He said it himself, the first time I saw him live: “I am the beautiful Little Richard! The originator! The emancipator! The architect of rock ‘n’ roll! History alive! Are you glad to see me? Oooo… I feel so real! I AM  real! Shut up! I’m not conceited–I’m convinced!”

What can I add? I’m a huge fan and for a while was thinking of doing a book about him. But I’ve tended not to perform his songs, because… well, come on: what can one do with a Little Richard song after hearing Little Richard do it?

He wasn’t like Chuck Berry, who wrote brilliant lyrics; he wrote pretty simple lyrics — perfect, maybe, but simple. What mattered was the performance, the voice, the piano, the whole thing. I saw him three times, all in the space of two weeks, and am forever glad, because seeing those shows in that space of time, I got to see how much variation he brought to every show. For example, he did “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” at every show, but the first show he called over his guitarist to sit with him on the piano bench and just sang to the guitar, the next time he did it solo at the piano, and the third time he did it with the full band. He performed “I Saw Her Standing There” at all three shows, but at the second show he never went to the bridge.

I was reviewing him for the Boston Globe, so got to talk to his bandleader, the trumpet player, who told me they never knew which song was coming next or how he’d do it. They just had to pay attention and follow him. It was quite a band, as well: eight pieces, including two bass players, one keeping time and the other, in high platform shoes, popping, slapping, and looking like Bootsy Collins.

No other pioneering rock ‘n’ roll star kept their show that fresh, but Richard was always more than just a rock ‘n’ roll star. He began as a gospel-tinged female impersonator on the southern club circuit, was recording good blues records by 1951, hit nationally with “Tutti Frutti” in 1955, inspiring a wave of imitators that included Otis Redding and James Brown, and when they led a new wave of soul music in the 1960s, he recorded some beautiful soul sides, including the magnificent “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me,” written by Don Covay, who also sang second vocal, and featuring Billy Preston on organ and Jimi Hendrix on guitar.

I know a bunch of Richard’s classic hits from the 1950s, not because I learned them, but because they are part of my cultural DNA. But, again, I’ve never tended to play them, except occasionally for my own pleasure, and I doubt I’ll ever post a version of “Tutti Frutti” or “Lucille…” but, then again, I would have said the same thing about “Long Tall Sally…” and then I came up with a version of “Kansas City” that used some older blues guitar licks, and somehow this fell together and I’ve been really enjoying playing it.

Richard used to explain that he wrote this after Pat Boone’s “Tutti Frutti” was a bigger hit than his original, the idea being that Boone could never match the speed and perfection of his enunciation of phrases like “Saw Aunt Mary coming and he ducked back in the alley.” Which, of course, was true. I’ve posted his full version of that story and some others on youtube, and recommend it; he always told his story better than anyone else could.

So anyway, this is my tribute to the originator, the emancipator, the architect, the true King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.