Little Richard: Here's Little Richard [CONCORD]

Why you'll love it

This Specialty edition presents the album in mono on 180g vinyl. It reached No. 13 on the Billboard pop albums chart, and Rolling Stone placed it at No. 50 on its first 500 Greatest Albums list.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Mono

About the album

Every rock and roll singer who has ever let rip into a microphone owes something to the opening seconds of "Tutti Frutti." In March 1957, Specialty Records gathered that single and the rest of Richard Penniman's early hits onto one LP, and it still sounds like popular music's big bang: pounding piano, a voice that goes from croon to howl in a single bar, and a horn section doing its best to keep up.

Producer Robert "Bumps" Blackwell cut most of it at J&M Studio in New Orleans with the city's finest session players. "Long Tall Sally" went to No. 1 on the R&B chart, and "Slippin' and Slidin'," "Rip It Up," "Ready Teddy" and "Jenny, Jenny" followed it up the charts. Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and Eddie Cochran were soon covering his songs, and the Library of Congress added "Tutti Frutti" to the National Recording Registry in 2009.

Little Richard went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with its very first class in 1986. A few years after this album, the Beatles opened for him on some European dates, a sentence that never stops being remarkable.

Also at Kops: more Little Richard on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Specialty / Craft (cat# SP 2100), a reissue of the 1957 album.