Mark Deming at Allmusic: Little Richard had been making records for four years before he rolled into Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studio in New Orleans and cut the epochal "Tutti Frutti" in the fall of 1955, but everything else he'd done -- and much of what others had recorded -- faded into insignificance when Richard wailed "A wop bop a loo mop a lomp bomp bomp" and kicked off one of the first great wailers in rock history. In retrospect, Little Richard's style doesn't seem so strikingly innovative as captured in 1956's Here's Little Richard -- his boogie-woogie piano stylings weren't all that different from what Fats Domino had been laying down since 1949, and his band pumped out the New Orleans backbeat that would define the Crescent City's R&B for the next two decades, albeit with precision and plenty of groove. But what set Richard apart was his willingness to ramp up the tempos and turn the outrage meter up to ten; "Tutti Frutti," "Rip It Up," and "Jenny Jenny" still sound outrageous a half-century after they were waxed, and it's difficult but intriguing to imagine how people must have reacted to Little Richard at a time when African-American performers were expected to be polite, and the notion of a gay man venturing out of the closet simply didn't exist (Richard's songs were thoroughly heterosexual on the surface, but the nudge and wink of "Tutti Frutti" and "Baby" is faint but visible, and his bop threads, mile-high process, and eye makeup clearly categorized him as someone "different"). These 12 tunes may not represent the alpha and omega of Little Richard's best music, but every song is a classic and unlike many of his peers, time has refused to render this first album quaint -- Richard's grainy scream remains one of the great sounds in rock & roll history, and the thunder of his piano and the frantic wail of the band is still the glorious call of a Friday night with pay in the pocket and trouble in mind. Brilliant stuff.

Wiki: Here's Little Richard is the debut album from Little Richard, released on March 1957. He had scored six Top 40 hits the previous year, some of which were included on this recording. It was his highest charting album, at 13 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. The album contained two of Richard's biggest hits, "Long Tall Sally", which reached No. 6, and "Jenny, Jenny", which reached No. 10 in the U.S. Pop chart. It also contained "Tutti Frutti" (his first hit), "Slippin' and Slidin'", and "Rip It Up," all of which were Billboard top 40 hits; and "Ready Teddy", "She's Got It," and "Miss Ann," all of which, in addition to the prior songs listed, were top 10 Billboard "Hot R&B Singles." In all, 9 of the LP's 12 songs made the US Billboard Hot 100 charts between 1955 and 1958. (See Little_Richard_discography#Singles for a complete listing of chart positions.)

In 2003, the album was ranked number 50 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, maintaining the rating in a 2012 revised list. It is included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and in 2010 Time listed it in the Top 100 Albums of All Time. The opening track "Tutti Frutti" was listed as No. 43 in Rolling Stone 's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time