When I was a teen, I loved to listen to Little Richard. We all did. I still do.

And even back then, we all knew he was tutti fruity – the lyrics said so – and none of us thought he was referring to Italian ice cream or that he was just crazy about sex, like most of us were.

The lyrics of the song were in a kind of code. So he could tell it like it really was and still be able to get up on stage, even on TV, and drive the audience into a screaming frenzy. Sort of like the way Liberace did, with all those rings and fur and candelabras. (Maybe grandma thought Mr. Showmanship just hadn’t met the right girl yet, and none of my family ever said he was a fagela – which is itself in code, as it’s an actual Yiddish word, literally “little birdie” – it was just something you didn’t talk about.)

But Tutti Frutti wasn’t the only song of Little Richard’s – and a long line of others, especially Black song-writers, whose lyrics were stuffed with double entendres. Like Good Golly Miss Molly or Slippin’ and Slidin’ (Peepin’ ‘n hidin’) – and even today, at least one more has yet to come out of the closet. As it’s about being in the closet.

Go look it up on the web. Only you won’t find it anywhere but here.

Wikipedia repeats the same old story about the origins of the lyrics – Honey Chile, a popular DJ, introduced “a little girl” to Little Richard’s record producer “Bumps” Blackwell. She’d written a few lines of a song for Richard to record “so she could pay the treatment for her ailing aunt” – Saw Uncle John with long tall Sally / They saw Aunt Mary comin’ / So they ducked back in the alley.

And the rest, as they say, is History, and after Little R recorded it in New Orleans on February 10, 1956, hundreds of groups, the Beatles and Elvis included, have done covers of it.

The key is hiding there in plain sight, in the next-to-last stanza. Which repeats every word of the third stanza, except one.

Sally is bald. Why? Because Sally’s a tall guy wearing a wig, and dressed in drag, and is working the street as a male prostitute. And “she’s” on the clock, and “built for speed” (doing as many “johns” as quickly as possible).

And “Uncle” John is – well, duh – one of the johns, and has “the misery” (he’s pretending to Mary, his wife, that he’s straight – but John’s found a way to have his fun – with “Sally,” who is long (where it counts) and has the “thing” John needs (the original title of the song: “The Thing”).

And when John sees Mary coming to find him, he ducks “back in the alley.” The Closet.

But of course, maybe I’m just seeing “things” that aren’t really there. And if you want to go back to seeing it like everyone else, as a song a little girl wrote about her uncle so she could pay her aunt’s medical bill…

Thanks for reading The History Nobody Knows!