Teddy Pendergrass' Close the Door was the ultimate '70s slow jam that we're still running back today! ✨ Watch his story during our #BlackMusicMonth Unsung marathon, kicking off Sunday at 12p/11c.
Remembering Little Richard (Monday, December 5, 1932 – Saturday, May 9, 2020)
Born Richard Wayne Penniman in Macon, Georgia, Little Richard was the third of twelve children in a Black Southern family shaped by church, poverty, performance, and survival. His earliest musical education came through Gospel music in Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal, and Pentecostal churches, where shouting, sanctified rhythm, piano, testimony, and holy movement helped form the sound he later carried into Rock and Roll.
Little Richard did not merely participate in Rock and Roll; he helped detonate it. With records like “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up,” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” his piano attack, scream, Gospel drive, makeup, hair, humor, sexuality, and stage command changed what popular music could look and sound like.
Little Richard’s flamboyant gender presentation, makeup, sensuality, and complicated public statements about sexuality made him one of popular music’s most disruptive cultural figures, even as he spent much of his life wrestling publicly with the tension between desire, performance, religion, and respectability.
His legacy remains foundational. An inaugural Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and a National Recording Registry honoree through “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard’s influence runs through Soul, Funk, Rock, Glam, Punk, Prince, James Brown, The Beatles, and generations of performers who learned that freedom could be loud.
On Saturday, May 9, 2020, Little Richard died in Tullahoma, Tennessee, from bone cancer. He was 87 years old.
Little Richard called himself “The Architect of Rock and Roll,” and history has done very little to prove him wrong.
Photo: Little Richard publicity portrait, circa 1950s–1960s. Photographer unconfirmed.