Of the three great black pianist-singers of early rock, Fats Domino was round and crooning, Ray Charles was a nightclub smoothie let loose after hours, and Little Richard Penniman, from Macon, Ga., was the raw goods. One thing for sure, “Tutti Frutti” has nothing to do with the ice-cream-and-chopped fruits dessert the song is a sexual anthem in Richard’s unique language: raving, speaking-in-tongues, R&B Esperanto. “Tutti frutti, all rooty”? “All rooty,” they determined, was a variation of “all right” from Cab Calloway’s 1941 “Are You All Reet?” (which includes the line, “I’m like the tree/ I’m all root”). Kids scrambled to decipher the meaning of the sounds emitted by the pompadoured piano dervish. The opening phrase of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” announced that early rock would be both primal and foreign, earthy and unearthly. “Wop bop-a-loo-mom a-lomp bomp bomp!” If Martians had landed on Earth and conquered it with rock ‘n roll, this could have been their war cry.
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