The 'Good Golly Miss Molly' singer, whose career spanned over six decades, has died
The third of 12 children, he grew up in Macon, Georgia. His father, a bricklayer who was embarrassed by his son’s affectations, was shot to death in a fight in 1952. In hopes of curing Richard’s birth defect — his right leg was three inches shorter than his left — his mother, Leva, sent him to the New Hope Baptist Church every Sunday.
"There wasn’t any rock’n’roll at that time," he recalled to PEOPLE years ago. "So we sang gospel. Everybody around us was singing gospel—the women hanging out the wash, the old men on the porches at night, everybody."A ninth-grade dropout with dreams of becoming as popular as the singing evangelist Brother Joe May, known as "the Thunderbolt of the Midwest," Richard skipped town with a traveling medicine show.
Richard toured steadily in the mid-’50s, performing all over the world, while issuing one hit single after another — "Ready Teddy", "Send Me Some Lovin'", "Ooh! My Soul", and "Kansas City."
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