Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023)

This documentary about the self-proclaimed king of rock ‘n’ roll (“shut up!”) makes a solid case that Little Richard Penniman is the one and only, accept no substitutes, and at the same time keeps it well shy of adoring hagiography, as much as he deserves adoring. Director and coproducer Lisa Cortes (The Remix: Hip Hop X Fashion; All In: The Fight for Democracy) keeps the focus on Little Richard’s complex status as a Black, queer icon. She ropes in a handful of celebrities to provide sound bites (Nona Hendryx, Mick Jagger, Tom Jones, Nile Rodgers, John Waters who admits his pencil mustache is an homage), rounds up another handful of academics to offer insight and context, and lets the music play. The Todd Haynes movie Velvet Goldmine gave Little Richard his just deserts, but I Am Everything benefits from actually having a rich well of archival footage of Little Richard himself, often in superior form. It charts his career from his earliest work trying to break in in the early ‘50s until his death in 2020. He first rejected show business for the church in 1957 because of a vision. By 1962 he was running out of money and turned to rock ‘n’ roll again. From the footage, the ‘60s was the time to see him. Later he would return to the church again, and even marry in the ‘70s, before running low on money again. The pattern repeated for much of his life. The Specialty label recorded all his early hits but kept the royalties for themselves after 1957, because he broke their contract in his spasm of religion. The performance footage from all eras is often wonderful. He refers to himself as the king of rock ‘n’ roll a few times—I suspect Elvis getting the honors more widely may have vexed Little Richard nearly as much as it did Jerry Lee Lewis. In Little Richard’s case, however (and Chuck Berry’s, while I’m at it, and Jerry Lee Lewis too why not?), the claim has at least as much weight as the one for Elvis. Give Elvis his due, but one thing I Am Everything slyly does is show clearly how, on the ‘50s covers of Little Richard’s hits such as “Tutti Frutti,” Elvis is a lot closer to Pat Boone than Little Richard. Little Richard was the one and only, he was the original, and he felt rejected most of his life for being what he was, rejected most tragically perhaps by himself, who never really strayed long from piety (though he strayed very far). A moment here where he finally feels acknowledged and honored at a 1997 ceremony gives a rare moment of evident peace for him, when he was 64. All the rest was God. Worth seeing.

The Girl Can't Help It (1956)

USA, 99 minutes
Director: Frank Tashlin
Writers: Frank Tashlin, Herbert Baker, Garson Kanin
Photography: Leon Shamroy
Music: Little Richard, Julie London, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Platters, Treniers, Ray Anthony, Abbey Lincoln
Editor: James B. Clark
Cast: Jayne Mansfield, Tom Ewell, Edmond O'Brien, Henry Jones, John Emery, Barry Gordon

The Girl Can't Help It looks like it might have started as an attempt to repeat the success of Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch from just the year before. Tom Ewell reprises his role as a mild-mannered (not to say dweebish) comfortable husband type, and Jayne Mansfield gets the sexpot honors that Marilyn Monroe had in the first picture. And the story goes similar places. But there are a couple of key ingredients The Girl Can't Help It has that The Seven Year Itch does not. The first is director and cowriter Frank Tashlin, whose style and instincts were honed as a key figure at the Warner Brothers animation factory in the '30s. After this movie he would go on to work with Jerry Lewis. The second is rock 'n' roll—real rock 'n' roll, from 1956.

In fact, the whole thing is so packed with music there's room for names you're sure to recognize—Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, and the Platters—as well as some that maybe you won't: Ray Anthony, the Chuckles, Eddie Fontaine, the Treniers. And there are even a few names, such as Abbey Lincoln and Julie London, that make you wonder how they happened to wander into this at all. My guess—again, because this is still so relatively early, in 1956—is they just cast the net wide: if it was a hit because of jukeboxes (and/or radio), it was a candidate for inclusion. And it's that sense of all-embracing inclusion as much as anything that makes this movie such a great big kick.

"Tutti-Frutti" (1956)

40. Little Richard, "Tutti-Frutti" (Jan. 28, 1956, #17)

Talk about iconic, talk about the origins of rock 'n' roll, talk about the detonation points of history. Little Richard—though he did not come from nowhere, hardly—about had it all, not least the wit to invent "A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop a-lop-bam-boom" and then use it to open this, his first hit, cramming it down the microphone hard. He's the one pumping the piano—later a saxophone shows itself in—and the whole thing is delivered with a fervent fever across its two and a half minutes that is equal parts church throw-down and titanic pleasure release. It may sound rather tame to our ears now, but I think that's more the production and the recording technology. What doesn't sound tame is Little Richard's vocal, a fact easily enough detected when one attempts to sing along and match him note for note, intonation for intonation. Then you'll feel it. He's all over the register: falsetto hoots, various growls, grunting flourishes, hard breathing, and that attempt always to enunciate those nonsense syllables as if they mean something. Because they do, and it's a meaning that transcends language, which makes his strategy really the only way to do it (just don't call it speaking in tongues). Little Richard made his bones with this, repeating the same kind of stunt over the next year and a half or so. If it's tempting to argue for any one of them over the others, that's a matter of personal taste—they are all essentially of a piece. He then retired into a career that continues today, more than 50 years on, vacillating between obedience to the Lord and a return to these devilish sounds and the kind of media empire that produces them. Little Richard himself, of course, would never use the term "media empire," even in regard to his appearances on "Hollywood Squares."

The Very Best of Little Richard (1956-1964)

"Tutti-Frutti" The original wild man of rock 'n' roll, and accept no substitutes. In his prime—hell, even now—there is no one like Little Richard [Penniman], of Macon, Georgia, though plenty have tried. James Brown, Paul McCartney, and Otis Redding all started their careers dazzled by and frequently outright imitating him (Redding also hailed from Macon), adopting his various stylings vocally if not sartorially (few before the '70s were willing to so publicly attempt such transparent light-in-the-loafers outlandishness) in order to find their rock 'n' roll ways. Bob Dylan wrote in his high school yearbook, circa 1959, that he aspired to play with Little Richard. Jimi Hendrix once said he wanted to do with his guitar what Little Richard did with his voice, by implication his performance. Prince reaches all the way through James Brown to get to the essence of Little Richard. This is no matter of simply paying lip service to a hoary rock 'n' roll cliché or legend. A listen to what Little Richard accomplished in his prime, and maybe a gander at what he contributes to the movie The Girl Can't Help It, should serve to answer any further questions. On a driving job I had once, long ago, I can never forget how I lit up like a pinball machine whenever the oldies station played one of those early hits: "Tutti-Frutti," "Long Tall Sally," "Rip it Up," "Keep a Knockin'," and others. The excitement is palpable, irresistible, and enduring to this day. Penniman, like so many of the early rock 'n' rollers, may be driven as much by mad flight into and out of the arms of Satan—which, at least in his case, could as well simply be the mundane matter of refusing to accept his own sexuality, though arguably that amounts to the same thing. His career itself has been marked by a similar dynamic. Rock 'n' roller, minister of the church, media celebrity, hallowed communicant, on and on it goes, back and forth. Fortunately for us (if perhaps less so for him), all of that tension is compressed into this music, which, as the saying goes, will never die. That's the art of it, and his never-ending accomplishment.