Little Richard: I am Everything and Portrait of Jason Challenging the Societal Norms

By George Morris

Challenging the Norms

Society in the 1950s was plagued with segregation and homophobia. There was a specific image that people had to uphold and fit into that severely limited expression and art. That was until certain artists such as Little Richard and the producers of Portrait of Jason started to emerge. Through both documentaries, what is considered “accepted” through art, music, performance, sex, religion, and expression is challenged. I found that both documentaries, from the same time period yet produced at in different decades, have significant overlap about how two prominent people broke down the same barriers between expression, sexuality, and race, on different stages of the world. While Portrait of Jason explored identity, intersexuality and the challenges that people in those categories faced, Little Richard was a symbol of hope showing people that expression, art, and identity are possible anywhere.

Little Richard: I am Everything.

The documentary Little Richard: I am Everything on HBO MAX was incredibly moving and was presented in a way that easily helped connect the life and actions of Little Richard to challenges that different communities face in our present-day community. The documentary would flash between actual footage of Little Richards performances and subsequent interviews and then to present day experts offering their opinions on his life actions. Despite having little prior knowledge of this era or person, this style made it very easy for me to connect with the time period as well as the character and personality of Little Richard. I found that Little Richard expressed many different emotions including confidence as well as a sense of hurt through his interviews. This made it easy for me to agree with the experts when they determined that he was deeply affected by never receiving the same recognition of his peers despite being one of the creators of an entire genre of music, and the most prominent faces of expression and rebellion through rock and roll.

This documentary helps inform that Little Richard (Richard Penniman) was a prominent Artist who reinvented pop music and rock and roll as a form of self-expression in the 1950s. He is known for breaking almost every rule in music and is credited for creating a template for black and queer origins of rock and roll. Little Richard referred to himself as the emancipator, the architect and the one who started it all. 

People wanted him to conform to Ray Charles and imitate others famous African musicians when he wanted play something that was completely his own.

One lunch break at an audition, he sat down at a piano and played an original called tutti fruity. This song shocked everyone because of the tempo, lyrics, and the energy that it brought to the room. He was singing about graphic sex, and everyone was baffled that he could accomplish it without being threatening. While listening I was personally shocked because I had thought that Elvis was the original writer (which leads us to Little Richard’s next problem).

White society didn’t like that he was becoming a hero. Other artists began playing his songs and selling more records from them. This can be attributed to the older generation of white society being against having a black gay man as the popular musician of the time. They were saying over the radio that it would corrupt their children, and that it was brought to America by the communists. It is also important to note that this was during the same time as Emmit Till. Because of his mixed-race attendance at performances and his sexual identity Richard was arrested many times.

Although Richard was able to empower so many other people and artists, the documentary showed that he was never able to accept himself. The world kept trying to make him fit a certain mold and he seemed to struggle throughout his life with really identifying himself as either in the box or out of it, he was everything. Little Richard gave people the fuel to rebel against society and societal norms. Everybody was afraid of him because he was unpredictable. Little Richard's music began to break down the walls of segregation because everyone wanted to listen to it, not just the African American community. All of this work and his accomplishments only cause me to wonder, why is he not more well known? Why had I not known Little Richard as one of the greats and creators of Rock and Roll Prior to watching the documentary?