Little Richard is Everything at the Kino
VICTORIA KINGHAM
In the words of musicologist Fredara Hadley: “Black music is the wellspring of American popular music, but at the same time there are industries and societies that often do not value black creators, or they want the blackness toned down”. “Do you know,” continues Little Richard Penniman himself, “that Pat Boone and Elvis Presley sold more Tutti Frutti than I did?”
Lisa Cortes’ biopic about the extraordinary Little Richard, who lived an absolutely over-the-top, no holds barred existence all his life and still lived until the age of 88, does much more than reference his unique musical career. Narrating his story from childhood in a series of film clips, the opinions of other musicians, producers, friends, musicologists, relatives, all overlaid by the driving energy of his songs and performances, the film interrogates, through a celebration of Penniman’s life, a number of universal truths. It points out the endemic racism still prevalent in the States, the Queerness of Penniman’s performances and persona at a time when this was a complete taboo, the way Black music and Black musicians and indeed Black dance halls and night clubs paved the way for white rock-and-rollers – “white kids wanted to go to black clubs”- even in the 1950s, at a time when those citizens labelled as ‘coloreds’ were still denied entry to spaces, entrances, professions, positions reserved for ‘whites-only’.
Trailblazer and innovator, Penniman scorches through American cultural history from 1932 to 2020. Even as he embraced religion, married (and later divorced) a woman, then renounced his former life and (for a time) his gayness, he still rampaged through every show, preaching, singing, playing, acting (without pay) at religious meetings and filling them until (by then in his fifties) he returned undiminished to the anarchic brilliance of his earlier performances.
Indeed the place of ‘Holy-roller’ Christianity in American Black culture is singular, given that it was brought by missionaries to Afro-Americans held in pre-revolutionary slavery. Enslaved Christians meanwhile developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom. ‘Oh, Freedom, A Change is Gonna Come, Freedom Reigns’. The film shows Little Richard in a direct line from Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Ma Rainey, and the deep well of gospel that enabled him to become the definitive inventor of rock and roll.
The I Am Everything of the film’s title, while it is a quote from Penniman himself, was clearly chosen by Cortes to emphasise the truth that the influence of Black American music on at least a century of popular music, jazz, rock music, folk music, classical music, is so profound as to be incalculable, and that Black American music springs directly, and is inseparable from, Black American culture, slavery, and oppression. Though some talk glibly of ‘cultural appropriation’ – the film points, essentially, to cultural suppression, and to Richard’s larger-than-life talent as a rocket through White fortifications. Thus we see Penniman’s massive contribution only being, finally, formally recognised in a 1996 awards ceremony.
If you didn’t catch this film (and the audience was not large) you can rent it from Amazon. If you’re a Prime member, you are paying £2.99 to watch a significant slice of international social history. See it, and think again.
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