When I first heard Pat's recordings of "Ain't That a Shame" and "Tutti Frutti", I had never heard of Fats Domino nor Little Richard.

Pop music was pretty much segregated then, with the exception of a few 'crossover' artists like Nat Cole, Sarah Vaughn, and the Mills Brothers.

I think the record that probably did the most to break that barrier was Chuck Berry's "Maybelline". When it became an R&B hit there were several covers by white performers, all of them horrible, and Berry's original broke through, the rest being rock and roll history.

Then the previously little known (to white listeners) versions of some of Pat's hits became popular retroactively.

Pat and Richard have, of course, been good friends in private life for a long time.