R.I.P.: Art Rupe, Pioneering Record Label Owner

Art Rupe

Art Rupe, the founder of Specialty Records, an innovative independent label based in Los Angeles that brought rhythm and blues into the mainstream and helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era with singers like Little Richard and Lloyd Price, died on Friday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif.

He was 104, reports The NY Times.

Rupe created Specialty in 1946 with a niche audience in mind (hence the name). The major labels of the time, focused on mass-market pop hits, ignored the urbanized, blues-based music that appealed to Black audiences in the big cities. Rupe hoped to capitalize on this oversight by showcasing acts with “a big-band sound expressed in a churchy way,” as he put it to Arnold Shaw, the author of “Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues” (1978).

In the late 1940s and early ’50s, artists like Roy Milton, Percy Mayfield and Joe Liggins consistently put Specialty in the Top 10 of what were known as the “race record” charts until Billboard magazine began using the term “rhythm and blues” in 1949. In 1952, on a scouting trip to New Orleans, Rupe recorded Lloyd Price, then 19, singing his own composition, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” That record, which featured Fats Domino on piano, became the top-selling R&B record of the year and broke through to white listeners, too.

Three years later, Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. During a lunch break at a recording session in New Orleans, Little Richard sat down at the piano and shouted out a risqué song he used in his nightclub act: “Tutti Frutti.” With hastily rewritten lyrics, the song became one of rock’s early classics, and the first in a string of Little Richard hits that included “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Rip It Up,” “Lucille,” “Keep a-Knockin’” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.”

Art Rupe was born Arthur Newton Goldberg on Sept. 5, 1917, in Greensburg, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, and grew up in nearby McKeesport, where his father, David, was a salesman at a secondhand furniture store and his mother, Anna, was a music lover. After attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Miami University in Ohio, he moved to Los Angeles in 1939.