#also delighted at the legacy of lady rockers screaming through baby Paul

[mydaroga]

Rip It Up c/w Ready Teddy was a bolt from the blue for Paul McCartney. He too experienced the epiphany: first Elvis and now this! ‘Little Richard was this voice from heaven or hell, or both. This screaming voice seemed to come from the top of his head. I tried to do it one day and found I could. You had to lose every inhibition and do it.’ Jim McCartney didn’t like it at all, but Paul was singing like a boy possessed, and in a very real sense he was. Absorbing Elvis, Little Richard and Gene Vincent was glorious, and it could block out other feelings. Paul revelled in the sounds of his great American heroes. He loved the way Little Richard hollered in his songs, a high-pitched ‘Wooooooo!’ evident in almost every recording, and found he had the range and talent to imitate this too. Paul would know it as his ‘Little Richard voice’, though Richard himself admitted to having purloined it from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Wynonie Harris, and Esquerita, the artist whose look, voice and sound he’d all but cloned.

Mark Lewisohn, Tune In, quote from interview by Johnnie Walker, BBC Radio 2, 11 May 2001.