BIRTHING LITTLE RICHARD
Reflections on the Rise of Rock-n-Roll, Los Angeles, 1950-7

by Charles Deemer

(originally published in Oregon Magazine)

I became a teenager in the right place at the right
time. Although you could count on one hand the number
of blacks enrolled at Woodrow Wilson Jr. High or
Pasadena High School, Los Angeles County had large
enough a black population to justify the existence of
radio shows that played "the very best in Negro
entertainment" around the clock. One such show was
Hunter Hancock's afternoon "Harlematinee" on KFVD.

I'd discovered this radio show in Jr. High. In 1952,
when I turned 13, I already was part of a growing
vanguard of white kids listening to black music, and
we were going to change the popular music industry
forever. I was on the front lines for the birth of
rock-n-roll.

But as a pre-teen and teenager, I didn't look like
anyone in "Grease" or on "Happy Days." I didn't even
smoke, let alone roll a cigarette pack up the sleeve
of a T-shirt. I didn't own a car, let alone a hot rod.
My hair was in a butch, not a flat top. Hell, I didn't
even date. I was a science nerd -- but boy did I love
listening to black music on Hunter Hancock's radio
show, from Little Water to Muddy Waters, from The
Clovers to The Robins to The Flamingos, from the
wailing sax of Earl Bostic to the bending guitar notes
of young B.B. "Blues Boy" King. 

To this day I can remember Hancock's signature
introduction: "From blues to ballads, from bebop to
boogie, featuring the very best in Negro
entertainment." Late at night, there was a more risque
radio show, "Harlem Hit Parade" on KRKD, which was
hosted by a DJ who called himself "Huggy Boy" and
sponsored by an all-night record store, Dolphin's of
Hollywood. 

In this literal and explicit age, when the life of the
imagination is so impoverished that nothing is left to
it, anyone under 55 may find it hard to comprehend how
risque the lyrics of some early 50s R&B songs were and
how titillating they became to white teenagers and
pre-teens. Black artists were attracting a growing,
white, teenage audience with songs that rattled the
walls of decency, and the times they were a-changin'.

In 1951 came "Sixty Minute Man" by Billy Ward and The
Dominoes. This bragging confession by a stud included
lines like "they call me Lovin' Dan; I rock 'em, roll
'em, all night long, I'm the Sixty Minute Man." This
great lover would make women holler "please don't
stop!" and his seductive ways would end with "fifteen
minutes of teasin', fifteen minutes of squeezin', and
fifteen minutes of blowin' my top."

Television was in its infancy, and there was no talk
show on which a Dr. Ruth could explicate the meaning
of "blowin' my top." Virgin teenagers had to imagine
this experience themselves and, believe me, the result
was considerably more titillating than anything Dr.
Ruth would have to say.

The next year The Clovers released "One Mint Julep."
Here we learned that seduction could have unfortunate
consequences: "I'm through with flirtin' and drinkin'
whiskey, I got six extra children from a-gettin'
frisky" and "one mint julep was the cause of it all." 

1954 is the pivotal year in the history of
rock-n-roll. Most pop music historians credit
"Sh-Boom" by The Chords as being the first rock-n-roll
single. This song by a black group attracted such a
substantial white teenage audience that it was
"covered" by a white group, which typically drained
the arrangement of all its sensual energy and began a
process of de-sexualizing early black rock-n-roll with
white cover records that reached its absurd extreme
when Pat Boone started covering the hits of Little
Richard. 

But in 1954 the sound was still black. That same year
in Memphis, Sam Phillips of Sun Records, who had been
looking for a white singer with the black sound and
black feel, signed Elvis Presley. (You can hear Elvis'
early Sun recordings, like "That's Alright Mama" and
"Mystery Train," at
http://www.elvispresleyonline.com/html/elvis_discography.html).

To "hip" white teenagers, however, 1954 was most
remembered not for "Sh-Boom" or Elvis but for three
extraordinary records released by Hank Ballard and The
Midnighters: "Work With Me Annie," "Sexy Ways," and
"Annie Had A Baby."

In "Work With Me Annie," the lyric "let's get it while
the gettin' is good" was considered so dirty, so
obscene, that for a time the song was banned from the
airways in Los Angeles. This was the situation when I
heard Huggy Boy announce on his early morning radio
show that, the law be damned, next week at 3 a.m. he
was going to play "Work with Me, Annie" on the air!
(You can hear "Work With Me Annie" online at
http://www.iei.net/~drifter/blues/ballard.html).

My Jr. High was abuzz with the news. Would Huggy Boy
really dare to do this? Of course, those of us who
were hip (and I was one hip nerd) knew the song
because we owned a 78 rpm record of it or at least had
heard it on the radio before it was banned. And no
wonder it was banned: "Annie please don't cheat, Give
me all my meat!" My God, who had ever heard anything
so sexually explicit on the radio before? 

Hank Ballard and The Midnighters, more than any other
black group in the early 1950s, had a reputation for
being sexual and dangerous. Their songs were full of
references to, well, SEX. "Sexy Ways" had the
mind-boggling lyric: "In the hall, on the wall; Dance
baby dance, now crawl crawl crawl!," followed by so
many repetitions of "Oh baby; Do it, baby" that a
teenager could have a premature coronary just from
imagining the activity being described. Ballard's
quivering voice suggested more sexual abandon than
anyone before Little Richard. Hank Ballard and The
Midnighters would have made "The Star Spangled Banner"
sound sexual.

Despite being banned, "Work With Me, Annie" was so
popular -- at the time it was referred to as the Negro
National Anthem -- that it inspired a sequel, "Annie
Had A Baby." This song was filled with predictions
about male-female relationships that many male
teenagers would encounter in the very near future:
"She sings to the baby instead of me, Clings to the
baby instead of me; Now it's clear and it's understood
-- That's what happens when the gettin' gets good!
Annie had a baby, can't work no more."

And so we spent a long week at Wilson Jr. High in
1954, the tension mounting, as we awaited the early
morning when Huggy Boy was going to defy the law and
put Annie back on the airways. Would he chicken out at
the last minute? One day a rumor spread around school
that Huggy Boy had been fired. In my room, I 
nervously waited up late for his show to start -- and
felt incredible relief to hear his usual opening
banter, "This is Dick Hugg -- Huggy Boy!"

On the morning in question, I had no trouble getting
up at 3 a.m. I often set my alarm for 3 in order to
get up and look at the stars with my telescope.
Sometimes I would take a portable radio outside with
me, listening to Huggy Boy at low volume as I
star-gazed. This night, however, I stayed in bed,
turning on the show around 2 and waiting for the
count-down to the magic hour.

As 3 approached, it became clear that he was going to
go through with it; at least, he kept talking about
it. And then the hour came, and it really happened:
the introductory guitar riff played, Hank Ballard sang
"Work with me, Annie" in a voice drooling with sex,
and the Midnighters followed with their suggestive
chorus, "Ah-oom, ah-oom." Jesus Christ, Huggy Boy was
breaking the law just like he said he would!

I wanted to call up one of my nerd friends to make
sure he was listening. I wanted to shout at the top of
my lungs -- without waking my parents. I wanted to
masturbate. Maybe I would have gotten around to the
latter if an unexpected sound hadn't come from the
radio.

Someone was pounding on a door! Huggy Boy explained
that the police were outside, trying to break into his
studio! And then there was a crash, a confusion of
noise suggesting breaking furniture ... and then the
radio show was off the air! Huggy Boy had been
arrested, right on the radio!

It doesn't matter that later, as an adult, I realized
this was all staged. And good radio theater it was,
too. But at the time it all made perfect sense because
there was, in fact, something deliciously wicked about
listening to the songs of Hank Ballard and The
Midnighters. The sizzling abandon in these songs was
as different from Patti Page's proper singing about
doggies in the window as the chaotic mess in my room
was from the perfectly made bedspread in my parents'
bedroom. (Of course, no teenager could imagine his
parents making love.)

In fact, rock-n-roll was going to clean up its act as
it became more and more popular in the late-50s. The
infamous gyrations of Elvis' hips were far less risque
than the quivering sexuality in Hank Ballard's voice,
but by Elvis -- who burst upon the scene in 1956 after
Phillips sold his contract to RCA, where Elvis quickly
recorded "Heartbreak Hotel" and became a national icon
-- there was such a large, white, teenage audience for
rock-n-roll that the less threatening gestures of
Elvis caused much more uproar than the raw sexuality
of early 50s R&B. Why? Probably because the white
audience was small and restricted to large urban
centers in the early 50s. By 1955, kids everywhere,
from Montana to Rhode Island, were getting off on
rock-n-roll, and to some critics this defined a
cultural crisis. At more than one radio station,
rock-n-roll records were being destroyed on the air.

For me, rock-n-roll was just about over by 1957, and
my musical tastes were turning to West Coast Jazz,
particularly to the musical partnership of Gerry
Mulligan and Chet Baker. I wouldn't get interested in
rock again until Bob Dylan went electric. But I
experienced one last hurrah to the more raw early
sounds when a travelling rock-n-roll revue came to my
high school during my senior year. Among the
headliners was Little Richard.

Little Richard inherited the "most nasty" throne from
Hank Ballard. Little Richard was even more dangerous:
for one, he looked more dangerous, with his pompadour
hair style and constantly sweating brow, and the
sexuality in his voice was more like a growl than a
quiver. Hank Ballard seduced the audience;  Little
Richard raped it.

I went to the revue mainly to see Little Richard. He'd
recently come out with a new single, "Jenny, Jenny,"
the only recording on which he'd lost his breath, and
I was hoping he'd sing it. Near the end of the
program, he did.

Unfortunately, he wasn't able to finish "Jenny,
Jenny." Little Richard, who knew as well as anyone why
white teenagers had flocked to rock-n-roll, began
singing on stage with the microphone between his legs,
where it jutted out toward the audience like a long,
skinny, silver phallus. He even began stroking it.

Somewhere in the back of the auditorium was our
Principal. She was not a fan of rock-n-roll, and the
only reason the revue had come to campus was because
the campus belonged to the Community College, which we
shared while our new high school was being built. When
our Principal saw what Little Richard was up to, she
did the very thing one might expect from a woman whose
highlight of the week was to lead the student body in
singing "You Gotta Have Heart" at the end of each
school assembly: she turned off the power to the
building.

Somehow no riot started. After the show was officially
cancelled, most teenagers probably went cruising or
went home, waiting for Huggy Boy to come on the radio.
 

I remember sitting in the dark auditorium, marveling
at the history I just had witnessed and how lucky I
was to have grown up on The Clovers and on Hank
Ballard and The Midnighters and how one day I would be
talking about seeing Little Richard the night my high
school principal turned off his power, and how
wonderful it was to be a teenager at this time and
place, to participate in the rise of rock-n-roll, even
if now Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were the
only performers who retained the forbidden danger of
the music's roots. 

It wouldn't be until six years later, late on a
morning in November, 1963, when I would learn that
history has many moods, some of them dark and
uprooting, and as the sixties progressed and the
assassinations piled up, I began to understand that
never again would I live through an historical moment
as warmly nostalgic as the birthing of Little Richard.

                                   ***