Lloyd Price, singer and early rock influence, dies at 88

NEW YORK – Singer-songwriter Lloyd Price, an early rock ’n roll star and enduring maverick whose hits incorporated these types of up-tempo favorites as “Lawdy Pass up Clawdy,” “Personality” and the semi-forbidden “Stagger Lee,” has died. He was 88.

Price died Monday at a extended-time period treatment facility in New Rochelle, New York, of problems from diabetic issues, his spouse, Jacqueline Price, instructed The Affiliated Push on Saturday.

Lloyd Price, inducted into the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame in 1998, was between the final survivors of a submit-Globe War II scene in New Orleans that anticipated the shifts in preferred songs and tradition top to the rise of rock in the mid-1950s. Along with Fat Domino and David Bartholomew between other people, Price fashioned a deep, exuberant seem close to the brass and swing of New Orleans jazz and blues that positioned large on R&B charts and finally crossed more than to white audiences.

“Very important portion of Rock record. He was Before Little Richard!” rock singer and E Avenue Band member Steven Van Zandt reported Saturday on Twitter. “Lawdy Pass up Clawdy of 1952 has a legit claim as the very first Rock hit…. Righteous cat. Huge talent.”

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Price’s nickname was “Mr. Temperament,” fitting for a performer with a heat smile and a tenor voice to match. But he was much additional than an participating entertainer. He was unusually independent for his time, managing his individual document label even in advance of these types of stars as Frank Sinatra did the identical, holding on to his publishing rights, and serving as his individual agent and manager. He would normally speak of the racial injustices he endured, calling his memoir “sumdumhonkey” and producing on his Facebook web page all through the 2020 Black Life Matter protests that powering his “affable exterior” was “a gentleman who is seething.”

Born in Kenner, Louisiana, just one of 11 siblings, Price had been singing in church and participating in piano due to the fact childhood. He was in his late teenagers when a area DJ’s most loved catchphrase, “Lawdy Pass up Clawdy,” helped encourage him to generate his boundary-breaking very first hit, which he worked on in his mother’s fried fish cafe.

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Showcasing Domino’s trademark piano trills, “Lawdy Pass up Clawdy” hit No. 1 on the R&B charts in 1952, sold additional than 1 million copies and turned a rock typical, covered by Elvis Presley and Little Richard between other people. But Price would have mixed inner thoughts about the song’s wide enchantment, later remembering how area officers in the Jim Crow South resisted letting both of those blacks and whites go to his reveals.

Price was drafted and put in the mid-1950s in military services service in Korea. He began a career restart with the 1957 ballad “Just Due to the fact,” and hit the major with the brassy, pop-oriented “Stagger Lee,” just one of the catchiest, most celebratory tracks at any time recorded about a barroom murder.

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