What Little Richard Deserved

Because the story of Little Richard is inextricable from the story of what other artists took from him, it can be tempting to forget that he, too, absorbed and emulated the talent that came before him. One virtue of the moving and expansive new documentary “I Am Everything,” directed by Lisa Cortés, is how thoughtfully it catalogues the influences that shaped his artistry. Born Richard Penniman to a large, poor family in the religious small town of Macon, Georgia, Richard took in the gospels and spirituals he saw as a boy in church—both with his mother at Baptist services, which were neat, seated, and driven by the voice, and with his father, a minister, at the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the proceedings were rich with raucous instrumentation and dancing in the aisles, and where to sit was unforgivable. Witnessing these two modes of worship at an early age seemed to give Richard a blueprint for the opposing impulses that he held within: he was a performer who sometimes lived in every inch of the world and who sometimes retreated.

“They wouldn’t let me sing that much, ’cause I wouldn’t stop,” Richard says in one clip early in the film, which weaves interview and performance footage of Richard (who died in 2020) with commentary from scholars, old friends and bandmates, and the artists indebted to him, including Mick Jagger. (Unfortunately, it includes only still imagery of Richard as a boy; a youngster shown singing passionately in a church choir is someone else.) When Richard was fourteen, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Queen Mother of Rock and Roll—shown in a couple of exuberant archival performance clips—saw him singing backstage when she did a gig in Macon and was so impressed that she let him open the show and gave him a little pocket money. To escape his home town, Richard toured in minstrel tent shows and eventually looped into the informal network of Black clubs and bars known as the Chitlin’ Circuit, where he’d sometimes don a dress and perform under the name Princess Lavonne. While on the road, he met and grew close to the blues singer Billy Wright, who helped him get his first recording contract, in 1951. An openly gay Black performer who also sometimes performed in drag, Wright also schooled Richard on the importance of self-presentation, of caking one’s makeup and greasing one’s pompadour just so. Not long after, at a bus station back in Macon, Richard met Esquerita, a queer, tall, magnetic rock-and-roll piano player who taught him how to hit the keys with percussive ferocity. In one interview, Richard recalls that industry executives wanted him to sound like Ray Charles or B. B. King. “Me and those young kids, we was tired of all that slow music,” he says.

As any Little Richard chronicle must, “I Am Everything” unravels the central injustice that looms over his career, which is that what Richard accomplished as a performer was far greater than what he ever got for it. He is not unique in this; many Black artists of many eras could, of course, say the same. But, in Richard’s case, the sheer size of the gap is so jarringly wide that it feels like a predicament all its own. Richard not only pioneered a sound, a style, and a performance technique that would help to define modern rock-and-roll music—driving, unpredictable, pushing the limits of pace and volume simultaneously—he also generously nurtured other musicians, including Jimi Hendrix, who began his career in Richard’s band, and the Beatles, who opened a series of shows for him in 1962. But Richard was also the poor Black kid who once worked in a restaurant at a Greyhound station where, owing to Jim Crow, he wasn’t allowed to eat or even use the bathroom. When the owner of Specialty Records, Art Rupe, purchased the rights to “Tutti Frutti,” which would become Richard’s first hit, he paid fifty dollars, and Richard’s contract gave him half a cent for each record that got sold—a fraction of what white stars at the time were getting. Richard’s father, Bud, had been shot and killed when Richard was nineteen, leaving the family desperate. In a 1984 interview, Richard recalled, “I was a dumb Black kid and my mama had twelve kids and my daddy was dead. I wanted to help them, so I took whatever was offered. Rock and roll was an exit for me.” Again, he wasn’t alone: white record labels capitalizing on the desperation of Black artists is an unavoidable part of the story of American music. But an aggravating of the wound, for Richard, was having to watch white artists such as Pat Boone climb higher on the charts singing sanitized, slowed-down versions of the same songs.

The conventional wisdom was that Black music would do just fine, so long as there wasn’t a Black person singing it. But when Little Richard did perform his own stuff, audiences couldn’t get enough of his untamed flamboyance and his command of the stage. Richard was not only beautiful but confident in his beauty; he knew his angles and didn’t have to work hard to find good light. He was beautiful while sweating, while his perfect hair became gradually undone in a whirl of movement. He wore the labor of performance well. Before Elvis or the Beatles, Little Richard had women, overwhelmed by his magnetism, flinging their underwear onstage. There’s a price to being a Black performer who’s that free and that beautiful. In Amarillo, Texas, after Richard took off his shirt onstage, a D.A. had him arrested on charges of lewd behavior. In “I Am Everything,” Richard describes another incident, in Augusta, Georgia, where he was beaten by police and told, “ ‘You’re singing nigger music to white kids.’ ” At a time before venues were integrated, white kids would sneak in on nights designated for Black audiences to hear him play. Richard recalls this in the film with a sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm, which is understandable given his craving for affirmation. But it is also painful to think of Black concertgoers adhering to the horrors of segregation, attending a night that was supposed to be theirs, only to discover that it didn’t really belong to them, just as Richard’s music would no longer be his.

Hip to the co-opting of “Tutti Frutti,” Richard wrote and performed his next hit, “Long Tall Sally,” at a frantic tempo which could not hope to be duplicated by the cardigan-clad likes of Pat Boone. The lyrics collapsed atop one another into a single run-on sentence: “WelllongtallSallyshe’sbuiltforspeed / ShegoteverythingthatUncleJohnneed.” Of course, that didn’t stop other artists from doing their own dampened versions: Boone, the Beatles, the Kinks. In the documentary, the writer and sociologist Zandria Robinson floats a term that she finds more befitting of Richard’s case than appropriation: obliteration. When it comes to the matter of legacy—which versions of which songs are remembered, and who is credited—history was not kind to Little Richard. Even if you knew this already, as I did, to see it laid out in “I Am Everything” feels freshly devastating. Because Richard ended up leaving his contract at Specialty Records early, he received no royalties for the hits he’d made with the label. A couple of decades later, he was selling Bibles on television, making a hundred and fifty dollars a week.

When it comes to Black artists, I am not very interested in the performance of humility. To remind people of all you’re capable of, and all you’ve done, may not stop you from being erased, but it might at least hang some shame around the necks of those doing the erasing. The special heartbreak of Little Richard, though, was that his declarations curdled over time from joyful boasting, or even a kind of self-amazement—I’m so good even I can hardly believe it—into a more frantic, resentful kind of attention-seeking. In one clip shown in the film, Richard is onstage presenting the award for Best New Artist at the 1988 Grammys. He pretends to scan the envelope in his hands, then looks up and pronounces, “Me.” I’ve seen the clip countless times, but what happens next never ceases to fascinate me. Richard veers from playful to plaintive: “Y’all ain’t never gave me no Grammy, and I been singing for years! I am the architect of rock and roll, and I have never received nothing!” (He was eventually granted a lifetime-achievement award, in 1993.) The audience responds first with laughter, as if Richard were joking, and then with waves of applause, a standing ovation, clapping over Richard’s protests until he can barely be heard. It’s a show of appreciation but an empty one, a crowd reacting to the spectacle of Richard but not the substance. It’s the sound of laudatory noise threatening to diminish and then vanish for good.

A second clip, of Little Richard inducting Otis Redding into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a year later, is even harder to watch. Richard had been inducted into the Rock Hall in 1986, but he’d missed the ceremony owing to a car crash in Los Angeles that nearly took his life. So the induction of Redding became sort of a de-facto tribute to himself. His speech was sometimes funny—“Y’all should record me, I don’t know why you’re not! I’m still here, and I look decent!”—but also self-indulgent, obsessed with settling the score, with pressing against the immovable walls of history. (I was reminded of another Richard tribute, in Rolling Stone in 2005, in a special issue naming the hundred greatest artists in music history. For every musician chosen, a peer or admirer would write a small encomium—for instance, Bono wrote about Elvis, who was ranked third. Little Richard was ranked eighth and wrote about himself.) Near the end of the proceedings, Richard calls Redding one of the greatest composers and singers who’d ever lived, and then he paused, and it seemed as if he might let that tribute linger in the air. But then he continues, “That’s including me. And everyone else. Jimi Hendrix and all them that’s been with me. James Brown, the Beatles,” and then, furrowing his brow and peering out at the crowd, he adds, “Mick Jagger. He don’t ever mention it, but he was with me, too. Mick, you remember that!”