James Prioleau "Dick" Richards III (November 15, 1946 – September 13, 2018) was an American video artist, music producer and TV personality.

[1] Richards also is noted for having preserved the video collection of his artistic partner Nelson Sullivan, who recorded hundreds of hours of videotape in New York City's Downtown scene between 1983 and 1989, capturing such luminaries as RuPaul, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Sylvia Miles and Susanne Bartsch.

A conscientious objector who vehemently opposed the Vietnam War, Richards fulfilled his alternative service requirement in part by working at the Atlanta Girls Club.

He met activists and politics-minded people he admired including Maynard Jackson, as well as "Julian Bond, John Lewis, Andrew Young and many others who pushed Atlanta toward its bright future.

Richards later recalled, "We never could learn how to work the volume controls or cue up a record properly, but playing a disco song was beyond the pale.

[1]In an interview with Carolyn Rivera, Richards said: "We decided it would be televised live-on-tape from James' mother's basement (so we could have proper refreshments and not be bothered by grown-ups) with no editing, and it would be a talk/variety show, and the only guests we would invite would be people we knew.

"[8] In his 2018 obituary of Richards, Matthew Terrell wrote that "at the time, public access television was well-known as a bastion for new, experimental, and wide-ranging voices (kind of making it the YouTube of the '80s and '90s), and The American Music Show showcased alt-Atlanta in a way it had never been portrayed.

This show, which Richards produced on a weekly budget of $5 (the cost of the tape to record it on), took viewers into underground drag performances, on tours of gay cruising trails in public areas, to tacky psychedelic trailer parks with bizarre singing sisters, and to rural Georgia, where a 24-year-old RuPaul protested the real-life KKK.

[13] Dick Richards archived more than 600 videotapes that were shot by his longtime friend, Nelson Sullivan, who died July 4, 1989 of an apparent heart attack.

[8] In 1981, Richards met John David Goldman, who had recently relocated to Atlanta from Greenwood, South Carolina, to pursue a career in journalism, and the two began a relationship.

After allowing the rental tenants to remain through the end of the school year, Richards headed south to take possession of the house in June 2005.

[20] In 2013, Richards, Goldman and Potsy Duncan donated The American Music Show video recordings to the Emory University Libraries.