Little Richard’s innovative marriage of boogie, gospel, beats and scaldingly profane sentiment provided the spark for rock’n’roll, a eureka moment that was too seldom acknowledged during his lifetime.
Lisa Cortés’ fond, scholarly, starry documentary not only ensures that the innovator behind Tutti Frutti and Good Golly, Miss Molly gets his due but also provides a rip-roaring bow for the artist variously known as the Georgia Peach, the Living Flame and the Southern Child.
Transgressive before the word existed, Richard Wayne Penniman of Macon, Georgia, was born with a gallimaufry of identifiers – black, queer, disabled, femme – that would not work in his favour in the southern United States of the 1930s. Academics including Zandria Robinson, Jason King and Fredara Hadley, the ethnomusicologist, skilfully relate context and the meaning of Little Richard as the film breezes through his unlikely life.
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The son of a church deacon who attended both Baptist and Pentecostal services, Richard idolised Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He began performing with a travelling medicine show in his teens and was scrubbing pots and pans at a Greyhound station when he got the call to record at J&M Studio in New Orleans. There, he produced blistering, hopping, innuendo-peddling standards that some seven decades later still make the listener think, ‘Is he allowed to sing that on the radio?’
Cortés does not shy away from her subject’s strange ambivalence towards his own sexuality nor from the substance abuse that drove him back to evangelical Christianity. His pioneering music and outrageous persona, the doc argues, were bound up with his religious fervour and queerness.
There’s too much life, unpredictability and jubilation for Little Richard: I Am Everything to dwell on lost years and opportunities. A winning cast, including John Waters and Tom Jones, line up to pay tribute. The Living Flame blazes on.
