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.