Macon Remembers Hometown Music Icon Little Richard

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Little Richard greets crowd of well wishers at the historic Douglass Theatre while in town in 2001 to receive an award. / Courtesy of The Telegraph

"The Architect of Rock 'n' Roll" is being remembered in his hometown of Macon, Georgia, after he died Saturday at 87.

"Little" Richard Penniman created music like no one had heard before. And, growing up in Macon’s historically Black Pleasant Hill neighborhood, he was a kid like no one had seen before.Macon remembers Little Richard

“Richard was a known character around here. He was always, uh, somewhat effeminate,” said music producer Gary Montgomery, a longtime friend of Penniman’s.

“So he said, ‘Look, I was born with one leg shorter than the other,’ a couple inches maybe, ‘a big head.’ He said, ‘If I wanted to play with the boys, I’d have to play baseball and run, but I couldn’t move because of the one leg shorter than the other, my parents couldn’t afford shoes for me.’”

Instead, Penniman took to playing dollhouse with the girls. In 1997, he told CBS’s Tom Snyder that the swishy identity he forged proved advantageous to his music career.

“To be black, and to work for white girls, I had to look that way," Penniman said. "If I didn’t wear makeup and look feminine, I could work the white clubs, they wouldn’t let me be with the white girls. So the more effeminate I looked, they didn’t mind me being with the white women. They said, ‘Oh Richard, ain’t nothing to him, ain’t a thing to him.’”

The boy who would become "Little Richard" got his first break at the Macon City Auditorium, a 2,600-seat theater with a beautiful, reverberant copper dome over it.

Penniman had a job selling Coca Cola there when he was 14 years old, and was present for a show by Arkansas proto-rock singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

He later wrote of that day, "She asked me if I wanted to come up on the stage that night and sing a song with her. During the show, in front of everybody, she invited me up to sing. Everybody applauded and cheered, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to me."

Penniman liked to loudly imitate Tharpe's boogie-woogie sound with his left hand while he played piano in church, which cost him the gig. He found that he could play as he wanted at Ann’s Tick-Tock Club, a hole-in-the-wall in downtown Macon on what was known as "the Chitlin’ Circuit" — a string of venues across the eastern U.S. where black performers could play in the days of Jim Crow.

The old club has since housed restaurants frequented by Montgomery.

"This is when he was washing dishes at the bus station. He’d come in, come and sing and go back to work," Montgomery said.

That kitchen job at the Greyhound station down the street actually gave Penniman his first hit — "Tutti Frutti."

As he told Snyder, Penniman struggled to scrape all the old beans from the bottoms of tall pots that he had to wash. When the pots weren’t clean enough, he’d catch flack from his white bosses.

“And you know you couldn’t say nothing back to those white people," Penniman said. "All I could say was ‘Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom,’ I mean, ‘Leave me alone,’ you know? And that’s the way I had to get back at them.”

Here's a sign of the times: When Little Richard recorded "Tutti Frutti," he would not have been allowed to attend Macon's Mercer University, then an all-white Baptist school. But 57 years later, Mercer president Bill Underwood stood at the podium at the school's 2013 commencement ceremony and uttered, in his white Southern drawl, "Bop bop a loo, a wop bam boo," to roaring applause.

Underwood then presented Penniman with an honorary doctorate.

The singer didn't speak, but smiled wide as blue sequined shoes peaked out from between his graduation gown and the foot of his wheelchair.

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Little Richard entertains a Macon crowd at the Coliseum in 2001 while his nephew looks on. / (courtesy The Telegraph)

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Little Richard on the campus of Mercer University after receiving his honorary degree