What Little Richard Deserved

Because the story of Little Richard is inextricable from the story of what other artists took from him, it can be tempting to forget that he, too, absorbed and emulated the talent that came before him. One virtue of the moving and expansive new documentary “I Am Everything,” directed by Lisa Cortés, is how thoughtfully it catalogues the influences that shaped his artistry. Born Richard Penniman to a large, poor family in the religious small town of Macon, Georgia, Richard took in the gospels and spirituals he saw as a boy in church—both with his mother at Baptist services, which were neat, seated, and driven by the voice, and with his father, a minister, at the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the proceedings were rich with raucous instrumentation and dancing in the aisles, and where to sit was unforgivable. Witnessing these two modes of worship at an early age seemed to give Richard a blueprint for the opposing impulses that he held within: he was a performer who sometimes lived in every inch of the world and who sometimes retreated.