A stirring addition to such revisionist rock and roll-related documentaries as “Summer of Soul (Or… When The Revolution Could Not be Televised)", “The Velvet Underground” and “Moonage Daydream,” Lisa Cortes’ “Little Richard: I Am Everything” takes perhaps the original rock music pioneer and argues that he was marginalized because of his sexual orientation and never given the acclaim and riches he deserved.
Before James Brown, before Otis Redding, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson and Prince, there was Little Richard aka Richard Wayne Penniman, one of 12 children of hard-pressed parents from Macon, Georgia. His father was a preacher who ran a nightclub and moonshine. Richard’s granddaddy had a piano. The boy played. The family attended the Baptist Church in New Hope and the local AME Church. His peers called him “sissy,” “punk” and other slurs. He loved to wear make-up and his mother’s clothes and even the curtains. He was also disabled with limbs of different lengths. As a boy, his father “put him out.” “I been through that,” chimes in gay activist Billy Porter, one of many musicians, gay and straight, interviewed for the film.
Among them are Mick Jagger, who toured with Little Richard in mid-'60s, Paul McCartney, who confesses that the Beatles trademark “scream” was borrowed from Little Richard, and Sir Tom Jones, who also toured with Richard. Influenced by the likes of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, young Richard hit the Chitlin’ Circuit with such acts as Sugar Foot Sam from Alabam, where Richard heard “dirty blues” and found that sexual lines blurred at night. Little Richard even dared to headline a drag show band dressed as Princess Levonne. Inspired by cross-dressing piano player Esquerita and gay Atlanta singer Billy Wright, who helped Little Richard get a recording contract and whose pompadours Little Richard copied, Little Richard recorded a bowdlerized version of the gay sex ditty “Tutti Frutti” in 1955.
