![]() ![]() ![]() “The industry back then didn’t allow me to get the credit, because I was black and the kids who were buying my records were white.”īut in a remarkably concentrated two-year output beginning in early 1956, he formed an honored foundation of rock. “God bless Elvis - he and I were very close friends - but I didn’t get the credit I deserved,” Richard said in a 2004 interview with the Dallas Morning News. The self-proclaimed “architect of rock ’n’ roll” often complained that he didn’t get his due recognition or financial rewards, blaming racism, conspiracies, unfair contracts and the practice of having more conventional, white singers such as Pat Boone record his songs in watered-down versions that outsold the originals. Richard’s exaggerated persona eventually evolved into caricature, obscuring his initial impact but helping him return repeatedly from obscurity in his later years, when he acted in films, appeared on TV game shows and in commercials and recorded a children’s album. mingled with their white counterparts to create the polyglot vitality of late-’50s pop radio. It was an audience open to performers regardless of race, and while black artists had occasionally cracked the pop charts in the past, it was now a whole new world, as Richard and other African American singers - Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Frankie Lymon, et al.
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