Remember Little Richard? A Queen of The South/When Being Gay was to be a Communist

• • Jon Savage
  • The Observer 

Portrait of American rock & roll singer Little Richard (Richard Penniman) performing while standing at a piano Photograph: Frank Driggs Collection/Getty Images

In February 1955, the music that would become known as rock'n'roll was still latent. Bill Haley and the Comets were in the pop top 20 with Dim, Dim the Lights. Elvis Presley had recently released his third Sun Records single, Milkcow Blues Boogie. Fats Domino was nearing breakthrough. It was there, in the clubs, on the jukeboxes, and on the R&B charts, but it was not yet named.

During that month, several men – and one woman in her mid-20s – were in a New Orleans studio trying to make a record. Producer Robert "Bumps" Blackwell knew the singer, the 22-year-old Little Richard (AKA Richard Wayne Penniman), was a star, but the music wasn't happening. Richard had already been through two record labels, RCA and Peacock. Time was running out.

After five so-so songs, they took a lunch break. Richard took over the piano and started hamming it up, pounding out his forte riff. As he later told his biographer, Charles White: "One song which would really tear the house down 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 …'"

Richard was well aware of the song's risque connotations. Fascinated by all kinds of sex and – by his own account – a compulsive voyeur, he had immersed himself in the subterranean gay world of his native deep south, meeting along his travels legendary characters such as the eldritch rocker Esquerita (Steven Reeder) and the female impersonator Bobby Marchan.

Blackwell spotted a hit, and a record that finally caught the lightning- rod personality of the singer. The lyrics, however, were impossible: a flamboyant gay performer singing about anal sex was too much. He enlisted Dorothy La Bostrie, who was attending the session to watch Richard recording one of her songs, to write some new words on the spot. They then nailed it in three takes.

Released in October as Little Richard's debut on Speciality Records, Tutti Frutti – with its sensational and often disputed catchphrase, "Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom" – made the US pop top 20 in early 1956, surviving even the sales lost to Pat Boone's anodyne cover version. (The thought of the whiter-than-white Boone singing a song with these connotations is exquisitely ironic.)

Covered by Elvis Presley, Tutti Frutti catapulted Richard into the front rank of the new movement. Over the next four years, he released a sequence of explosive records that were hits both in the US and the UK: Long Tall Sally, Rip It Up, Slippin' and Slidin', Lucille, Jenny Jenny, Keep A-knockin', Good Golly Miss Molly, Ooh My Soul – all holy writs of rock'n'roll.

In the UK, Richard was massive, partly thanks to his appearance in The Girl Can't Help It (1956) – the greatest rock'n'roll film ever – which he stole with his pompadour and his manic commitment to the big bad beat. Even after he temporarily quit pop music to become a preacher, in October 1957, his records still made the charts for a couple of years: Baby Face, Kansas City.

In retrospect, all the great founding rockers were extraordinary characters, but Richard was one of the wildest of them all. Jerry Lee Lewis might have been a force of nature, Gene Vincent a contorted street punk, but Richard combined camp, androgyny and the toughest, most monomaniac rock into a look, a feel and a sound that would have a massive influence in the decades to come.

In the early 60s, Richard – who had returned to the devil's music – toured with both the Beatles and the Stones. In 1962, he taught Paul McCartney his trademark holler, and McCartney repaid the debt with two of the Beatles' most ferocious covers, Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey! and Long Tall Sally – the song that closed their last-ever public live show in August 1966.

Richard's influence is immense and can be felt in performers as diverse as John Lennon, Sam Cooke, Smokey Robinson, Otis Redding, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Elton John and Jimi Hendrix – the latter played with him during 1965 and cut a record that year, I Don't Know What You've Got But It's Got Me. Through Hendrix, there is the influence on performers such as Prince, among many others.

Now approaching his 80th birthday, Little Richard has seen his innovations become part of the mainstream. All the major stars – including Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson – that have made androgyny and flamboyance part of their appeal owe him a debt. He embodies the original promise of rock: that the marginal, the weird and the outcast should have their place in the sun.