhound bus station at the time,” he told David Dalton in 1970. “I couldn’t talk back to my boss man. He would bring all these pots back for me to wash, and one day I said, ‘I’ve got to do something to stop this man bring back all these pots for me to wash,’ and I said ‘Awap bop a cup bop a wop bam boom, take ’em out!’ and that’s what I meant at the time. As so I wrote ‘Tutti Frutti’ in the kitchen, I wrote ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ in the kitchen, I wrote ‘Long Tall Sally’ in that kitchen.”
Riffing off this basic phrase, Richard pounded the piano, yelled, shrieked and testified over just under two and a half minutes, and in doing so opened up the underground that he had inhabited. On one level, “Tutti Frutti” was a nonsense heterosexual pop song, with a relentlessly repeated title and catchphrase. But, prepped by the dirty-lyrics scandal and listening to the singer’s intense, slippery vocal, you could read a sexual subtext into its lines, particularly when Richard shrieked: “She knows how to love me / Yes, indeed / Boy, you don’t know what she do to me.”
And the song’s gay origins are in there as an unseen foundation, hinted at in the title, “Tutti Frutti”—all the fruits, the word ‘fruit’ being a popular slang term for gay men at the time. In 1955, very few people knew of the hidden history encoded in “Tutti Frutti”‘s scats and shrieks, and Richard was canny enough not to make them too obvious: if he wanted a Cadillac, he knew he had to play the game. He was not put under intense scrutiny: there was very little pop coverage outside Billboard and Cashbox, and the scandal sheets left him alone. Too marginal, too weird.
But all you needed to do was look. With his pancake and his pompadour, Richard was hardly a shrinking violet. In his autobiography, written thirty years later, Richard equivocated around the question of his sexual orientation. He talked at length about his homosexual experiences, but at the same time emphasized his heterosexual voyeurism. In the end, though, the actual specifics of what turned Richard on are irrelevant. By his sheer presence in 1955, he opened up a world of difference, revealing a subterranean realm of great complexity and great vigor that was beginning to claim its time, along with teenagers and Black Americans. Liberation was in the air, and the freaks wanted in.
By early November, “Tutti Frutti” had sold 200,000 copies, entering the R&B charts in the middle of the month at #12. It was the breakthrough sound of freedom, couched in an extreme androgyny. The game was on.
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From The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream by Jon Savage. Copyright © 2025. Available from Liveright Publishing Corporation, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company.
