Sad news is coming through that Little Richard has passed
away.https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/little-richard-dead-48505/Little Richard was born Richard Wayne Penniman (December 5, 1932 – May 9, 2020). He was a pioneer of rock and roll music, supremely charismatic and a showman who was known for his almost frenetic piano playing.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_RichardHis cause of death is listed as bone cancer. He passed away at his family home.Bob Dylan was influenced by Little Richard as a teenager. He wrote in his high school yearbook in 1959 that his ambition was to ‘Join Little Richard’.The EDLIS Hibbing website (and the EDLIS book, ‘Bob Dylan’s Hibbing) has entries about Bob Dylan and Little Richard.http://hibbing.yolasite.com/family-and-friends.phpLeRoy Hoikkala:”I knew Bob pretty much from school and everything. Growing up you see each other. It is a small town. You know, everybody knows everybody in town. How we got to meet as far as playing in a band was Monte Edwardson–who is a guitar player; who is very good; he still plays today; he is a natural guitar player–we worked downtown, Monte and myself. Right across the street [from school], we met each other and we walked to a little job, an after-school job. And Bob was just there one day. Monte and I had been messing around with playing drums and guitar; just jamming a little bit. I had taken lessons for quite a few years. So, Bob just happened to say, “Hey, you guys going downtown?”We actually walked from school to downtown, so we told him that we were playing, you know, just getting together and jamming around and playing. So, he said: “Hey, I’m playing piano, mouth-organ, harmonica and guitar. Maybe we could get together and kind of play a little bit.”We said, “Yes, sure.”So we started playing in Bob’s garage that was attached to his house, that little garage. We jammed in there for quite a bit, and we got a couple of jobs. The first time he ever got paid to do anything was with our band the Golden Chords.Sometimes we’d go into the house to play, because he had a piano in the house.It was just the three of us at that time. Me, Monte Edwardson and Bob. I played drums.We played at the National Guard Armory, a pretty big building. We hired the police department, because you had to have the police, we hired people to collect tickets, we sold tickets, made tickets. We hired someone to clean the place up and everything, and we made money. It was kind of fun. It was one of those things where you put a lot of money out and do something; try to fix a Saturday night rock opera or “jam,” and a lot of kids came. That was probably the first time Bob ever was paid to do anything musically.It was a dance. There was a wide-open area, no chairs, nothing, big stage, that’s all.It was a onetime show, that particular one. That was kind of how we got together and started playing.Then we played that talent show, you know, where we actually won but lost, because the kids went crazy [but the judges] gave it to someone else that tap danced. Bob was a little detached on that one saying, “We should have won, you know?” Because, in fact the audience was with us, but they gave it to someone else. We came in second. (He laughs.)That was the three of us as the Golden Chords. The reason we called it the Golden Chords was because Bob was really…he could really chord with the piano and the guitar, really chord beautifully. He was really a natural at chording. And my drums were gold, sparkling gold. So, we said Golden…Chords, that´s how we got the name.Ah, we played some of the Little Richard tunes, [like] “Jenny, Jenny.” Some of the southern type music, the blues songs…a lot of Little Richard. Bob loved Little Richard, so we did a lot of Little Richard stuff.”— Interview withLeRoy Hoikkala, conducted by Lars Lindhhttp://www.b-dylan.com/pages/samples/leroyhoikkala.html===The tape made with his school friend John Bucklen in 1958 features Bob Zimmerman the rock’n’roller, playing piano and guitar and singing snatches of five songs (with some shared vocals by Bucklen) interspersed with conversation between the two. The songs are ‘Little Richard’ (composed by Dylan), ‘Buzz Buzz Buzz’ (a hit for the Hollywood Flames in late 1957 to early 1958), ‘Jenny, Jenny’ (a Little Richard song), ‘We Belong Together’ (a minor chart hit in March that year for an adenoidal black harmony duo from the Bronx called Robert & Johnny, i.e. Robert Carr and Johnny Mitchell) and the unknown ‘Betty Lou’ (sometimes listed wrongly as ‘Blue Moon’). Four were first heard, though incompletely, on BBC-TV’s excellent ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, first broadcast in the UK on May 8, 1993.===https://www.facebook.com/groups/EDLISPianos/permalink/381036015256944/Billy James interview – October 1961, New York:Dylan: I play the piano. I used to play the piano. I used to play great piano, very great. I used to play Little Richard stuff only an octave higher. And everything came out – He made a big mistake – his records were great records – but couldn’t have been greater. His great mistake was he played low. If he had played high, they would’ve been uncomplicated. Do you listen to Little Richard?James: No.Dylan: Well, Little Richard’s something else. He’s a preacher, man. But I sort of played the piano in his style. And I played everything high and amplified it.– This interview was conducted by Billy James of CBS sometime in the Fall, 1961. It is the first known taped interview and this is a transcript of the, unfortunately incomplete tape, published in Stephen Pickering’s Praxis: One. A complete transcript (?) was published in New Musical Express 4/24/76.http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/61-fall.htmhttp://dvdylanjim50reviews.yolasite.com/resources/Reference%20%281%29.pdf