Earl Palmer: session drummer who played on Little Richard’s hits
When Phil Spector was constructing his legendary “wall of sound” in the 1960s on songs such as You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ by the Righteous Brothers and River Deep, Mountain High by Ike and Tina Turner, it was Palmer to whom he turned for the beat. There was no style he could not play, from mature ballads to teen pop, and he, drummed on sessions for everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Monkees. In the realm of jazz, he drummed for Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie and he played blues with B. B. King and soul with Ray Charles.
Ulitmately his tally ran literally to thousands of sessions, making him — according to claims that no rival has ever come forward to dispute — the most recorded drummer in history. Yet he always insisted that his New Orleans roots were evident in everything he did, based on the rhythmic patterns of the music of the city’s unique street parades.
Born Earl Cyril Palmer in New Orleans in 1924, his mother was a singer who toured the black vaudeville circuit backing Ida Cox, one of the earliest recorded female blues performers. By the time he was 5, Palmer was on stage, too, tap dancing with Cox’s Darktown Scandals revue. He later attributed his skill as a drummer to his early experience as a dancer which, he said, gave him “an understanding of rhythmic time” that no formal musical education could teach.
After serving in Europe with the US Army in the Second World War, he returned to New Orleans and attended college, where he studied piano, percussion and composition. Teaming up with the band leader Dave Bartholomew, he began playing drums in the clubs around the Crescent City, and by 1950 was installed as the house drummer at Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans.
Musically the city had always marched to a beat quite different from anywhere else in America and at Matassa’s Palmer contributed to an entirely new sound that fused jazz, blues and R&B on records such as Domino’s I’m Walkin’, Smiley Lewis’s I Hear You Knockin’ and Lloyd Price’s Lawdy Miss Clawdy. It became known as “the New Orleans sound” and helped to shape the rock’n’roll revolution. When, in 1955, Little Richard arrived in New Orleans to record his first session for Speciality Records, Palmer was the drummer and the session produced the singer’s first explosive hit, Tutti Frutti. Palmer repeated the beat on further Little Richard hits such as Long Tall Sally and Lucille.
In 1957 he moved to Los Angeles where there were far greater opportunities for a session drummer than on the somewhat insular New Orleans scene. One of the first recordings he drummed on after the move was Ritchie Valens’s La Bamba, another landmark in rock’n’roll history.
But he swifly became the most prolific and sought-after drummer in town, playing on records by Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and Doris Day among countless others far removed from rock’n’roll, as well as on recordings for soul singers such as Sam Cooke and Ray Charles. In the 1960s he became Spector’s first-choice drummer, contributing thunderously to the producer’s famous wall of sound. He also played on numerous well-known film and television theme tunes, from The Odd Couple to The Brady Bunch, and in later years there were sessions for such distinctively individualistic stylists as Neil Young, Randy Newman, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello.
Yet in Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story, a 1999 biography by Tony Scherman presented mostly in Palmer’s own words, he said that he could remember few details of any of the sessions he had played on. They were simply part of the job, he confessed, and although he had helped to invent the backbeat that became rock’n’roll, he remained surprisingly unimpressed by the achievement. “What was rock’n’roll to me? I was not interested in Little Richard or Fats Domino,” he admitted at one point in the book. He was happy to be a drummer for hire, laying no claim to possessing any particular musical vision of his own and ready to play any session if it paid well enough. His sense of professional pride lay simply in the all-round versatility that enabled him to do so.
Away from session work, his personal musical preference was for jazz and in later years he formed his own trio, performing regularly in West Coast clubs. He also became actively involved in a campaign for session musicians to receive credit and royalties for their past recordings.
He was one of the first session men to be admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, his citation commending his “solid stickwork and feverish backbeat” that had laid the foundation for rock’n’roll drumming.
He is survived by his fourth wife, Jeline, and by seven children from earlier marriages.
Earl Palmer, drummer, was born on October 25, 1924. He died on September 19, 2008, aged 83