Chart position: #2 R&B (for 6 weeks), #17 Pop
Category: R&B
Writers: Dorothy LaBostrie, Richard Penniman, Lubin
Label and number: Specialty 561, Los Angeles
Flipside: "I'm Just a Lonely Guy (All Alone)"
When and where recorded: September 14, 1955, in New Orleans
When released: October 1955
Why important: It established Little Richard as rock 'n' roll's first
wild man.
Influenced by: Slim and Slam's "Tutu Frutti" (#3 Pop, 1938), Slim Gaillard's
"Turn Frutti" (1945)
Influenced: "Shout Bamalam" by Otis Redding (his first record)
Important cover version: Pat Boone (#12 Pop), Art Mooney
Important remakes: Elvis Presley (Elvis Presley, #1 Pop, 1956), Little
Richard (1964)
The story behind the record: "One song which would really tear the house
down," Little Richard said, "was 'Tutti Frutti.' The lyrics were kind of vulgar,
'Tutti Frutti, good booty, if it don't fit don't force it, you can grease it,
make it easy.' White people, it always cracked 'em up, but black people didn't
like it that much. They liked the blues. So I never thought about recording
'Tutti Frutti,' it was just something I did." Another obstacle to recording
the song might have been that it apparently was about anal sex.
Little Richard isn't sure where the song came from, but there's a chance that he picked it up during his association with his early mentor, the late R&B singer Billy Wright. It was Wright who introduced Richard Penniman to the flamboyant gay lifestyle. "I copied him as far as dressing, the hairdo and the makeup, 'cause he was the only man I ever seen wearing makeup before," Richard told his biographer, Charles White. He also borrowed some of Wright's vocal intonations, which he displayed on his first recordings after Wright helped him get his first contract, with RCA Victor, in 1951. (The man who signed him was Steve Shales, the same producer later responsible for bringing Elvis Presley to RCA.)
Richard may have also picked up an early version of the song from a South Carolina singer-pianist named Eskew Reeder, who performed under the name Esquerita. Little Richard told Charles White: "I met this gay guy, a piano player named Esquerita [in the Macon, Georgia, Greyhound Bus terminal] . . . So Esquerita and me went up to my house and he got on the piano and he played 'One Mint Julep,' way up on the treble . . . I said, 'Hey, how do you do that?' And he says, 'I'll teach you.' And that's when I really started playing . . . I learned a whole lot about phrasing from him. He really taught me a lot." (Esquerita later signed with Capitol Records, which billed him as the "new Little Richard," but his voice was too hoarse and his recordings chaotic.)
Before his death in 1986, Esquerita told writer Rick Coleman, "When I met Richard he wasn't using the obligato voice-whoooo!-just straight singing." The "obligato holler" was something he himself had picked up years before from his sisters who were studying opera. But Little Richard himself attributes his 'Tutti Frutti' vocal signature elsewhere: "The Clara Ward Singers had a lady named Marion Williams, and she would sing, 'I love God-whooooo!' I got that from her."
Going back even further, it's possible that Richard heard one of Bulee "Slim" Gaillard's versions of "Tutti Frutti," recorded for Vocalion as Slim and Slam in 1938 and again, for 20th Century, in 1945. The earlier version was a pop hit at the time. Tutii frutti-a confection of Italian origin that contains various chopped fruits-was just the kind of phrase that Gaillard was notorious for turning into nonsense verse. A multitalented black jazzman, Gaillard had been recording gonzo tunes like "Flat Foot Floogie (with the Floy Floy)"-a jive reference to a whore with gonorrhea-flavored with his own language, called "Vout," since the mid-'30s. In Vout, words were repeated, bent and appended with syllables like -oreenee and -oroonie. In 1946 Gaillard had a pop hit with a piece of silliness called "Cement Mixer," with lyrics like "put-ti put-ti, puttily hootie, puttily vootie. " Gaillard's "Tutti Frutti" bears a resemblance to what Little Richard sang many years later. Little Richard's verses are new, but the chorus is not much different from Gaillard's "Tutti frutti frutti, tutti frutti frutti, tutu frutti frutti . . . "
By the time Little Richard put a band together in 1953, he was singing his own "Tutti Frutti," wearing his hair like Billy Wright and Esquerita, and rolling his eyes skyward like pianist-singer Fats Waller. He even affected Waller's sly grin and pencil-thin mustache. Little Richard was clearly a synthesizer of his environment. He recalled working over the song while washing dishes in Macon's bus station after his early R&B career belly flopped. "I couldn't talk back to the boss so instead of saying bad words I'd say, 'Wop bop a loo bop a lop barn boom, so he didn't know what I was thinking. I'd also sing 'Tutti Frutti' to lighten the load of carrying those dishes and washing those pots and pans."
Richard Wayne Penniman was born December 5,1932, in Macon, and raised in the city's Pleasant Hill section. His family was devout Seventh Day Adventist- a grandfather and a couple of uncles were ministers. Richard himself grew up in the choir and played the church piano. By age sixteen, however, he broke away from his family-partly because his father derided him for his feminine mannerisms-and performed at a local dive called the Tick Tock Club. When he won a radio station talent contest at Atlanta's 81 Theater, his prize was a contract with RCA.
Little Richard's tenure at RCA was brief, and a couple of sessions for Peacock Records in Houston led him
nowhere, but he was persistent. On the advice of singer Lloyd Price, he sent a demo tape to Art Rupe at
Specialty Records in Los Angeles, where Price had had a hit three years earlier with "Lawdy Miss Clawdy"
[see #30]. Rupe wasn't impressed with Penniman at first-he sounded too much like Billy Wright and one or
two other singers. But his new, thirty-seven-year-old A&R man, a light-skinned bandleader named Robert
"Bumps" Blackwell, thought that maybe Richard had something. Blackwell had already demonstrated a nose
for talent. Back home in Seattle, he had given Ray Charles and Quincy Jones their starts in his band.
At Blackwell's suggestion, he and Rupe went to New Orleans where Specialty recorded many of its artists. They contacted Little Richard and told him to meet them there for two full days of recording- Rupe wasn't sure of Richard's talent or Blackwell's production ability, so he wanted plenty of material to choose from. Although Little Richard had his own tightly-rehearsed band, Blackwell decided to record instead with Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studio musicians who had played on many of Specialty's other records, not to mention Fats Domino's hits on Imperial Records. And despite Little Richard's own piano playing, Blackwell hired another pianist, Huey Smith, for the sessions. Smith would later have a couple of his own hits, including "Rockin' Pneumonia and Boogie W oogie Flu" and "Sea Cruise" (with Frankie Ford). Little did the sidemen-tenor saxists Lee Allen and Red Tyler, guitarist Frank Fields, drummer Earl Palmer and the others-realize that soon they would no longer be referred to as "Fats Domino's Band." By year's end, companies would stampede into town to record with them at J&M because they were "Little Richard's Band."
"The [fifteen-by sixteen-foot] studio was just a back room in a furniture store, like an ordinary motel room," Blackwell said shortly before his death in 1985. "There'd be a grand piano just as you came in the door. I'd [put] the grand's lid up with a mike in the keys and [saxophonists] Alvin Tyler and Lee Allen would be blowing into that. Earl Palmer's drums were out of the door, where I had a mike. The bass man would be on the other side of the studio."
In those days the producer had to get a "balance" before recording by listening through headphones while the band warmed up. "If it didn't sound right I'd just keep moving the mikes around . . . It might take me forty-five minutes, an hour, to get that balance within the room."
On the first day, September 13, Little Richard and the band recorded four songs, including a version of Little Willie Littlefield's "K.C. Lovin'," written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Specialty would later release the song as "Kansas City." But generally Little Richard's selections that day were unremarkable, and Blackwell left the studio discouraged.
On the following day they were scheduled to cut four more songs, including "I'm just a Lonely Guy," written by a local girl named Dorothy LaBostrie. "She kept bugging me to record her songs," said Blackwell. "They all sounded the same, but this one had good lyrics, so we went with it. I knew I had to go back to Los Angeles with at least two good songs that Rupe could put out on a record, and I thought that Dorothy's song was one of 'em. But I didn't think [Richard's] prepared stuff had any hit quality, and it disturbed me.
"Then during a break-things had gotten tight so we needed to relax-I heard Richard playing around with 'Tutti Frutti.' It was a nightclub song. But it was risque, none of the words were useable."
Luckily, LaBostrie was hanging around to see how her song was coming along. "I brought her in to clean up the words. Richard was ashamed to sing the words in front of her, so they turned their backs to each other-turned to the walls-and Richard sang the song three times. Finally Dorothy said, 'That's enough.' She came in with the words about fifteen minutes before our regular session was to end. The pianist [Huey Smith] didn't know the song, so I let Richard play. I set up a microphone between him and the piano and dropped another one inside the piano, and we went with that. Since the band was tight and wound up, and the balance was right, we did 'Tutti Frutti.' It took only two or three takes before our time was up."Ironically, the dirty little song-after Little Richard had dressed it up with his gospel turns and the whooooo! he'd taken from the Clara Ward Singers-sounded almost like a spiritual. Certainly there was nothing else on the commercial market that had such gospel intensity.
"Got a gal named Sue, she know just what to do . . . she rocks to the east, rocks to the west, she's the girl that I love best . . . " When Art Rupe heard it, he dismissed "Tutti Frutti" as a novelty, but he thought it might be different enough to sell well. First, though, it needed some doctoring. Because of J&M Studio's heavily padded walls, floor and ceiling, the room had no natural reverb. It was almost dead. So in transferring the tape to the master disk for pressing, Rupe brightened it up by adding a little echo and speeding up the tape to raise the pitch.
Prior to the session Little Richard had signed Specialty's standard contract for artists and songwriters. By today's standards his artist royalty-"a half cent for every record," in his own words-was a pittance. As for Little Richard's publishing rights, " 'Tutti Frutti' was sold to Specialty for $50," he said, and part of that deal seems to have included the addition of a mystery name, Lubin, to the songwriting credits. Most likely, this was one of Rupe's own dummy names.
Little Richard was at home in Macon when he heard deejay Gene Nobles play "Tutti Frutti" over clear-channel WLAC out of Nashville, Tennessee, on "Randy's Record Mart" show. "It came on and I said, 'Mother, that's me!' "The owner of the popular mail-order record store, Randy Wood, liked the record so well that he covered it on his own label, Dot Records, with a handsome young Tennessee singer named Pat Boone. Little Richard's original version did very well on the pop charts for a black record on an indie label, but Boone's ridiculously polite cover record outsold it considerably.
Bumps Blackwell figured that the only way to discourage white cover artists was to speed up the next record. "With 'Long Tall Sally' we kept recording it faster and faster. When it was finished I turned to Richard and said, 'Let's see Pat Boone get his mouth together to do this song.' "Pat Boone did cover "Long Tall Sally," and his version sold a million.
Perhaps the strangest cover of "Tutti Frutti" was by Art Mooney's band, featuring a young singer named Ocie Smith (later to have a couple of hits as O. C. Smith). Smith, who was black, basically copied Pat Boone's version, not Little Richard's.
(Beware: Little Richard has since recorded several versions of "Tutti Frutti," none of which comes even close to the original. In 1964 Vee-Jay Records rerecorded several of his old Specialty Records hits, and they are terrible! However, they're often repackaged in albums and sold to look like the original hits. Always look for the Specialty trademark.)
"Little Richard had the best [hairdo]. I grew this mustache because I wanted to be the white Little Richard when I was nineteen. On the cover of his first album, he looked like he was from Mars. He was the most frightening man in rock 'n' roll."-John Waters, film director
"Seeing Little Richard singing 'Tutu Frutti' and getting over, I went on to the WIBB studios to do a demo of [my first bit] Please Please Please.'"-James Brown, singer
"'Tutu Frutti' and 'Long Tall Sally.' When I heard them on the radio, they encompassed everything that was missing from my world. Put it this way: Little Richard . . . was where I wanted to be."-Lou Reed