Alen said Little Richard died in Nashville with his brother and son by his side. Alen tells CNN that the cause of death is related to bone cancer.
He called the star “one of the legends, the creators” and said that little Richard had been “sick for quite a while”.
Born to Richard Penniman in Georgia in 1932, the pioneer of rock would have distinguished himself in any era, but in the 1950s, when he came to the fore, he was like no other: a bright-colored man, makeup artist, who played the piano that personified “devil’s music” for the plant guardians.
Elvis Presley was one thing, but despite all his pelvic thrusts and curled hair, juvenile delinquent hair, he was in the heart of an educated southern boy who loved his father. Little Richard, though … well, it may have come from a large Southern family, but it represented something else.
“Richard opened the door. He brought together the races,” said arranger H.B. Barnum in Charles White’s 1984 biography “The Life and Times of Little Richard”.
“When I first went to the street, there were a lot of segregated audiences. With Richard, even though they still had the segregated audience in the building, they were there TOGETHER. And many times before the end of the night, they would all mix together “.
Even the Rolling Stones frontman, Mick Jagger, wasn’t very sloppy on stage, he was an admirer.
“There is no single sentence to describe his grip on the audience. I couldn’t believe Little Richard’s power on stage. It was incredible,” he said, according to White’s book.
Little Richard knew his power. “They saw me as something like a liberator, a way out,” he once said. “My medium of expression, my music, was a way in which many people wished they could express themselves and they couldn’t.”
This is a developing story. Return for updates.
CNN’s Melissa Alonso contributed to this report.
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