Larry Williams

Larry Williams stood out as a boisterous and energetic rock & roll performer who scored multiple successes toward the end of the 1950s. Several of those tracks, including “Bony Maroney,” “Dizzy, Miss Lizzy,” “Short Fat Fannie,” “Bad Boy,” and “She Said Yeah,” earned lasting recognition as rock & roll standards and were later interpreted by British Invasion acts. John Lennon in particular admired Williams and revisited several of the singer’s compositions across his own career.

Growing up in New Orleans, Williams acquired piano skills early on. As a teenager he relocated with his family to Oakland, California, and became part of the local R&B outfit the Lemon Drops. During a 1954 visit back to New Orleans at age nineteen, he encountered Lloyd Price, then recording for Specialty Records. Price brought the young musician on as his valet and arranged an introduction to the label’s staff producer, Robert “Bumps” Blackwell. Before long, Specialty owner Art Rupe placed Williams under a solo contract.

Specialty had just lost its premier attraction, Little Richard, when it added Williams to the roster. Shortly after Williams completed his debut single—a version of Price’s “Just Because” backed by Richard’s former band—Little Richard stepped away from rock & roll to pursue ministry. The single reached number eleven on the R&B charts in spring 1957. With their biggest star gone, the label concentrated its efforts on Williams, reshaping his public image and supplying him with a repertoire that blended hard-driving R&B, rock & roll, and ballads in a style closely modeled on Richard’s earlier successes.

Williams’s first release after Little Richard’s departure, the high-energy “Short Fat Fannie,” climbed to the top of the R&B listings and number five on the pop charts during summer 1957. Later that year “Bony Maronie” followed, peaking at number four R&B and number fourteen pop. Momentum proved difficult to sustain; the next two singles, “You Bug Me, Baby” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” bypassed the R&B charts yet registered modest pop placements in late 1957 and early 1958. Even so, Williams’s recordings gained a following as imports in Britain, where the Beatles later covered both sides of the “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” single—its B-side being “Slow Down”—during the mid-1960s. American sales continued to slide despite a steady flow of Specialty singles and one complete album.

Williams’s 1959 arrest on narcotics charges prompted Specialty to end the relationship. Throughout the 1960s he moved among several labels, cutting material for Chess, Mercury, Island, and Decca. By the middle of the decade he had teamed with Johnny “Guitar” Watson; together they recorded for OKeh Records, achieving Top 40 R&B entries with “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” in spring 1967 and “Nobody,” cut with Kaleidoscope, in early 1968. In 1966 Williams also served as house producer for OKeh, though few of his productions achieved commercial success.

From 1968 through 1978 Williams remained largely inactive, issuing no new recordings and appearing only sparingly in performance. He resurfaced in 1978 with the funk album That’s Larry Williams on Fantasy Records, which met with poor sales and unfavorable notices. In 1980 he was discovered dead from a gunshot wound to the head at his Los Angeles residence. Although the medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, speculation continued for years that drugs, crime, and alleged involvement in prostitution had led to his murder.

Specialty Records issued a 1989 compilation titled Bad Boy that gathered Williams’s major hits and most familiar songs.