This contrast between Little Richard‘s “Tutti Frutti” (1955) and Pat Boone‘s cover (1956) is perhaps the clearest illustration of the racial and cultural gatekeeping that defined the early days of rock and roll. It is a story of raw, revolutionary genius meeting calculated, commercial assimilation.
🔥 Little Richard: The Revolutionary Original
Little Richard Penniman’s recording of “Tutti Frutti” is universally recognized as a foundational moment in rock and roll, setting the template for the genre with its energy and rebellious spirit.
- Musical Characteristics (The Heat):
- Tempo and Energy: Blazing fast, driven by Richard’s frantic, percussive piano playing and a powerful backbeat.
- Vocal Delivery: Richard’s voice is a scream, a whoop, a force of nature. It’s raw, loud, and bursting with unrestrained, gender-bending exuberance and sexual energy.
- The Signature Sound: The song is famous for its nonsense-syllable opening, “A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom!”—Richard’s vocalized drum beat—which signaled an explosion of new, unbridled sound.
- Lyrical Context (The Edge):
- The original, unrecorded lyrics Richard performed live were explicitly sexual and addressed queer themes (e.g., “Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy”).
- The recorded version, penned by Dorothy LaBostrie under pressure from the label to make it acceptable for radio, sanitized the lyrics, changing “good booty” to the slang phrase “aw rootie” (all righty) and replacing the suggestive verses with innocent rhymes about girls named Sue and Daisy. Even this “cleaned-up” version retained a palpable sensuality.
- Cultural Status: It was a massive Rhythm and Blues (R&B) hit, reaching #2 on the R&B charts, proving the demand for this new, exciting Black music.
🍦 Pat Boone: The Sanitized Cover
Pat Boone, a clean-cut, religiously devout, and commercially bankable pop crooner, was the industry’s answer to the “problem” of Little Richard’s radical appeal.
- Musical Characteristics (The Ice):
- Tempo and Energy: Significantly slower and softer. The track is delivered with a restrained, easy-listening pop arrangement that stripped away the frantic energy and wild abandon.
- Vocal Delivery: Boone’s delivery is smooth, calm, and traditional. It is purely vocal performance, entirely lacking the screams, shouts, and percussive vocalizations that were so integral to Richard’s emotional and sexual delivery.
- The Signature Sound: Boone omits the famous “A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom!” entirely, removing the song’s opening burst of rock and roll anarchy.
- Lyrical Context (The White Bread):
- Boone’s version used the already sanitized lyrics from Richard’s released version, but the inherent sensuality that Richard’s voice carried was completely neutralized by Boone’s clean-cut image and restrained delivery. The song became a generic, harmless pop tune.
- Cultural Status: Boone’s version reached a peak of #12 on the mainstream Pop chart (higher than Richard’s crossover peak of #17).
The Historical Irony and Inequity
The ultimate contrast reveals the deep-seated racial inequities of the 1950s music industry:
- Gatekeeping the Audience: Little Richard’s music was considered too “raw,” too sexual, and too threatening (both musically and racially) for the vast, lucrative mainstream white audience and white-controlled radio stations.
- Commercial Success for the Conduit: Pat Boone’s cover—which he himself later described as “admittedly sanitized” and “vanilla”—provided a commercially acceptable conduit. It allowed white, middle-class teenagers to hear the song’s melody and rhythm, while allowing their parents (and the record companies) to rest assured that the singer and the message were wholesome and non-threatening.
- Financial Injustice: While Little Richard was the creative architect who defined the sound of rock and roll, he was commercially marginalized. Pat Boone’s cover sold millions, ensuring that the lion’s share of the profit, mainstream airplay, and cultural capital flowed to the white artist and the major white record label, illustrating how Black creativity drove the industry while Black artists were often denied commensurate reward.
As Little Richard himself lamented: “They put me in the drawer and they put Pat Boone on the dresser.”
