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New Orleans - Part 3

© Barney Quick

The session had that make-or-break feeling, as if the singer’s career were hanging in the balance. Richard Penniman had released several sides on two labels, RCA and Peacock, in the previous four years, but without much to show for it in the way of sales. Now, signed to Art Rupe’s Specialty label and paired with producer Bumps Blackwell, Penniman was running out the clock at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio on New Orleans’ Rampart Street this 1955 day. The band had tried several blues things at various tempos, but it all sounded distressingly uninspired.

Blackwell called a lunch break, hoping for some way to regroup before he depleted his label’s budget for the project. Everyone went over to the Dew Drop Inn. Penniman sat down at the club’s piano. Someone suggested that he try the wild little novelty number he sometimes did in his stage act. Penniman was reluctant. He’d faced enough trouble in life as a gay black blues shouter in the deep South and didn’t want to be identified with a song that began “A wop bop a lu-bop a good god-damn, tutti-fruiti, good booty.” Especially when the lyrics that followed got even more explicit in celebrating gay sex. He finally acquiesced and drove the band through two minutes plus of the most searing pandemonium anyone in the room had ever heard.

We have a hit, thought Blackwell. Someone called local songwriter Dorothy La Bostrie, who crafted some tamer lyrics. The assemblage headed back to the studio and put the result on tape. Thus did Little Richard make the leap from third-tier chitlin-circuit act to one of the major shaping forces of rock and roll.

J&M Studio stayed busy in those days. Pianist-arranger Harold Batiste, tenor saxophonists Lee Allen and Alvin “Red” Tyler, drummer Earl Palmer, guitarists Ernest McLean and Roy Montrell and others left their stamp on records by Shirley and Lee, Smiley Lewis, Huey “Piano” Smith, Fats Domino and Clarence “Frogman” Henry throughout the mid-1950s.

Those records marked the second great wave of New Orleans r&b. It was characterized by a lot of nonsense singing (such as the “gooba gooba” chorus on “Don’t You Just Know It?” by Smith and Henry’s frog and girl imitations on “Ain’t Got A Home”) and unpolished voices, backed by the most solid, tight session musicianship to be found in any studio in the country. It was fun party music, but not well suited to longevity. It wasn’t much for such crack players to sink their teeth into, either. A lot of them, notably Palmer and Batiste, left for Los Angeles.

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