Little Richard Penniman, the piano-pounding blues-belter from Georgia, was riding high on the rock ’n’ roll charts — “Tutti Frutti,” “Long, Tall Sally,” those radical reinventions of the conventionally accepted idea of a pop-tune hit — when Fort Worth beckoned with a booking at the Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium.
Richard’s barnstorming tour of July-August 1956 ranged from New Orleans’ Labor Union Hall to the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Nor did Little Richard’s anchoring label, Los Angeles-based Specialty Records, neglect the provinces: Amarillo and Lubbock provided concert stops en route to Fort Worth.
Amarillo nearly jinxed the deal.
Specialty Records’ 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 “Tutti Frutti” had splashed in 1955, Little Richard was still laboring under archaic typecasting as a “race records” artist at a larger but less adventurous corporate label, RCA Victor.
That transformative recording of “Tutti Frutti,” 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 ’n’ 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’s records; the show became a standing-room sellout.
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 — not to give away too much, y’know. The conspicuous arrests had included Richard, Prince, and the instrumental accompanists — a scant eight citizens, but nonetheless a full-band lineup in the small-ensemble music-making economy of the period.
I revisited the scene of that municipal embarrassment a few years ago. The site of Little Richard’s disturbing-the-peace bust stands now as a ghostly West Side landmark of Old Amarillo called the Nat Ballroom — 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’s famous song of that title; rhymes with “get your kicks.”)
The Nat’s immense dance floor, nowadays, seems cramped and maze-like when partitioned into vendors’ 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’s 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.
An Eye- and Ear-Witness Account
Now, my Uncle Grady managed Amarillo’s 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’s policy-busting experiment, given the geographical isolation of Amarillo. But Interstate applied such desegregation companywide when an increase in paid admissions became evident.
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’s 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.
On that pivotal date of Aug. 23, 1956, when I was 8 years old, Grady invited me to attend Little Richard’s pivotal show at Amarillo’s 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.
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 ’n’ roll. On this occasion, the headliner was Little Richard Penniman, a profoundly Black rock ’n’ roll star, born of amen-corner gospel and barrelhouse R&B. The crowd was salt-and-pepper — anybody could buy tickets — 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.
Little Richard’s program, frantic and thrilling, ended prematurely in an impulsive and awkwardly timed police raid that resulted in several arrests on intended charges of miscegenation — a misdemeanor rap, calculated to divide and conquer by sheer dehumanizing force of humiliation — 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.
The entertainer’s face, accompanied by a headline reading, “Hepcat Handcuffed,” adorned the next morning’s 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 “bulldog” edition, printed around 1 a.m. for the Panhandle-at-large readership), or on an interior page of the “four-star,” or late-morning press run.
Now, the Globe-News Company’s resident publisher, S.B. Whittenburg, exercised a standing policy that no Black individual’s face should appear upon Page 1 of any given day’s 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’ promotional kit. And, yes, that pairing of “The Werewolf” and “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” had been a sure-enough humdinger, embellished for good measure with a “Popeye” cartoon.
The Back-Story, Further Documented
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’s erratic fortunes during the 1970s as a reporter and editor with the Daily News & Globe-Times.
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.
“I was dancing up a storm, here — right here — when all that happened, y’know,” she said by way of an almost-introduction.
“Here when all what happened?” I said.
“Why, when Little Richard got busted for stripping off his shirt,” she said. “It was in the newspaper.”
“No kidding? I was right here, too, when it happened.”
“Wouldn’t you have been a little too young for such rowdy nightlife?” she demanded in a matronly, scolding tone.
“I was a guest of an uncle. He was in show business.”
“Oh. Then you remember.”
“Looks as though we both remember,” I said.
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’s 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’s retrospective report tells the story like this:
“Liquor agents and other authorities raided the singer’s crowded concert at the Nat Ballroom after spotting several minors milling outside the hall, holding alcoholic beverage bottles.
“Lawman 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.
“‘Next thing I knew, they came carting Little Richard out,’ Bagley said. ‘They filed on him for some lewd conduct on stage... That was before he got to be so well-known.’”
During an intermission, Bagley and Brewer’s 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 — 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.
Back on the Road to Fort Worth
Karen D. Smith’s account of 1999 continues: “In Justice of the Peace C.W. Carder’s 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.
“The singer and the manager, Aubrey Prince, said they only pleaded guilty because they had a Lubbock performance that night.” The Lubbock and Fort Worth engagements proceeded without incident, although neither city’s 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’ nearest equivalent to formal or even consistent rock-music journalism amounted to blathering fan-magazine drivel.
“‘Really, what happened is that [the authorities] told them not to come back,’” Bagley told Karen Smith. The reporter added as an aside: “The performers said they didn’t want to return to Amarillo, anyway, and Prince ventured that the situation would threaten other concert dates he had arranged here for Nat “King” Cole and Fats Domino.” The road manager seems to have been bluffing, here: Nat Cole was a major-label, mass-audience attraction, better suited to Amarillo’s Municipal Auditorium, and Fats Domino would at length play the Nat Ballroom without complications.
Smith’s story continues: “Amarillo’s audience didn’t wow Little Richard, anyway. ‘It’s the quietest dance I ever played,’ the artist told the Globe-Times.”
In the on-the-spot newspaper coverage of 1956, the singer’s appraisal seemed at odds with an accompanying story by another Globe staffer named Loyal Gould: “The cats jumped last night,” wrote Gould, affecting a condescending teenage vocabulary. “In fact, they rocked way out..., then rolled away their inhibitions with the help of Little Richard and his orchestra.” 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.
“In the stratospheric twilight of the Nat Ballroom,” Gould’s report continued, “some 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.” (The reporter probably meant electric guitars. Little Richard’s lineup used no steel guitars, which symbolized C&W-style music.)
“Fellows 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,” added Gould.
“And 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 ’n’ roll hierarchy.
“The songs: ‘Tutti Frutti,’ ‘Slippin’ an’ Slidin,’ and ‘Long, Tall Sally.’
“‘It’s just the beat,’ Little Richard said. ‘It really gets you, man.’”
