A Rock And Roll Original

This is a fine collection of the songs Little Richard recorded for the Specialty label.

Back in the day, Little Richard scared the hell out of middle class white American parents but the kids knew what was good!

You've got Little Richard pounding away at his piano and singing in his own inimitable style, a great sax player who sounds like he might blow out a lung at any moment and a drummer who provides the steady rockin' beat to Richard's anarchic style of rock!

The last two cuts ("Baby Face" and "Silvery Moon") are pretty tame but the rest of this album is terrific.

The songs have been digitally remastered from the original tapes and sound great.

The only minus is a lack of decent liner notes.

The REAL KING OF ROCK AND ROLL!

Little Richard is the real King of Rock n Roll. Get this wonderful collection & hear the power and energy of this legend

The title is right...

Richard's pioneering work at the dawn of rock and roll is all contained in the 46 minutes of this disc. The songs, sound and spirit were laid down nearly 50 years ago, but still seem exciting today. I was not quite a teenager when "Tutti Fruitti" hit the charts, but I sat up and took notice. Little Richard was the model for Jerry Lee Lewis a short time later, and influenced everyone. Kind of like a black Liberace on speed, he frightened white parents and even some white teens, who bought Pat Boone's tamer versions of his songs instead of these Specialty singles. If you care about the birth of rock, this one has to be on your shelf along with Elvis's Sun recordings and his first RCA release, the one with "Hound Dog." Back in '54 and '55 there was Bill Haley and Hank Ballard and then Elvis and Little Richard and then Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and everyone else. Nobody was as frenetic as Richard. The booklet with this CD is lamentably short on prose, but has some great b/w photos of L.R. in his prime. However, it's the songs that count, most of them under two minutes and seeming to race by even faster, with the pounding piano and the shreiking horns. It's all good, all important, and all fun.