Music executive Art Rupe, whose Specialty Records was a premier label during the formative years of rock ’n roll and helped launch the careers of Little Richard, Sam Cooke and many others, has died.

Little Richard later sued Specialty Records decades later for millions in unpaid royalties. The pop icon, who died at the age of 87 on May 9, sought $112 million in owed money in the 1984 suit.

A new PBS American Masters documentary showcases the influence of Little Richard, a dynamo performer who never let himself be defined for long by any one musical category or sexual identity.

The story of Little Richard’s rise to stardom in the 1950s is a textbook example of the vital David-and-Goliath role that independent record labels played in the birth of rock ’n’ roll in a ...

Little Richard, the screaming, preening, scene-stealing wild man of early rock ‘n’ roll with hits like “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally,” died Saturday, Dick Alen, his former agent ...

News of Richard's death surfaced shortly after the music world learned that Andre Harrell, an influential music executive who launched Uptown Records and hired Sean "P. Diddy" Combs as an intern ...

Little Richard in performance at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in New York ... An earlier version of this obituary misidentified the producer of Little Richard's first session for Specialty Records.

In the mid-1960s, Little Richard emerged from his self-imposed retirement to record for small R&B labels including Okeh, which released “The Explosive Little Richard” in 1967.

David Bowie was no exception; he reminisced in this 1991 interview about the first time he picked up a Little Richard record, and he said “without him, I think myself and half of my ...

In a 1988 interview, Bowie called Richard his “patron saint.” He obsessively listened to and studied Richard’s early records as a kid in 1950s London, thousands of miles away from New ...