Good Booty, Pt. 1

Little Richard

Did you know that the original lyrics of Little Richard's 1955-56 hit "Tutti Frutti" were dirty? The original lyrics referred to sex from the point of view a gay man (which Little Richard was and is, though he was not out of the closet then):

Tutti Frutti, good booty
If it don't fit, don't force it
You can grease it, make it easy

Tutti Frutti, good booty
If it's tight, it's all right
And if it's greasy, it makes it easy

Cleaned up for public consumption, they became:

Tutti frutti, aw rooty … (repeated)

There's a book just out that sets this factoid in the context of (in the words of its subtitle) Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music. The book's main title is (no surprise here) Good Booty. It's by Ann Powers, a music critic and correspondent at National Public Radio.

Powers was recently interviewed on the air by Joshua Johnson, host of "1A," about her excellent new book. That interview led me to begin reading the book itself. As of this point in time, I've managed to absorb the introduction and the first chapter, called "The Taboo Baby."

Why my interest in this subject? I'm developing a course that I'd like to teach at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Towson University. My "Ebony and Ivory" course will illustrate, using YouTube videos wherever possible, how African American music and mainstream popular music have intertwined all through American history.

Here's a video of a young Little Richard singing "Tutti Frutti" in the early days of television:

It illustrates something that Ann Powers emphasizes in her book: how so many African American musical styles are dance music. In her first chapter, she takes that history all the way back to 1805 New Orleans. It was in the years just after the U.S. acquired the Louisiana Purchase from the French, in 1803, that people of African descent, slave and free, would come to congregate in New Orleans' Congo Square to perform their music.

As the blacks, both slave and free, sang and danced in Congo Square, the whites looked on in sneaking admiration and, yes, a degree of lust. The music in Congo Square often involved dancing that had sexual overtones:

The Bamboula, 1885 drawing
by Edward Windsor Kemble

The illustration above is called "The Bamboula." A bamboula is, says Wikipedia, "a type of drum made from a rum barrel with skin stretched over one end. It is also a dance accompanied by music from these drums." The drum and the dance called the bamboula came to the melting pot of New Orleans from the Caribbean islands — specifically, from the country then called Saint-Domingue (and now called Haiti). Africa, though, was where that type of drum and its accompanying dance style came from originally.

The New Orleans "Creoles of color" had more than just the bamboula in their musical repertory. In general, "Creole music" consisted of "melodies, sometimes including dance-related instrumental accompaniments, sung in Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole [a language] by Louisiana Creole people of French, Spanish, Native [American], and/or African" descent. Anyone living in Louisiana who was born in America, not abroad, was termed a Creole. Those who were not of purely white descent were Creoles of color. The term "Creole of color" was most often used to describe one particular mixed-race demographic, a mixture of black and white.

(Wikipedia has a list of prominent Louisiana Creoles.)

Little Richard, though not himself a Creole, recorded "Tutti Frutti" in New Orleans, “just down the street from ... Congo Square.” In that city, he relied on a co-writer named Dorothy LaBostrie to help him clean up his originally sexually explicit lyrics. LaBostrie was a Creole, on her father's side.

The fact that a black man of uncertain sexuality, Little Richard, could have a hit record in the mainstream U.S. market ("Tutti Frutti" went to No. 17 on the Billboard Top 40 chart in early 1956) represented the sort of liberation from constraint and taboo that, to white teens, early rock 'n' roll stood for.

Powers sees that liberation as a continuation of what got started in Congo Square in the years following 1805. Music, dancing, racial mixing, sex, liberation from constraint and taboo — all these and much more merge together in the topic sentence of Powers' "The Taboo Baby" chapter: "Popular music gives shape, in time, to desire; and desire always crosses boundaries."

(More Good Booty posts to come later on ... )