On this day in 1955 — 68 years ago today — Little Richard walked into a New Orleans recording studio and gave birth to "Tutti Frutti."
On this day in 1955 — 68 years ago today — Little Richard walked into a New Orleans recording studio and gave birth to "Tutti Frutti."
Little Richard, B.B. Kings Club, New York City, 2004
Photo by Frank Beacham
The question of who invented rock and roll will be never be answered authoritatively, but one of the handful of names that belongs in any discussion of the topic is Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard.
He has called himself "The Architect of Rock and Roll" — a title he has every right to claim by force of both his music, which played a critical role in moving early rock and roll toward its now-familiar sound, and his personality, which helped create our basic expectations of rock-and-roll performers and performances.
The combined power of those forces was unleashed upon the world as a result of the events that took place on this day in 1955 — 68 years ago today — when Little Richard walked into a New Orleans recording studio and gave birth to a record called "Tutti Frutti."
As a child growing up in Macon, Georgia, Little Richard was exposed to great music by the likes of Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald, but it left him wanting something stronger. "I knew there was something that could be louder than that," he later said, "but didn't know where to find it. And I found out it was me."
"Tutti frutti, good booty..." was the way the version went that Little Richard was accustomed to performing in his club act, and from there it got into censorship.
It was during a lunch break from his first-ever recording session that Little Richard went to the piano and banged that filthy tune out for his producer, Bumps Blackwell, who was extremely unhappy with the results of the session so far.
As Blackwell would later tell it, "He hits that piano, dididididididididi...and starts to sing, 'Awop-bop-a-Loo-Mop a-good Goddam...' and I said 'Wow! That's what I want from you Richard. That's a hit!'"
But first, the song's racy lyrics had to be reworked for there to be any chance of the song being deemed acceptable by the conservative American audience of the 1950s. An aspiring local songwriter by the name of Dorothy La Bostrie was quickly summoned to the Dew Drop Inn to come up with new lyrics for the un-recordable original.
By the time they all returned from lunch, the "Tutti frutti, all rooty" with which we are now familiar was written down alongside lyrics about two girls, Sue and Daisy.
In the last 15 minutes of that historic recording session on September 14, 1955, "Tutti Frutti" was recorded, and Little Richard's claim to have been present at the birth of rock and roll was secured.
In 2007, Little Richard was having problems walking due to sciatica in his left leg, requiring him to use crutches. In November, 2009, he entered a hospital to have replacement surgery on his left hip.
Despite returning to perform the following year, his problems with his hip continued and the musician was often helped onstage by a wheelchair. He has told fans that his surgery has his hip "breaking inside" and refuses to have further work on it.
The question of who invented rock and roll will be never be answered authoritatively, but one of the handful of names that belongs in any discussion of the topic is Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard.
He has called himself "The Architect of Rock and Roll" — a title he has every right to claim by force of both his music, which played a critical role in moving early rock and roll toward its now-familiar sound, and his personality, which helped create our basic expectations of rock-and-roll performers and performances.
The combined power of those forces was unleashed upon the world as a result of the events that took place on this day in 1955 — 66 years ago today — when Little Richard walked into a New Orleans recording studio and gave birth to a record called "Tutti Frutti."
As a child growing up in Macon, Georgia, Little Richard was exposed to great music by the likes of Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald, but it left him wanting something stronger. "I knew there was something that could be louder than that," he later said, "but didn't know where to find it. And I found out it was me."
"Tutti frutti, good booty..." was the way the version went that Little Richard was accustomed to performing in his club act, and from there it got into censorship.
It was during a lunch break from his first-ever recording session that Little Richard went to the piano and banged that filthy tune out for his producer, Bumps Blackwell, who was extremely unhappy with the results of the session so far.
As Blackwell would later tell it, "He hits that piano, dididididididididi...and starts to sing, 'Awop-bop-a-Loo-Mop a-good Goddam...' and I said 'Wow! That's what I want from you Richard. That's a hit!'"
But first, the song's racy lyrics had to be reworked for there to be any chance of the song being deemed acceptable by the conservative American audience of the 1950s. An aspiring local songwriter by the name of Dorothy La Bostrie was quickly summoned to the Dew Drop Inn to come up with new lyrics for the un-recordable original.
By the time they all returned from lunch, the "Tutti frutti, all rooty" with which we are now familiar was written down alongside lyrics about two girls, Sue and Daisy.
In the last 15 minutes of that historic recording session on September 14, 1955, "Tutti Frutti" was recorded, and Little Richard's claim to have been present at the birth of rock and roll was secured.
In 2007, Little Richard was having problems walking due to sciatica in his left leg, requiring him to use crutches. In November, 2009, he entered a hospital to have replacement surgery on his left hip.
Despite returning to perform the following year, his problems with his hip continued and the musician was often helped onstage by a wheelchair. He told fans that his surgery has his hip "breaking inside" and he refused to have further work on it.
Little Richard died on May 9, 2020, at the age of 87 at his home in Tullahoma, Tennessee from a cause related to bone cancer, after a two-month illness.
Here Little Richard performs “Tutti Frutti” in the 1956 Alan Freed film, “Don’t Knock the Rock”
Thanks History.com
Isadora Duncan
Photo by Barbara Morgan
On September 14, 1927 — 96 years ago today — dancer Isadora Duncan was strangled in Nice, France, when the enormous silk scarf she was wearing got tangled in the rear hubcaps of her open car.
"Affectations," said Gertrude Stein when she heard the news of Duncan's death, "can be dangerous."
Duncan was born in 1877 in San Francisco and moved to Europe to become a dancer when she was in her early 20s. She had always loved to dance — in her teens, she worked as a dance teacher at her mother's music school.
However, Duncan was not a classically trained ballerina. On the contrary, she was a free-spirited bohemian whose dances were improvisational and emotional. They were choreographed, she said, "to rediscover the beautiful, rhythmical motions of the human body."
In contrast to the short tutus and stiff shoes that ballet dancers wore, Duncan typically danced barefoot, wrapped in flowing togas and scarves. Female audiences, in particular, adored her: In an era when classical ballet was falling out of favor with many sophisticated people (and when the scantily-clad dancers themselves were, more often than not, "sponsored" by wealthy male patrons), Duncan's performances celebrated independence and self-expression.
Duncan lived a self-consciously bohemian, eccentric life offstage as well. She was a feminist and a Darwinist, an advocate of free love and a Communist. For this, her American citizenship was revoked in the early 1920s.
Meanwhile, her life was a tragic one, especially when it came to automobiles. In 1913, her two small children drowned when the car they were riding in plunged over a bridge and into the Seine in Paris, and Duncan herself was seriously injured in car accidents in 1913 and 1924.
On the day she died at age 50, Duncan was a passenger in a brand-new convertible sports car that she was learning to drive.
As she leaned back in her seat to enjoy the sea breeze, her enormous red scarf "which she had worn since she took up communism," one newspaper reported. blew into the well of the rear wheel on the passenger side.
It wound around the axle, tightening around Duncan's neck and dragging her from the car and onto the cobblestone street. She died instantly.
Thanks History.com
“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.”
— Isadora Duncan
Photo by Barbara Morgan
Amy Winehouse was born 40 years ago today.
Winehouse was a singer and songwriter known for her powerful deep contralto vocals and her eclectic mix of musical genres including R&B, soul and jazz.
Her 2003 debut album, Frank, was critically successful in the UK and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.
Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning on July 23, 2011 at age 27.
Her album, Back to Black, subsequently became the UK's best-selling album so far this century.
Here, Winehouse sings “Body and Soul” with Tony Bennett in 2011.
Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger
Photo by Mary Ellen Mark
Clayton Moore, actor who played the Lone Ranger on television, was born 109 years ago today.
Moore was the Lone Ranger from 1949–1951 and 1954–1957.
Born in Chicago, he became a circus acrobat by age eight and appeared at the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago in 1934 with a trapeze act. As a young man, Moore worked successfully as a John Robert Powers model. Moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s, he worked as a stunt man and bit player between modeling jobs.
Moore was an occasional player in “B” westerns and the lead in four Republic Studio cliffhangers, and two for Columbia.
He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II and made training films (Target — Invisible and others) with the First Motion Picture Unit.
Moore's career advanced in 1949, when George Trendle spotted him in the Ghost of Zorro serial. As creator-producer of The Lone Ranger radio show (with writer Fran Striker), Trendle was about to launch the television version. Moore landed the role.
Moore trained his voice to sound like the radio version of The Lone Ranger, which had then been on the air since 1933, and succeeded in lowering his already distinctive baritone even further.
With the first notes of Rossini's "William Tell Overture" and actor Gerald Mohr's "Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear ... ," Moore and co-star Jay Silverheels, in the role of Tonto, made television history as the stars of the first Western written specifically for that medium.
The Lone Ranger soon became the highest-rated program to that point on the fledgling ABC network and its first true hit — earning an Emmy nomination in 1950. Moore starred in 169 episodes of the television show.
After two successful years presenting a new episode every week, 52 weeks a year, Moore had a pay dispute and left the series. Eventually the show's producers came to terms and rehired Moore.
He stayed with the program until it ended first-run production in 1957. He and Jay Silverheels also starred in two feature-length Lone Ranger motion pictures. After completion of the second feature, The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold in 1958, Moore embarked on what would be 40 years of personal appearances, TV guest spots and classic commercials as the legendary masked man.
Silverheels joined him for occasional appearances during the early 1960s. Throughout his career, Moore expressed respect and love for Silverheels.
In 1979, the owner of the Ranger character, Jack Wrather, obtained a court order prohibiting Moore from making future appearances as The Lone Ranger. Wrather anticipated making a new film version of the story, and did not want the value of the character being undercut by Moore's appearances.
Also, Wrather did not want to encourage the belief that the 65-year-old Moore would be playing the role in the new picture. This move proved to be a public relations disaster.
Moore responded by changing his costume slightly and replacing the Domino mask with similar-looking Foster Grant wraparound sunglasses, and by counter-suing Wrather. He eventually won the suit, and was able to resume his appearances in costume, which he continued to do until shortly before his death.
Moore was so identified with the masked man that he is the only person on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, as of 2006, to have his character's name along with his on the star, which reads, "Clayton Moore — The Lone Ranger.”
He was inducted into the Stuntman's Hall of Fame in 1982 and in 1990 was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Clayton Moore died on December 28, 1999, in a West Hills, California, hospital after suffering a heart attack at his home in nearby Calabasas. He was 85.
The late Jay Thomas tells a Lone Ranger story to David Letterman, 2009.
The late Jay Thomas tells a Lone Ranger story to David Letterman, 2009.
On this day in 1982 — 41 years ago today — Princess Grace of Monaco, the American-born former film star, Grace Kelly, died at the age of 52 from injuries suffered after her car plunged off a mountain road near Monte Carlo.
During the height of her Hollywood career in the 1950s, Kelly became an international icon of beauty and glamour. Her films included The Country Girl and Rear Window.
Kelly, the daughter of a former model and a wealthy industrialist, was born on November 12, 1929, in Philadelphia, and began acting as a child. After high school, she attended the American Academy for Dramatic Arts in New York.
While she auditioned for Broadway plays, the classic blonde beauty supported herself by modeling and appearing in TV commercials. In 1949, Kelly debuted on Broadway in The Father by August Strindberg. Two years later, she landed her first Hollywood bit part in Fourteen Hours.
Her big break came in 1952, when she starred as Gary Cooper’s wife in High Noon, the western. Her performance in 1954’s The Country Girl, as the wife of an alcoholic actor and singer played by Bing Crosby, won her a Best Actress Oscar. Kelly beat out Judy Garland in A Star is Born.
Among Kelly’s other acting credits were three Alfred Hitchcock thrillers: Dial M for Murder (1954) with Ray Milland and Robert Cummings, Rear Window (1954) with James Stewart and To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant.
Her last big-screen role was in 1956’s High Society, a musical adaptation of 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, co-starring Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.
Kelly gave up her acting career after marrying Prince Rainier III of Monaco (1923-2005) on April 19, 1956, in a lavish ceremony in Monaco. The couple, who had met the year before at the Cannes Film Festival, went on to have three children.
On September 13, 1982, Princess Grace was driving with her youngest daughter, Stephanie, when she reportedly suffered a stroke and lost control of her car, which plunged down a mountainside.
Stephanie, then 17, survived, but Princess Grace died the following day. Her death was mourned by millions of fans throughout the world.
Thanks History.com
Patti and Fred Sonic Smith, backstage at the Second Chance, Ann Arbor, Michigan, February 8, 1978
Photo by Sue Rynski
“I ‘stole’ this moment between Patti and Fred backstage. The next night I returned with a print for them. They were standing together in about the same location where the photo was taken. Fred and his band were my friends, but I’d never spoken with Patti. She took the photo, looked at Fred and said, “This perfectly describes our relationship.” Then she said to me, “This will be our wedding picture.”
— Sue Rynski
Fred "Sonic" Smith was born 75 years ago today.
A guitarist and member of the band, MC5, Smith was married to poet and singer, Patti Smith, and collaborated on her 1988 album, Dream of Life. After MC5, Smith formed Rendezvous Band, which released one single, "City Slang," during Smith's lifetime.
Smith was playing a gig in which his band was opening for Smith. Patti Smith's guitarist, Lenny Kaye, introduced Fred and Patti before the show and the two were married in 1980. Fred served as inspiration for Patti Smith who wrote to him, among other tributes, a song called "Frederick.”
Smith died in 1994 at age 45 of heart failure. Smith's 1996 album, Gone Again, features a tribute to her late husband.
The Smiths had a son, Jackson (born in 1982), who is married to Meg White (formerly of indie band, The White Stripes) and a daughter, Jesse (born in 1987), who is a pianist and has performed on stage with her mother.
In this 1978 clip, Patti Smith and her group play with future husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, in the Second Chance Club in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Car crash, Washington, D.C., 1921