He regularly presented himself as having been the “originator”, the “liberator” (“emancipator”), the “architect of rock’n’roll”. Like when, in tears and deeply moved, he received a Merit Award at the American Music Awards in 1997, in recognition for his career.
This sequence, which comes towards the end of the documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything, by Lisa Cortes, shows Richard Wayne Penniman, known as “Little Richard” (1932-2020), far from the exuberance that was the mark of his life of artist.
Classic in its form – short extracts from concerts, television broadcasts, chronological approach, testimonies from artists or relatives, journalists, musicologists, comments from Little Richard – the film is interesting because of its bias. That of favoring the study of the personality of the singer, pianist and songwriter with numerous successes at the end of the 1950s (Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally, Rip It Up, Lucille, Good Golly Miss Molly, Jenny Jenny…), torn between his sexual preferences for men, partying, excess and the idea of sin.
Preacher in the 1970s
It is also up to sociologists to place Little Richard's journey more generally in the America of segregation, of the refusal of difference, of the weight of religion in everyday life.
Born December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia, Little Richard, small, “with one leg shorter than the other and one arm longer than the other,” was raised in a family of twelve children. . His father, a mason and strict pastor, who sees no problem in running a nightclub and selling contraband alcohol, chases him away when he realizes that the teenager likes to cross-dress and put on makeup.
Little Richard will alternately claim his homosexuality (“I was the first gay”) or reject it, as when, having become a preacher in the 1970s, without ceasing to perform in concerts, he declaims: “ Oh God, save me! (…) I like men, it’s unnatural. »
As a black child, he suffered racism. A black artist, he allows, between jokes, the pain and anger of not having been recognized until too late as one of the great creators of rock'n'roll, putting this down to the color of his skin. . “White people certainly didn't want their kids to listen to a fat old black man singing, screaming and sweating. So they stuck these songs on white people's butts. First Elvis [Presley], and then Pat Boone. »
And even if youth, without distinction, celebrated him in the 1950s, and many white artists revere him (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Tom Jones, David Bowie...), he will say, during the same ceremony of American Music Awards, 1997: “It took a while. »
