“A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!” It was almost 11:00 pm that night in October 1955. Richard Wayne Penniman, 22, lay on his bed. He listens distractedly to the radio and ruminates on the failure of his life; some time earlier, he returned to live with his family in Macon, a provincial town in Georgia. He barely remembers that a month earlier he had traveled to New Orleans to record a few songs with the Fats Domino orchestra. “Frankly, the roots of desire were already cut in me,” he said almost thirty years later. “But when I heard my voice, I felt an electric shock run through my body.” He calls his neighbor, Jew Sam, a childhood friend, and tells him that Tutti Frutti spreads.
Hard to imagine how improbable it was that this puny being called “little”, this thing affected to the point where his own father shouted to him that he was only a half-man, this Black from the South born in segregation and dedicated to cleaning the toilets of the Macon bus station all his life, became the architect of rock’n’roll. Little Richard, from his first to his last cry, embodied for all those who wanted to put his own in their place the very emblem of sedition, emphasis and freedom. This very tube, Tutti Frutti, which opened with a rhythmic onomatopoeia and whose text fell under the pansexual exhortation, did not only give blacks, gays, marginalized, solitary people an immediate hymn. It has created an inexhaustible breath of fresh air for the world’s youth.
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