Little Richard - I Am Everything (Original film soundtrack)

Little Richard: I Am Everything doesn't just serve as the soundtrack to a documentary, it makes one thing clear: the true creator of rock and roll was a black, queer pastor's son from Macon, Georgia.

For decades, official history awarded the crown to whoever repackaged Richard Penniman's sound with a tidier haircut and cleaner reputation. This documentary, and the accompanying soundtrack, sets the record straight. Little Richard not only influenced rock and roll, he blew it up by creating it, screaming and pounding a piano into submission years before anyone dared to sound this crazy in public. That he did so as an openly queer black man in the segregated South makes the erasure that followed even harder to excuse, and this collection insists on putting his name back at the top of the bill.

The soundtrack leans heavily on the originals rather than watered down covers. Tutti Frutti still sounds like a controlled explosion, Long Tall Sally struggles to maintain its own tempo, and Rip It Up remains the sound of a piano that you argue with rather than play. Valerie June and Cory Henry each contribute covers that honor madness without imitating it, and Tamar-Kali Brown's original score gives the film's quieter, more melancholic moments a place to land.

It's the sound of a record finally receiving the credit its architect deserved.