Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, by David Kirby.

Book review by Justin Brooke

In the introduction to his new Little Richard biography, poet David Kirby lets us know right off what kind of book this is going to be, declaring: “If this book were a car, it’d be a hooptie — an Oldsmobile 88, say.”

Kirby proceeds to take us on a fast and bumpy (yet stylin’) ride through the mad career of The Georgia Peach himself: Richard Wayne Penniman. Along the way we’re treated to Kirby’s witty, poetical musings on pop music, the 1950s, the “Old, Weird America”, Gay Macon, and the occasional Chuck Berry zinger. In fact Kirby drives us right into the heart — I mean the birth — of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Strangely, it’s not so much the biography of a man, but the biography of a song. “Tutti Frutti” was Richard’s breakout 1955 single. It must have horrified people when it first erupted from A.M. radios. Kirby asks: how exactly did a song like that come to be?

He begins with Richard’s magical incantation: A wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a lop-bam-boom, a phrase born in the dish pit of the Macon Greyhound Station, where young Richard used it as a way to curse out his boss. We see it evolve from there into a bar song about anal sex, and then (as Kirby claims) into the world’s first Rock ’n’ Roll song.

Try as he might, Kirby is never able to nail down an interview with The Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll himself. The closest he gets is a phone conversation with the man at the home of Willie Ruth Howard, Richard’s cousin. Here, in a hilarious exchange, Little Richard tricks Kirby into giving Willie Ruth 88 dollars.

Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll is a funny, strange, and totally fitting tribute to a long-overlooked genius. Was “Tutti Frutti” really the “first” Rock ‘n’ Roll song, as Kirby insists? Sure, I’ll buy that. And even if you disagree, I think you’ll love this book anyway. Any musician, music-lover, or lover of weirdness should hop on in.

Justin Brooke is a guitarist and one of the frontmen in the Atlanta based band Howlies