LOS ANGELES (AP) — Earl Palmer, a session drummer whose pioneering backbeats were recorded on classics like Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 84.
Earl Palmer in 1981. His backbeat was on thousands of tracks.
His death was confirmed by his spokesman, Kevin Sasaki.
Mr. Palmer was born in New Orleans in 1924 and worked extensively both there and in Los Angeles, where he later moved.
He recorded on thousands of tracks, and his session credits include artists as diverse as the Monkees, Neil Young and Frank Sinatra. His beats form the backdrop on Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High,” “The Fat Man” by Fats Domino and “I Hear You Knockin”‘ by Smiley Lewis. He also played for Phil Spector and Motown.
Ed Vodika, the pianist in the Earl Palmer Trio, recalled that the group’s weekly gigs in Los Angeles attracted a host of big-name musicians, from Bonnie Raitt to Ringo Starr. “He worked with so many people in his career, you never knew who would be in the audience,” he said.
Mr. Palmer was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. According to the institution’s Web site, rockhall.com, Little Richard wrote in his autobiography that Mr. Palmer “was probably the greatest session drummer of all time.”
Mr. Palmer was married four times and is survived by seven children.
His biography by Tony Scherman, “Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story,” was published in 1999
Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story is the biography of pioneer rock and roll drummer Earl Palmer. The book is by music journalist Tony Scherman with a foreword by Wynton Marsalis. More than half the text is directly quoted from Palmer, making the book as much an autobiography as it is a biography.
The story begins with Palmer as a four-year-old vaudeville tap dancer and continues with the story of New Orleans music and the emergence of a strong rock and roll drumming style featuring the back beat. After his triumphs in the city, Palmer moved to Los Angeles, where he became one of the top session musicians and arrangers of the 1950s through the 1970s, playing on hundreds of hits, from "La Bamba" to Percy Faith and Frank Sinatra.
The sections quoting Palmer are colorful, frank, and direct, giving the full flavor of his life as a musician. For example, speaking of playing on Little Richard's records:
- "Richard's music was exciting as a sumbitch. I'm not talking about the quality of it. It wasn't quality music. It wasn't no chords. It was just blues. "Slippin' and Slidin'" sounded like "Good Golly Miss Molly" and they both sounded like "Lucille". It was exciting because he was exciting. Richard is one of the few people I've ever recorded with that was just as exciting to watch in the studio as he was in performance."
LOS ANGELES - Earl Palmer, a New Orleans drummer who provided the distinctive backbeat for seminal rock 'n' roll songs by Fats Domino and Little Richard, then traveled west to become one of Hollywood's busiest session musicians, has died. He was 83.
Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, Mr. Palmer died Friday at his home in Banning, Calif., after a long illness, his family announced.
Often called the most recorded drummer in music history, Mr. Palmer played in thousands of rock 'n' roll and jazz sessions, as well as on movie and television scores.
He set the rhythm for Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'," Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" and "Long Tall Sally," Richie Valens's "La Bamba," and Sam Cooke's "You Send Me" in the 1950s. Producer Phil Spector used him to build his legendary Wall of Sound in the 1960s on such songs as "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin"' by the Righteous Brothers and "River Deep, Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner. In more recent years he played with Randy Newman, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, and B.B. King.
In the "Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll" from 1976, Langdon Winner called Mr. Palmer a "master of bass-drum syncopation and possibly the most inventive drummer rock and roll has ever had."
Born in New Orleans, Earl Cyril Palmer was tap-dancing by the time he was 5 on the black vaudeville circuit. He didn't learn to play drums until after serving in Europe with the Army in World War II.
But his childhood experiences served him well, Mr. Palmer said later. "I had the advantage of knowing music before I played it," he said in 1993. "Being a dancer gave me an understanding of rhythmic 'time,' and you can't teach that."
Jazz, blues, R&B, and country music were fusing into a new, distinct genre of music, with Fats Domino, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and Smiley Lewis the frontmen laying down tracks in the early 1950s for what would become known as the beginnings of rock 'n' roll.
"What we were playing on those early records was funky in relation to jazz," Mr. Palmer told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. "What we were playing already had that natural New Orleans flavor about the music. I played the bass drum how they played bass drum in funeral parade bands."
Besides providing the driving backbeat on many rock 'n' roll tunes, Mr. Palmer can be heard on recordings by jazz and pop stars Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and Doris Day, as well as on the TV theme songs for "Mission: Impossible," "Green Acres," and "The Odd Couple."
"When you're working in the studios you're playing every genre of music," Hal Blaine, his friend and another prolific session drummer, said. "You might be playing classical music in the morning and hard rock in the afternoon and straight jazz at night. . . . That's where they separate the men from the boys. If you're going to be a studio musician, it's the top of the ladder."
In 2000, Mr. Palmer and Blaine were among the first class of previously unsung sidemen inducted into a new category of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which cited Mr. Palmer's "solid stickwork and feverish backbeat" in laying the foundation for rock 'n' roll drumming.
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