“Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard

Little Richard cut "Tutti Frutti" in 1955, and it gave him his first major hit before landing on his 1957 album Here's Little Richard. He wrote it with Dorothy LaBostrie, with Joe Lubin also credited, and the title is Italian for "all fruits", which is about as much sense as the song ever needed to make. That famous nonsense refrain was him singing a drum pattern he'd dreamed up, hollered like he meant to wake the dead.

Robert "Bumps" Blackwell produced, and the band cooks: Lee Allen on tenor sax, Alvin "Red" Tyler on baritone, Earl Palmer on drums, Frank Fields on double bass. Loud, wild and hard-driving, it became a model for rock and roll itself, and in 2009 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.