Richard’s longtime keyboard player and friend Ronald “Ron” Jones adds that one day Richard jumped on the piano and played the “alop-bam-boom” riff and his producers asked about the hook they’d never heard before, even though the singer - who died in May 2020 at age 87 of bone cancer - had been using it for years while playing to Black audiences on the Chitlin’ Circuit. “‘Cause that’s all you gotta do is give Richard an audience, turn the lights on and show is on,” Blackwell says. “When we went into the Dew Drop Inn there was a piano… and that’s when I began to know and understand Little Richard,” says Specialty Records producer Robert “Bumps” Blackwell. ![]() In a Billboard exclusive clip from the show (see below), Little Richard’s bandmates and contemporaries talk about the origin story of “Tutti Frutti,” which was birthed at the raucous Dew Drop Inn in New Orleans.
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