Credit: Far Out / Eva Rinaldi
Tue 1 September 2026 15:30, UK
Ringo Starr didn’t ever claim to be one of the greatest musicians in the world.
He was happy enough playing his drums, and while he does get the title of one of the most famous drummers to ever walk the Earth, he’s always been more happy to sit at the back and hold down the backbeat than worry about whatever song he needs to write on his next album. His greatest moments were always about the vibe rather than the songcrafting, but occasionally, there are musicians who will stand out to him as the epitome of what a true rock and roll songwriter should be.
But the art of songwriting has changed more than a few times over the course of Starr’s career. No one would have thought to be writing tunes like Bob Dylan did when The Beatles first came to America, and while John Lennon and Paul McCartney did everything they could to copy that formula whenever they were working on new music, Starr felt that there was still a lot that he could work with when they changed up their styles.
He didn’t have to play the same kind of kit every single time they made a record, and he was more than willing to do something new and change the groove around to make a song work. That might only mean him coming in at specific times or playing the most simplistic drumming ever, but he would go the extra mile even if he felt that some of the songs didn’t need that much punch behind them.
If you were to ask him his preferences, though, the best rock and roll songs were the ones that had a backbeat behind them. Compared to the kind of music that everyone was hearing on the pop charts before the 1950s, hearing people like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry may as well have sounded like punk rock to a certain degree, so hearing that kind of roar is what got Starr going when he heard his first rock and roll songs.
Granted, there aren’t many people who could be able to make a rock and roll song as nasty as Little Richard could. Every single thing that came out of his mouth sounded like an air raid siren, and from the minute that people saw him singing and putting his leg up on top of the piano, they knew that they were in for someone with a different kind of ride than what everyone else was looking for.
And while Starr still had affection for people like Presley, he felt that Richard did everything right from the moment he began screaming, saying, “Little Richard… was sensational. And the power of it, when you’re a kid in Liverpool, of this guy in a band, and he was so just like, ‘Whooo,’ so strong. And it was great. The whole thing about Little Richard was great. And rock ‘n’ roll is so important to me, and he is certainly an icon of rock ‘n’ roll. He’d probably say, ‘The icon’.”
Further reading: From The Vault
It’s not hard to see why Richard got the attention he did, but when you look at the way he played, he deserved to be one notch above Presley in some regard. For one thing, he was writing his own tunes a lot of the time, and while Presley did have a certain swagger about him, there are tunes of his that are carbon copies of what Richard did, if not entire covers like his version of ‘Tutti Frutti’.
So despite Presley going down as the ‘King of Rock and Roll’, Richard feels much more deserving of that crown when it comes to being a true frontman. Chuck Berry may have written the book on rock to a certain degree, but there aren’t many people who have tried to act wild onstage who haven’t mimicked what Richard did naturally to some degree or another.
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