This biopic documents the systematic erasure of Little Richard’s contributions to Rock ‘n Roll while exploring the internal tension between religion and his queer identity. We break down LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING by Lisa Cortés in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: U.S. Documentary Competition Distribution: Magnolia/CNN Films. Theatrical release on April 21, 2023. Premiered on CNN on September 4, 2023, Premium Video on Demand on April 21, 2023, and Streaming on Max on November 23, 2023
From Sundance’s website: Like a quasar burning past the gaslight, director Lisa Cortés’ eye-opening documentary explodes the whitewashed canon of American pop music. Little Richard: I Am Everything shines a clarifying light on the Black, queer origins of rock ’n’ roll, and establishes the genre’s big bang: Richard Wayne Penniman.
Testimonials from legendary musicians and cultural figures, Black and queer scholars, Penniman’s family and friends, and interviews with the artist himself all exuberantly reclaim a history that was willfully appropriated by white artists and institutions. Cortés updates the canon with a treasure trove of rarely seen archival footage of Penniman. Among the gems are scenes with his Black and queer predecessors and contemporaries, like Sister Rosetta Tharpe: the mother of rock ’n’ roll who gave 14-year-old Penniman his first break.
Cortés depicts Penniman’s complex journey as a conflicted revolutionary who careened between religion, sex, and rock ’n’ roll, navigating the extreme tensions of race and sexuality of his time. She reminds us that outsiders and outcasts can possess superpowers that, given the chance, can create new worlds for us all to dance in.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.535] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're continuing our series on Sundance 2023, looking at the different documentaries. And today we're going to be looking at Little Richard, I Am Everything by Lisa Cortez. So this is a biopic that I think was trying to reclaim a lot of the history of Little Richard that has been largely erased. It's not surprising that I wasn't familiar with a lot of these different stories that were being told here, because I think there's been a long appropriation and erasure that's been happening here. And from the synopsis, it says black and queer scholars from Little Richard's family and friends and interviews with the artist himself, all exuberantly reclaim a history that was willfully appropriated by white artists and institutions. And this film documents that. And so it was really quite interesting to not only see that history that's being reclaimed, but also to see the ways and the manners in which that it was appropriated and claimed over time. So love to hear some of your first thoughts of this piece.
[00:01:16.077] Wonder Bright: Everything that you've just said is completely true. And it sounds a little like homework when it's stated like that, to me anyway. It sounds like something you have to do before you go out and play or like, you know, cultural vegetables that you need to ingest in order to have a well-rounded sense of history. And all of those things are true. And I just want to go on the record and state that this is such a great story. And especially for our podcast, which we're calling Story All the Way Down, it is story all the way down. And it's so funny because one of the things that's mentioned in the film is that Little Richard is this unreliable narrator and That might be so, but he was a brilliant storyteller. And even though the stories he was telling about his life sometimes interrupted one another or contradicted one another, perhaps when we suffer, it's good to be an unreliable narrator, right? Like if That means that the narrator is not reporting the facts of what happened to them so much as what they're making out of the things that happened to them. Little Richard is a human being who came here and created a story, whole cloth, that could not have existed without his genius and his passion and his insight and possibly divine inspiration. And I defy someone to watch this film and not be touched by his grace. And if you're sensitive to these kinds of things the way I am, it was like being touched by the grace of God through him.
[00:03:07.640] Kent Bye: Yeah, so we're talking about Richard Wayne Penniman, also known as a Little Richard, and I've got a lot of names for himself. I think that's why Lisa Cortez with the subtitle, I Am Everything, because he calls himself the innovator, the emancipator, the architect of rock and roll, the king of rock and roll. And so you go back through the history and see the evolution of rock and roll and how he was really at the center of a lot of the innovations of the style and the method in which that he was playing and fusing the different influences from the black gospel churches and the Chitlin circuit that he was on and interacting with the queer and transgender communities that somehow had a past at the time where it was illegal to be queer. cross-dressing or to be gay at that time, but in the context of some of these performances, it was okay. So it was almost like this carve out where he was able to dress and drag and get these influences from all these different singers that were pulling in influences from the black churches. So he's kind of like this intersection of both sexuality and race that he's pulling in all these different influences to kind of fuse and create the magical combination of rock and roll. But yet, at the same time, it wasn't palatable to present this queer black man as the face of rock and roll for the white institutions. And so they had Elvis Presley and Pat Boone come in to do covers of the same songs. And they later described that he was in a three-year contract and he left after 18 months. So he's essentially screwed out of a lot of the royalties. And there's a lot of shenanigans that were happening that he was not financially being compensated for all these innovations, but also these other people were taking off deliberately using his inspiration and his work to be the face of rock and roll at the time. Elvis being recognized by the public as the king of rock and roll, but yet, Little Richard having this king of rock and roll moniker that Elvis behind the scenes allegedly told him that he would always be the king of rock and roll. the history of how it's been told. One cultural critic said he was not only appropriated, he was obliterated from this history. And so you kind of go through these different phases of his life and see how he influenced directly the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and how he was able to be a part of so many other people that came along, whether it's Michael Jackson or Prince or other influences that he may have had. David Bowie. And I feel like this film is able to connect all those dots. So by the end of it, you're like, oh, wow, this guy was truly the architect of rock and roll and rightfully called the king of rock and roll.
[00:05:51.746] Wonder Bright: I was familiar with the appropriation of Little Richard in terms of rock and roll status, in terms of the way that he moved on stage, in terms of the music that he played and how he broadcast that music. What I wasn't aware of was the cross-dressing and transgender and queer nature of his work. That was totally news to me. And the fact that in erasing that, like they took what they wanted. and left that. So it's not just the eraser of him as a Black person, it's the erasure of queerness. And therefore the erasure of queerness at the heart of rock and roll, which was a revelation to me. And like, I mean, hello, of course, like who knows how to party? Queer people. Like, this is the ecstasy that little Richard shares so joyfully. And I also was not aware of his story of mysticism and of divinity and of His love for God. So there's this like direct intersection between his path in the church and his path as a queer person and his experience of divine ecstasy is coming through him in both sex and music. And to experience that full throttle through the interviews that Cortez uses and the clips of him talking to different people and the clips of people talking about him, it's really this extraordinary document of of rock and roll history, of queer history, of the experience of being an outcast in society, in the church, and the capacity to find your gods, despite that, sometimes maybe even because of it, right? And the fact that he was able to inspire other people like Mick Jagger and David Bowie to also explore their bisexuality, because this is this thing that we know about the 60s that there were rock and roll artists who were openly bi or who were playing with these things, but I had never had that portion of it linked so directly to Little Richard. And it was exhilarating as a member of the queer community myself. It is baffling to me that I didn't know this. It's not baffling, obviously. It's like, of course, of course, our culture has erased this. But it was so powerful to have it back again, you know, to have it restored inside of me in this way. And I just fell in love with them. I just totally fell in love with them.
[00:08:45.815] Kent Bye: Yeah, just reminded of a couple of things. One, John Waters being featured in there and seeing how much that Little Richard influenced the work of John Waters and the fact that John Waters penciled mustache as a direct inspiration from Little Richard. But also there is this tension between his spiritual life and his rock and roll profession, because as he was growing up, he wanted to be a minister. And so he had this drive to be involved with the church. But there's this tension between all the things that he's talking about some of his lyrics of tutti frutti, good booty was the original phrases. And so he's actually singing about anal sex, and they had to like clean up the lyrics. And so there's different ways in which that his lyrics are directly referring to this sexual liberation, but at the same time, he's got this inner shame of hiding who he truly is. And I think that plays out through the course of this film where he's going back and forth between rock and roll and the church and being involved directly as a minister or going back to divinity school. As I look at his natal chart, there's certain squares that are happening and squares typically represent these tensions. And so he's actually born December 5th, 1932. And he's got this Uranus square Pluto in his chart, and he's got this Neptune conjunct Mars square his Sun and Mercury. And so you have these tensions between the liberated force of Uranus with the transformational potential of Pluto, which really came to fore in the 60s when the conjunction happened and you have this explosion of rock and roll. So he's a part of that last quarter square, setting the seeds before you start to go into the explosion of this fusion of all the things that were happening in the zeitgeist of the 60s, which from 1960 to 72 was the Tarnassian orbs of wind that Uranus-Pluto conjunction happen and you have this liberation force of the transformational zeitgeist of that moment with those outer planet transits that move so slowly. But also Neptune being this connecting to both diffusion of the boundaries, but also of this connecting to the unity source and you have the Mars which is this high force onto that, squaring his son in Mercury that is communicating that, but also this tension between identity between that more religious context and the more rock and roll context. So, yeah, I'd love to hear any of your thoughts as you look at some of those squares and how that started to play out, both in the story, but also in the character of him trying to express himself.
[00:11:22.199] Wonder Bright: Yeah, this is one of the films that I watched where I was like, I had to like, look it up on my mobile phone. When was he born? Do we have his birth data? Like, what's his chart? All this kind of thing. And in keeping with this, like, version of him as a potentially unreliable narrator, something I noticed when I looked up his chart on Astra.com is that the source notes for his birth data give not only disparate birth times, we don't have an accurate birth time, But it actually gives two different birth dates because little Richard claimed to be born on December 25th because he's Christian and yet his mother is reportedly supposed to have told a biographer that he was born on December 5th. Both of those dates are 1932. But obviously that's like a 20-day difference. I'm just going to say that the chart that his mother reportedly gave for him, that date does give him this Neptune-Mars conjunction squaring Mercury and the Sun. And that really accurately depicts how he seems to occur in the world. The things that really struck me about his chart generationally is that he's born in 1932 and we have another biopic of Nam June Paek also in this slew of Sundance releases and both Little Richard and Nam June Paek were born in 1932. And in fact, Nam June Paik was a member of the Fluxus art movement, and most of those artists were born in the early 30s. There were a few, like John Cage, who were sort of the godfathers of that movement and the mentors to those people. But a lot of the people were of that generation, of that early 1930s. And for both Nam June Paek and little Richard, they were born with Saturn and Aquarius, which Saturn, of course, is going through Aquarius right now. So it's like the third Saturn return to their birth placement. So there's a couple of things that show up for me around that. And first of all, Saturn is all about rules and structure. And when it's an Aquarius, it can really create those rules and those structures in the way that it sees fit, because Aquarius is ruled by Saturn. So Saturn and Aquarius people have this capacity to see the rules. But what's so interesting about this generation of artists is that they saw the rules and then that allowed them to play with the rules and break the rules. So there's something so vibrant about the people who are involved with the arts from this period of time, and Little Richard is no exception, obviously, like proves out the rule in a way that, you know, He had lots of sexual partners his whole life. He was beloved. And yet he didn't have a coterie of artists who were there supporting and uplifting his work so much as stealing it and appropriating it, even when he was a mentor for them the way that he was with the Beatles and all of these artists so looked up to him and yet they couldn't help but imitate him. And then they got success that he never did. That wasn't their intent, you know, it's just that their whiteness granted them the privilege of sharing the wealth of this. They could be inspired and imitate it. And then they could only be seen as the originators within this culture, which just cannot seem to see little Richard. Right. And so to observe little Richard creating a world almost out of whole cloth, although I will say, obviously, that's not the case. Like what we see in the film is that when he leaves home because he suffers an abusive relationship with his father and he leaves home early and he joins a troupe of transgender artists, and drag queens. And this is where he develops his performance ability and his capacity to act within that queerness. So this is like another story where we get this Black transgender conversation occurring. across the scope of what was given to us this year at Sundance and to have it happen from this person born in 1932 and to wonder about these drag queens and his friends that he made when he was, you know, in his late teens and early 20s. And, you know, he took something from his time with them and then he replicated it out in the world. And, you know, we're still replicating it.
[00:16:12.825] Kent Bye: I think one of the things that this film does is also show the influences that he had as he was growing up, because this didn't come out of nowhere. He's coming from AME churches and Sister Rosetta Tharpe and all these other influences from the South that he was fusing things together as well, and people that he was inspired by. I think this film does a great job of situating not only his own personal story and the conflicts that he had, but also the cultural milieu that he was coming out of and helped to generate. And so you get this historical evolution of these different time periods and how as an individual, he's at the intersection of all of this. But also as we talk about the astrological descriptions of these conflicts, even if you don't look at that astrological description, you can see these inner turmoil that he has and In the artist statement that Lisa Cortez had about Sundance, she said she's taking testimony from all these different people and Little Richard isn't always the most reliable narrator about his own life. And so there's both a bit of hyperbole, but also this inner turmoil that he has where he can't fully express and own his own queerness in a way that he feels in conflict between how this is a mortal sin that if he really expresses himself, he's going to be going to hell. And so there's a part of his full expression of his identity that at the time he's growing up is in a cultural context where it's not accepted from the roots of his upbringing and his religious convictions. And so you get a sense of that tension But I guess the other thing that I wanted to say about this is that there's a way in which that little Richard's not getting his due. And you could see him giving awards to other people, and he's presenting these awards and passively aggressively saying, you know, how he could be also be awarded, but isn't being awarded. And so it's nice to see that there is a culmination of that where he does actually get some recognition while he's still alive, to see how moving it is for him to finally be seen and to be witnessed and to be acknowledged. for what he was able to do. So this film is able to do that, but it's nice to know that he didn't die never having had any type of that recognition. He may have not gotten the financial rewards for all of his innovations and work during his lifetime, and that's another sad aspect of his fates that he had to live with. But I was really satisfied to not only see that while he was alive, but also I think this film is trying to put together all those voices to really give him his due and to
[00:18:45.308] Wonder Bright: Really fully contextualize his life and what he was able to accomplish and what he means Yeah, I think this thing where Cortez says he's not the most reliable narrator, but I suspect that that's actually part of his genius because if we think of a reliable narrator as being somebody who tells the facts of their life and That's not necessarily, first of all, a compelling story. And secondly, the facts of our life are open for interpretation. And I think something that is really at the genius of queer culture is the capacity to tell a new story. about the facts of your life that have been told to you one way and then you strike out on your own and you find other people who can see you like little Richard did when he was in his late teens and early 20s and he found a group of drag queens who took him in and reflected back his glory and he could belong. And that is a redemptive arc that queer people, transgender people today still will recognize. Like that kind of witness occurs within these communities and it occurs within all marginalized communities. It's that recognition from one to another that I see you. You belong. Your pain is my pain. Your pain is our pain. And our pain was put on us by others. That doesn't come from us. And yet you see for little Richard this anxiety where he's going back and forth between the love of that shared space and the deep somehow inner knowledge that he has, that he is loved by God, that he feels the spirit of the gods when he's on that stage or his God when he's on that stage. And he makes everyone in the room feel it, too. Right. He's gone, but I'm feeling it myself watching it on our TV. Touched by God. Right? Like we're all God's children. This is what he's saying. Like stand up and dance, motherfucker. This is like something to have joy over and through. So what is like ultimately for me in many ways, the greatest sadness in this story is the way in which his spiritual truth was not something he was able to reconcile with inside community. So that when he would really start listening to his God, it became a punitive experience because that was the culture of divinity and God of his origin. And when we look at his chart, we do see that he we don't have his birth time. So even though it just he feels like just Leo all the time, if anybody knows astrology, they know Leo little Richard just is exuberantly shiny in the way that we experience Leo energy, creativity, and just glory. But we don't have Leo show up in his chart. What we do have is we have this exact conjunction between Mars and Neptune, which is squaring his Mercury and his Sun. And so in that square aspect you were talking about, there's this immediate tension. And often it's coming from an external source. There's a force outside of ourselves that is causing this inner turmoil, especially when it's squaring a planet like the sun or Mercury. where we're going to constantly question ourselves and constantly feel that we are at the mercy of external forces that we have no control over. And yet, simultaneously, when planets are witnessing one another so tightly and the orbs in this case are really sharp, they're like within a degree, it creates this frision of energy where it's like magnets that are opposing one another, and then they might suddenly flip and they come together. And when you get Neptune, this is where we get the call from God is like ringing off the hook and you have to answer it. So there is this tension in his character between the need to exalt physically through Mars and expression and desire and like the full throated cry of I want this. I need this makes us very compulsive where we find Mars and when it's conjoined to Neptune. It's like I need physical release through divinity. And that can happen through sex. And then obviously, apparently, it also happens through rock and roll. It happens through gospel. It happens through the power of music. And yet, Little Richard, for him, this dynamic was like this tension is caused where he can't reconcile it. And I suppose, you know, this is in many ways the function of art, that we have a question that truly ultimately can't be reconciled. It's the attempt to answer it that is what's critical. And yet the cost on him as a human in the attempt to reconcile it in the absence of witness from community. I just hope that as a culture, we can begin creating a witness that he didn't have.
[00:24:07.203] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's one quote that says, all this post-war aching, yearning and teenage horniness was put into a musical form that people could feel. And I feel like that translation of those feelings into the music that people could see this fusion of those desires and those feelings. His work is really doing that. Yeah. Well, I think what I'm bearing witness to in this film is that there's a chorus of friends and family and also the cultural critics in this. I really appreciate it. People standing up and say, he was not only appropriated, but he was obliterated. And to see that type of erasure and to reclaim it through a cultural artifact like this film, to retell that story and to really properly contextualize Little Richard and what he was able to accomplish because so many parts of his work were by these institutions of segregation and racism at the time that he was coming out with this. He was not able to be his own voice to be supported by the institutions of our culture to be the face of rock and roll at the time. They needed to put a white face with Pat Boone and Elvis. He was architecting all these songs and they had to basically erase him in order to put it out there. And so it propagates the culture and takes off, but yet he as the architect, the emancipator, the innovator, the king of rock and roll is being erased from that history. I'm just grateful for both the director, Lisa Cortes, for putting all this together, but the chorus of cultural critics in this film that are able to really properly contextualize his life in a way that is reclaiming this history. What are you bearing witness to?
[00:25:47.998] Wonder Bright: I want to bear witness to his capacity to listen to his God and to let that spark of divinity shine through him and to be a conduit in that way. And the kind of trust that that took, that on some level, his human soul recognized that it wasn't about him. It was about this much larger thing. And he connected a generation of people to this other realm of being, this ecstatic realm of being through his art, through his body, through his passion. for his Christ, and how it came to him. And I want to bear witness to Lisa Cortez and her whole crew for bringing this story through themselves and spreading his message.
[00:26:51.333] Kent Bye: Yeah, this is Little Richard, I Am Everything by Lisa Cortez. This has a distributor of Magnolia and CNN Films. So this will be made available at some point here, probably in 2023. So keep an eye out on that in terms of when it's going to be coming out. I'm glad that it'll be getting out there for people to be able to watch. Yeah.
[00:27:10.548] Wonder Bright: Thanks so much for joining us with Story All the Way Down for this episode devoted to Little Richard, I Am Everything by Lisa Cortez. Definitely check out the film. And if you want to know more about what Kent and I are doing, go to storyallthewaydown.com and see what we have to say.
