Little Richard, the electrifying and dazzling rock and roll pioneer, has died at the age of 87. The flamboyantly-dressed, soulful singer who mixed shouts, wails and whoops with fiery piano playing recorded some of the most foundational popular songs of the 20th century, including "Tutti Frutti," "Slippin' and Slidin'," "Long Tall Sally," "Lucille," and "Good Golly Miss Molly." His passing was confirmed by his son, Danny Penniman. The cause of death remains unknown.

Little Richard was born Richard Penniman in 1932, in Macon, Georgia, where his father was a deacon. He began singing in church as a child with such volume and enthusiasm that he earned the nickname “War Hawk.” As he got older he learned to play alto saxophone and got a part-time job selling soft drinks at the Macon City Auditorium, affording him an opportunity to see influential performers like Cab Calloway when they came into town. He made his first on stage appearance there at the age of 14, opening for Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She heard him singing her songs, set him loose in front of the audience and even paid him afterwards.

From there, a career was born, but it wasn’t an easy road to riches. While still working in a gospel idiom, though already sporting a pompadour, it wasn’t until early 1955 that the legendary phrase “awap bop a lup bop a wop bam boom,” changed his life.

Asked about the song’s creation, Little Richard told Rolling Stone: “I was washing dishes at the Greyhound bus station at the time. I couldn’t talk back to my boss man. He would bring all these pots back for me to wash, and one day I said, ‘I’ve got to do something to stop this man,’ and I said, “Awap bop a lup bop a wop bam boom, take ’em out!’"

His previous recording deals yielded little success, so he put together a demo to a new label, Specialty Records, for an irresistible and somewhat lewd track called “Tutti Frutti.”

During a recording session in September, Little Richard worried once again that the material he was getting down on wax wasn’t his true voice. During a break, he sat at the piano and banged out a fierce version of the song he’d originally sent in, “Tutti Frutti.” The producers recognized it was a hit, though brought in a new lyricist to erase the more transgressive sexual connotations. “Tutti Frutti” is an Italian term for “all flavors.” It originally went: “Tutti Frutti/Good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You can grease it/Make it easy”.

According to writer Parke Puterbaugh, Little Richard “blew the lid off the Fifties” more than any other performer: “His outrageous personality captured the music’s rebellious spirit, and his frantically charged piano playing and raspy, shouted vocals defined its sound.” Little Richard himself called what he had “the thang.”

“Tutti Frutti” was the first of a string of hits that mixed gospel, boogie woogie, and pure, loud energy. At a time of segregation, especially in the Jim Crow South, Little Richard’s sound easily crossed color lines and sold to all audiences, part of a first wave of rock and roll alongside Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

“We were breaking through the racial barrier,” Richard later told his biographer Charles White. “The white kids had to hide my records ’cos they daren’t let their parents know they had them in the house.  We decided that my image should be crazy and way-out so that the adults would think I was harmless.  I’d appear in one show dressed as the Queen of England and in the next as the pope.”

He also appeared in films, most notably Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It starring Jayne Mansfield, and performed to frenzied mobs at sports arenas.

And then he called it off. In 1957, after visions of burning wings being held up by angels during a rough flight from Melbourne to Sydney, he decided to repent for singing secular music. He didn’t leave music altogether, but recorded gospel albums to a far smaller demographic than his rock and roll contemporaries.

As his earlier work continued to inspire (The Beatles performed “Good Golly Miss Molly” in their Munich days and later recorded “Long Tall Sally”) he eventually came back to secular music.

During the 1970s he struggled with addiction to drugs and alcohol and in the early 1980s he sued a series of recording and publishing companies. That experience is perhaps best summed up by the man himself, in a clip from the 1998 film Why Do Fools Fall In Love.

In 1986 he appeared to great acclaim in Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which led to a resurgence of interest with mainstream audiences.

His stage costumes and persona led to speculation about his sexuality from the beginning, and his quotes on the matter are fraught with contradiction. He was born with an affliction that gave him an effeminate gait, for which he was ridiculed, especially by his father. "I wanted seven sons. You’ve spoiled it, you’re only half a son," he quoted his father as saying in his 1984 authorized biography The Life and Times of Little Richard. In that same book he denounced homosexuality as “contagious,” but years later told Penthouse that he was “gay his whole life” and later self-identified as "omnisexual." In 2017, however, during a Christian news channel interview, he appeared to disavow homosexuality, saying “[God] made men, men, he made women, women, you know? And you’ve got to live the way God wants you to live.”

Little Richard entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during its inaugural year in 1986 and was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993. That honor came after a memorable moment during the 1988 telecast in which he stopped the proceedings to remind the audience that he'd never won a Grammy and was, in fact, the architect of rock and roll.

His legacy lived on with other legends like Jimi Hendrix and Prince, and pretty much anyone who sat down at a piano and shouted "wooooooo!"

His passing, naturally, sparked warm memories from notables on social media.