Songfacts®:

• "Hey Little Richard" is the opening song on the oldest known recording Bob Dylan made, making it the first recorded Dylan tune in history. An original composition, it's 30 grainy seconds of 16-year-old Robert Zimmerman (he hadn't taken the name Bob Dylan yet) pounding on a piano and yelling in duet with his friend John Bucklen, "Hey, little Richard, poor Little Richard."
  
  Bucklen made the recording in spring of 1958 at Dylan's house in Hibbing, Minnesota. It's come to be known as The Bucklen Tape. The two young men were playing around in the garage, which is rather poetic as the recording sounds like something from the "garage rock" genre that emerged in the mid-'60s - Dylan always was ahead of his time.
  
  Contrary to the "wandering hobo of the American archetype" that Dylan would cultivate a couple years later in New York City, in The Bucklen Tape he sounds like any other suburban teenage boy banging away at his instrument, having fun, and talking about the popular musicians of his time. He says that Johnny Cash had no "expression" (was boring), which is funny considering he later did a duet with him on "Girl From The North Country." He also criticizes Ricky Nelson for being a poor singer and Elvis for stealing his music from smaller acts. The one person Dylan praises unequivocally is Little Richard.
• Little Richard was one of the most important figures in rock and roll history. He sang, played piano, and wrote some of rock's most iconic early tunes, including "Tutti Frutti" and "Long Tall Sally." He was a cultural icon and has been called the Architect of Rock and Roll. His career ran an incredible 70 years, but his peak was in the mid-1950s, right about the time Dylan recorded this song.
• The recording first came to light on May 8, 1993, when pieces of it were strewn throughout a BBC television show titled Highway 61 Revisited, part of their Tales of Rock and Roll series. It can also be heard on the 2005 documentary No Direction Home. It was supposed to be included on Highway 61 Interactive, a CD-ROM project that got canned over legal issues and never saw the light of day.