LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING
A hair-raising true tale of rock’n’roll. By Richard Williams
“THE rst song that you love and your parents hate is the beginning of the soundtrack to your life – and in my case it was most de nitely ‘Lucille’,” says lm director John Waters. His testimony is featured in Lisa Cortés’ Little Richard: I Am Everything, a fulllength biographical documentary on the life of the man who unblushingly described himself as “the originator, the emancipator, the architect of rock’n’roll”.
Waters’ testimony is the sort of thing that traditionally forms the foundation of a rock doc: a claim framed by a white man, now in his seventies, who experienced in real time the impact of the emergence of Little Richard and the music’s other founding gures. Someone like a thousand rock critics, in fact, including this one, who are regularly called upon to contribute to such projects. But this lm is dierent. And in many ways better.
“What would it do to the mythology of American rock music to see that its pioneers were queer black people?” These are the words of Fredara Hadley, who is neither a man, nor white, nor in her seventies. She is a professor of ethnomusicology at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, not born until Little Richard had renounced rock’n’roll for the ministry for a second time at the end of the 1970s. It is on thoughts such as hers that the lm pivots. And on those of Jason King, a writer, academic and currently chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, who says of the man who ip-opped all his life between the profane and the sacred: “He existed in contradiction.”
There is also Zandria Robinson, a sociologist working at the intersection of race, gender, popular culture and the American South at Georgetown University in Washington DC, who says, in the middle of a programme that has Mick Jagger, Tom Jones, Paul Mccartney, David Bowie and others acknowledging their profound debt to Little Richard: “We use the wrong word when we talk about ‘appropriation’. Think about it as ‘obliteration’.”
If that makes the lm sound about as appealing as a 100-minute lecture on critical race theory, think again. Richard Wayne Penniman – born 1932, died 2020 – dominates and animates every minute of a fastmoving, brilliantly edited lm. The historical material and the talking heads are integrated into a narrative in which every archive clip featuring its subject, whether in performance or in TV interviews with David Frost, Dick Clark, Ray Connolly and David Letterman, goes o like a rework.
His inuence was inestimable, but those contradictions were everpresent. As a child in Macon, Georgia he went to the strait-laced Baptist church with his mother on a Sunday morning and to the holy-rolling African Methodist Episcopal church with his father in the a¤ernoon. Emerging from the gender-uid world of the chitlin’ circuit as the rst entertainer, in his own estimation, to come out as gay, later he publicly repudiated homosexuality (“God made Adam to be with Eve, not Adam and Steve”).
Some of the most intimate and moving testimony comes from the veteran transgender performer and activist Sir Lady Java and from Lee Angel, whom he met when she was a teenage stripper and who says, “Richard was the love of my life and I believe I was the love of his.” Whoever he was, by the end of this rocking and richly detailed lm you’re in love with him, too.