New Books In Music

“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-lop-bam-boom!”And so rock and roll was born. And so American culture changed forever. So says David Kirby in Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Continuum, 2009). “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard’s first hit, recorded by Robert “Bumps” Blackwell at Cosimo Matassa’s J & M Studio in New Orleans in September 1955, co-written and sanitized by Dorothy LaBostrie after Richard’s original lyric (“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-good-goddamn/Tutti Frutti, good booty”) was deemed a bit too racy for a recorded release (it was, after all, a song about anal copulation, writes the author), is the lynchpin around which Kirby builds a biography of one of the greats of twentieth-century American music and art. His story moves from Richard’s childhood in Macon, Georgia, to his place among the greats of the old, weird America, to his legacy as the Architect of Rock. It’s Kirby’s contention, really, that Richa