Little Richard Penniman, the piano-pounding blues-belter from Georgia, was riding high on the rock \u2019n\u2019 roll charts \u2014 \u201cTutti Frutti,\u201d \u201cLong, Tall Sally,\u201d those radical reinventions of the conventionally accepted idea of a pop-tune hit \u2014 when Fort Worth beckoned with a booking at the Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Richard\u2019s barnstorming tour of July-August 1956 ranged from New Orleans\u2019 Labor Union Hall to the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Nor did Little Richard\u2019s anchoring label, Los Angeles-based Specialty Records, neglect the provinces: Amarillo and Lubbock provided concert stops en route to Fort Worth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Amarillo nearly jinxed the deal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Specialty Records\u2019 founder, Art Rupe, prized emotional fervor over formal musicianship. Rupe had given Little Richard the liberty to be his own raw-edged self, challenging a segregated musical marketplace to accept an essentially Black rhythm-and-blues style without dilution. Before \u201cTutti Frutti\u201d had splashed in 1955, Little Richard was still laboring under archaic typecasting as a \u201crace records\u201d artist at a larger but less adventurous corporate label, RCA Victor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That transformative recording of \u201cTutti Frutti,\u201d its erotic essence tempered by a chant of seemingly nonsensical syllables, would thrust Little Richard (1932-2020) into the emerging, cautiously integrated idiom called rock \u2019n\u2019 roll. The singer-pianist became a kinsman of the agreeably mixed likes of Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Carl Perkins. The announcement of an Aug. 25 appearance in Fort Worth saw a surge in local retail sales of Little Richard\u2019s records; the show became a standing-room sellout.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The snag occurred on Aug. 23, 1956, at Amarillo. Could have been worse, and almost was. Cooler heads prevailed, however, as a result of some fast thinking (make-nice peacekeeping, that is) by Little Richard and his road manager-chauffeur, Aubrey Prince. The Lubbock and Fort Worth engagements went on as planned \u2014 not to give away too much, y\u2019know. The conspicuous arrests had included Richard, Prince, and the instrumental accompanists \u2014 a scant eight citizens, but nonetheless a full-band lineup in the small-ensemble music-making economy of the period.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I revisited the scene of that municipal embarrassment a few years ago. The site of Little Richard\u2019s disturbing-the-peace bust stands now as a ghostly West Side landmark of Old Amarillo called the Nat Ballroom \u2014 still sturdy, although its festive atmosphere has long since succumbed to the gloom of a ragtag antiques mall. The site is the San Jacinto neighborhood, an off-downtown enclave that has adapted its once-prosperous mercantile foundations to a tourist-bait vibe, stemming from its ties to a historic pre-Interstate System highway known as Route 66. (Yes, the inspiration of Bobby Troup\u2019s famous song of that title; rhymes with \u201cget your kicks.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Nat\u2019s immense dance floor, nowadays, seems cramped and maze-like when partitioned into vendors\u2019 booths. The once-ornate, acoustically bright bandstand has been crammed with trinkets and furnishings that resemble nothing so much as thrift-store merchandise with forbidding price tags. In recent times, a half-hearted attempt to decorate the stage with musical instruments, attached to human-scale mannequins in musician-like attire, seemed a feeble wax-museum echo of the Nat\u2019s heyday. The place scarcely resembles its jive-jumping state of the night when my Uncle Grady L. Wilson and I had watched Little Richard and his band stir a mixed crowd to a frenzy (the happy and benevolent sort) and then get themselves arrested in the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n
An Eye- and Ear-Witness Account\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Now, my Uncle Grady managed Amarillo\u2019s downtown movie theaters and made a sideline of booking traveling entertainers for the Black-neighborhood nightclubs. Grady was the first picture-show boss within Dallas-based Interstate Theater Circuit to remove the barriers of segregated moviegoing. The Interstate brass cast a cautious gaze at Grady\u2019s policy-busting experiment, given the geographical isolation of Amarillo. But Interstate applied such desegregation companywide when an increase in paid admissions became evident.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Grady made no secret of his integrationist politics. He would be the only one among my blood-kin elders to vote the Kennedy ticket for 1960, and he entrusted his dental care to one Dr. Richard W. Jones, a fellow combat veteran of World War II who also held forth as president of Amarillo\u2019s branch of the NAACP. No pretensions of fashionably liberal superciliousness for this uncle of mine; he merely made the choices that suited his interests, and so there.\u00a0<\/p>\n On that pivotal date of Aug. 23, 1956, when I was 8 years old, Grady invited me to attend Little Richard\u2019s pivotal show at Amarillo\u2019s Nat Ballroom. The cavernous, balconied dancehall had thrived for decades on customarily white-folks patronage, showcasing since the 1930s-1940s such monumental big-band personalities as Glenn Miller, Bob Wills, and Jimmie Lunceford.\u00a0<\/p>\n By 1956, the inflated post-WWII economy had deflated the traveling big-band attractions to a procession of small but emphatic combos, ranging from jazz to country-western to the stirrings of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll. On this occasion, the headliner was Little Richard Penniman, a profoundly Black rock \u2019n\u2019 roll star, born of amen-corner gospel and barrelhouse R&B. The crowd was salt-and-pepper \u2014 anybody could buy tickets \u2014 and the promoters had made none of the standard provisions for segregated seating. The adjoining Alamo Bar offered Schlitzes and Lone Stars in chilled cans, along with soft drink setups.\u00a0<\/p>\n Little Richard\u2019s program, frantic and thrilling, ended prematurely in an impulsive and awkwardly timed police raid that resulted in several arrests on intended charges of miscegenation \u2014 a misdemeanor rap, calculated to divide and conquer by sheer dehumanizing force of humiliation \u2014 for a number of mixed-color couples on the dance floor. The centerpiece was a public-nuisance bust for Little Richard, who had provided the provocation for such unbridled merriment. My uncle had sensed the raid before it could begin and edged us toward an exit, but not before we had witnessed a measure of the misadventure.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The entertainer\u2019s face, accompanied by a headline reading, \u201cHepcat Handcuffed,\u201d adorned the next morning\u2019s Daily News. The photograph captured a fleetingly somber expression on the face of the usually ebullient Little Richard, as if conforming to the naturally grim face of a Potter County deputy sheriff named John Brown. Depending upon which edition a subscriber might have received, the photo appeared variously upon Page 1 (the \u201cbulldog\u201d edition, printed around 1 a.m. for the Panhandle-at-large readership), or on an interior page of the \u201cfour-star,\u201d or late-morning press run.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, the Globe-News Company\u2019s resident publisher, S.B. Whittenburg, exercised a standing policy that no Black individual\u2019s face should appear upon Page 1 of any given day\u2019s editions, unless associated with a provocative or urgent story. But Whittenburg also knew better than to enforce that rule when its exception might help to sell a few thousand additional copies. As my father ranted over breakfast about the disgrace thus visited upon our town and the pernicious influence of this newfangled anti-music, I kept mum. The official account, from where I sat, allowed as how Uncle Grady and I had attended a double-bill feature at one of his theaters. I had studied up accordingly on the films\u2019 promotional kit. And, yes, that pairing of \u201cThe Werewolf\u201d and \u201cEarth vs. the Flying Saucers\u201d had been a sure-enough humdinger, embellished for good measure with a \u201cPopeye\u201d cartoon.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Back-Story, Further Documented\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n On a visit in 2018 to Amarillo, I dropped in on the life-support remains of the Nat Ballroom, just to see if any disembodied spirits might be stirring. While working as a musician during high school and college, I had booked my white-boy soul band into the Nat on occasion, and I had covered the property\u2019s erratic fortunes during the 1970s as a reporter and editor with the Daily News & Globe-Times.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n On this stopover of times more recent, I encountered a stranger near the cluttered former bandstand: The woman looked to be about 85 years of age. She had a story to tell.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI was dancing up a storm, here \u2014 right here \u2014 when all that happened, y\u2019know,\u201d she said by way of an almost-introduction.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHere when all what happened?\u201d I said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhy, when Little Richard got busted for stripping off his shirt,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was in the newspaper.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNo kidding? I was right here, too, when it happened.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWouldn\u2019t you have been a little too young for such rowdy nightlife?\u201d she demanded in a matronly, scolding tone.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI was a guest of an uncle. He was in show business.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOh. Then you remember.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cLooks as though we both remember,\u201d I said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another source, too young to possess first-hand impressions but capable of turning up surviving primary sources, had surfaced in 1999: Karen D. Smith, a new-generation reporter for Amarillo\u2019s since-conjoined Globe-News papers, located a long-retired law enforcer who had helped to railroad the raid and found him willing to talk. Smith\u2019s retrospective report tells the story like this:\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cLiquor agents and other authorities raided the singer\u2019s crowded concert at the Nat Ballroom after spotting several minors milling outside the hall, holding alcoholic beverage bottles.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cLawman Wayne Bagley, assistant district attorney at the time, and his wife were returning from dinner out with [liquor agent] W.C. Brewer and his wife when Brewer … stopped to check the situation out. Other liquor agents arrived, as well, Bagley said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Next thing I knew, they came carting Little Richard out,\u2019 Bagley said. \u2018They filed on him for some lewd conduct on stage…\u00a0 That was before he got to be so well-known.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n During an intermission, Bagley and Brewer\u2019s improvised fun-police squad had approached Little Richard with a request to temper the performance, as if expecting Perry Como or Pat Boone to materialize in his place. The entertainer resumed his act to welcoming applause \u2014 and cranked the tensions a notch by removing his shirt. At least the show ended on a crowd-pleasing high note, even if the authorities had stopped the music with a full-band shutdown.\u00a0<\/p>\n Back on the Road to Fort Worth\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Karen D. Smith\u2019s account of 1999 continues: \u201cIn Justice of the Peace C.W. Carder\u2019s courtroom the next morning, the group paid a collective $76 in fines after pleading guilty to a disturbing-the-peace charge. The other charges were dropped.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe singer and the manager, Aubrey Prince, said they only pleaded guilty because they had a Lubbock performance that night.\u201d The Lubbock and Fort Worth engagements proceeded without incident, although neither city\u2019s newspapers-of-record appear to have assigned any critics to appraise the performances. Localized arts-and-entertainment coverage of the day confined itself as a rule to hometown symphony orchestras and Little Theatre amateurism. Not to mention that the 1950s\u2019 nearest equivalent to formal or even consistent rock-music journalism amounted to blathering fan-magazine drivel.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Really, what happened is that [the authorities] told them not to come back,\u2019\u201d Bagley told Karen Smith. The reporter added as an aside: \u201cThe performers said they didn\u2019t want to return to Amarillo, anyway, and Prince ventured that the situation would threaten other concert dates he had arranged here for Nat \u201cKing\u201d Cole and Fats Domino.\u201d The road manager seems to have been bluffing, here: Nat Cole was a major-label, mass-audience attraction, better suited to Amarillo\u2019s Municipal Auditorium, and Fats Domino would at length play the Nat Ballroom without complications.\u00a0<\/p>\n Smith\u2019s story continues: \u201cAmarillo\u2019s audience didn\u2019t wow Little Richard, anyway. \u2018It\u2019s the quietest dance I ever played,\u2019 the artist told the Globe-Times.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In the on-the-spot newspaper coverage of 1956, the singer\u2019s appraisal seemed at odds with an accompanying story by another Globe staffer named Loyal Gould: \u201cThe cats jumped last night,\u201d wrote Gould, affecting a condescending teenage vocabulary. \u201cIn fact, they rocked way out…, then rolled away their inhibitions with the help of Little Richard and his orchestra.\u201d At 29, Gould was a year away from joining the Associated Press, where he would become a prominent international correspondent en route to an extended career as a professor of journalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn the stratospheric twilight of the Nat Ballroom,\u201d Gould\u2019s report continued, \u201csome 400 teenagers and a few old-timers in their 20s bopped to the rhythms of three weaving saxophonists, two steel guitarists (sic), a drummer, and a pianist.\u201d (The reporter probably meant electric guitars. Little Richard\u2019s lineup used no steel guitars, which symbolized C&W-style music.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFellows with ducktail haircuts and turned-up collars, girls with tight skirts, went through sundry gyrations, contortions, and deep knee bends. They looked like Halloween goblins in a puppet show,\u201d added Gould.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAnd they really flipped when Little Richard, wearing a Mediterranean-blue suit, white shirt, and brown suede shoes, delivered the three songs which have brought him close to the top of the rock \u2019n\u2019 roll hierarchy.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe songs: \u2018Tutti Frutti,\u2019 \u2018Slippin\u2019 an\u2019 Slidin,\u2019 and \u2018Long, Tall Sally.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018It\u2019s just the beat,\u2019 Little Richard said. \u2018It really gets you, man.\u2019\u201d \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Little Richard Penniman, the piano-pounding blues-belter from Georgia, was riding high on the rock \u2019n\u2019 roll charts \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":119117,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5138],"tags":[5229,8067,185,7371,7372,472,11878,38775,13813,5921,358,74337,7453,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-119116","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-worth","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-artist","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-fort-worth","12":"tag-fortworth","13":"tag-history","14":"tag-live-music","15":"tag-michael-h-price","16":"tag-people-of-influence","17":"tag-style","18":"tag-texas","19":"tag-texas-history","20":"tag-top-story","21":"tag-tx","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114972516877822127","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}