Jerry Lee Lewis

• 1. Introduction

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  Jerry Lee Lewis walked into Sun Records in Memphis in November 1956 with nothing but nerve. Label owner Sam Phillips was out of town, so producer Jack Clement hit record anyway, capturing Lewis playing Ray Price's "Crazy Arms" and one of his own compositions. Nobody in that room could have known they were witnessing the start of one of the most turbulent, contradictory, and thrilling careers in American music.

  He was born on the 29th of September 1935 in Ferriday, Louisiana, to an impoverished farming family. His parents mortgaged their farm to buy him a piano. He grew up down the road from a cousin who would become a televangelist and another who would become a country star. He was expelled from Bible school for playing boogie-woogie. He was arrested outside Elvis Presley's front gates, drunk and armed, at three in the morning. He married seven times, filed for bankruptcy, and outlasted nearly everyone.

  Nicknamed "The Killer," Lewis earned a reputation as rock and roll's first great wild man. But the question that shadows his whole career is not how wild he was. It is how a man who genuinely feared God could spend his life playing the devil's music, and why, despite every catastrophe, the music kept coming.

• 2. Sun Records and the Sound

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  On the 4th of December 1956, Elvis Presley dropped by Sun Records to pay a visit while Carl Perkins was cutting new tracks with Lewis backing him on piano. Johnny Cash was there watching. Sam Phillips left the tape rolling as the four of them fell into an impromptu session, performing gospel songs, Chuck Berry covers, and Elvis's own hits. Those recordings were later released as Million Dollar Quartet.

  Lewis's piano work was already stamped across the Sun catalogue by then. His distinctive playing can be heard on Carl Perkins's "Matchbox", "Your True Love", and "Put Your Cat Clothes On", and on Billy Lee Riley's "Flyin' Saucers Rock'n'Roll". His own singles were billed as "Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano", which was not a metaphor. He pounded the keys with his heel, kicked the piano bench aside, played standing, raked his hands up and down the keys, sat on the keyboard, and climbed on top.

  His inaugural television appearance came on The Steve Allen Show on the 28th of July 1957, where he played "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and demonstrated those moves for a national audience. The song sold so well it was eventually selected for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2005. "Great Balls of Fire" followed, bringing international fame and a radio boycott from stations that found the songs objectionable.

  But Lewis himself was troubled by the material. According to multiple first-hand accounts, including Johnny Cash, Lewis genuinely feared his music was leading his audience and himself toward damnation. A recorded argument from the "Great Balls of Fire" session survives in which Lewis can be heard telling Phillips he refuses to record the song because he considers it blasphemous, asking, "How can the devil save souls?"

• 3. The Scandal

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  The British press found out about Myra Gale Brown at Heathrow Airport in May 1958. Ray Berry, a news agency reporter who happened to be the only journalist present, learned that Lewis's third wife was his cousin and had been thirteen years old when they married. Lewis, who was twenty-two at the time, claimed she was actually fifteen. The tour was canceled after only three concerts.

  The fallout was swift and severe. Lewis's rock and roll career, which had been at its peak, collapsed almost overnight. His chart success dried up through most of the early 1960s, with one notable exception: a cover of Ray Charles's "What'd I Say", recorded in 1961 at the new Sun studio Phillips had opened at 639 Madison Avenue in Memphis.

  His Sun contract ended in 1963, and he moved to Smash Records, a division of Mercury. The team there believed they had found his comeback with a song called "I'm on Fire", but as music historian Colin Escott notes in the sleeve notes to the retrospective A Half Century of Hits, Mercury had barely pressed the record before the Beatles arrived in America and reshaped radio playlists almost entirely. Smash's early albums, including The Return of Rock, Memphis Beat, and Soul My Way, sold poorly.

  What the scandal years produced, however, was a live act of staggering intensity. Live at the Star Club, Hamburg, recorded with the Nashville Teens in 1964, captured Lewis performing with everything on the line. Milo Miles wrote in Rolling Stone that it was "not an album, it's a crime scene: Jerry Lee Lewis slaughters his rivals in a 13-song set that feels like one long convulsion." Producer Siggi Loch placed microphones as close to the instruments as possible and set a stereo microphone in the audience to catch the room. The album is rated five out of five stars in that review.

• 4. Country Reinvention

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  Promotions manager Eddie Kilroy pitched the idea of recording a straight country record in Nashville when Lewis was already preparing to leave Smash. Lewis had nothing to lose, so he agreed to cut the Jerry Chesnut song "Another Place, Another Time". It was released as a single on the 9th of March 1968, and climbed to number four on the country charts, staying there for seventeen weeks.

  The timing caught people off guard, but as Colin Escott observed in his liner notes to the 1995 compilation Killer Country, the move was less a break than it appeared. Lewis had always recorded country music; his very first release on Sun back in 1956 had been "Crazy Arms". The last time he had charted in country before the 1968 comeback was "Pen and Paper" in 1964, which had reached number thirty-six. The gap between those two placements was the entire disaster of his public life.

  Between 1968 and 1977, Lewis placed seventeen top-ten singles on the Billboard country chart, including four that reached number one. His producer during this run was Jerry Kennedy, and the records had a sparse quality that biographer Rick Bragg described in his book Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story as "hard country" - more substantial than the polished Nashville sound of the era. Critics were particularly struck by Lewis's vocals, which music writers of the period compared favorably to George Jones and Merle Haggard.

  His former Smash producer Shelby Singleton, who had purchased Sun Records from Sam Phillips in July 1969, moved quickly to repackage Lewis's old country recordings once Lewis had become the most commercially successful country artist in the world. One unreleased Sun recording, "One Minute Past Eternity", was issued as a single and reached number two on the country chart.

• 5. The Killer Off Stage

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  On the 29th of September 1976, which was his 41st birthday, Lewis fired a .357 Magnum at a Coke bottle in his bedroom. The bullet ricocheted and hit bassist Butch Owens in the chest. Owens survived.

  Less than two months later, on the 23rd of November 1976, Lewis was arrested outside Graceland. In Rick Bragg's 2014 authorized biography, Lewis explained that he had been at a Memphis nightclub called the Vapors, drinking champagne, when he remembered that Elvis had asked him to visit. Lewis drove to Graceland before three in the morning with a loaded pistol on the dashboard, a bottle of champagne under his arm, and accidentally smashed into the front gates. Elvis watched on closed-circuit television and told guards to call the police. Lewis was charged with carrying a pistol and public drunkenness and released on a $250 bond. His defiant mugshot was distributed around the world. Elvis died at Graceland nine months later.

  The IRS moved against Lewis in 1979, seizing several automobiles, a tractor, five motorcycles, jewelry, musical instruments, home entertainment equipment, and firearms to cover a $274,000 tax debt. An auction the following year drew only 150 potential bidders and raised $91,382, roughly a third of what was owed. In 1988, Lewis filed for bankruptcy, declaring that he was more than $3 million in debt, including $2 million owed to the IRS. His personal life was no less chaotic: he was married seven times, and two of his marriages ended in the deaths of his wives under circumstances that attracted unwanted attention.

  He also lost a son, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., in 1973 when the young man was nineteen, and another child, three-year-old Steve Allen Lewis, who drowned in a swimming pool in 1962.

• 6. Faith and Contradiction

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  Pearry Green, who was president of the student body at the Southwest Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, was present the night Lewis was expelled. Lewis had played a boogie-woogie version of "My God Is Real" at a church talent show, and the dean called both of them into his office the following morning. That expulsion set the tone for everything that came after.

  The tension between faith and music ran through Lewis's entire life without ever resolving. During the Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis and Elvis Presley dominated the gospel portions of the recording because, as Lewis later told biographer Rick Bragg, only the two of them had been raised in the Assembly of God. Cash and Perkins were Baptists and didn't know the words. Lewis's account has a particular edge to it, as if denominational literacy in gospel music was a form of credibility he took seriously.

  In the 1990 documentary The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, Lewis said, "The Bible doesn't even speak of religion. No word of religion is even in the Bible. Sanctification! Are you sanctified? Have you been saved? See, I was a good preacher, I know my Bible. I find myself falling short of the glory of God." He recorded a gospel album for the first time in 1970, released in 1971. In March 2020, he announced a new gospel project with producer T-Bone Burnett and guitarist James Burton, though nothing from those sessions was ever released. In 2022, the final year of his life, he and his cousin Jimmy Swaggart released a gospel album called The Boys from Ferriday.

• 7. Legacy

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  Lewis was inducted into the inaugural class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. Despite looking frail after hospitalizations for stomach problems, he started an unplanned jam at the end of the ceremony that became a feature of all future Hall of Fame events. He returned to Sun Studio that same year to record Class of '55 with Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins, plus admiring younger artists including John Fogerty.

  Elton John, in a 2013 interview with Leah Harper, described what hearing "Great Balls of Fire" did to him as a child: "The piano playing that I had heard had been more sedate. My dad collected George Shearing records, but this was the first time I heard someone beat the shit out of a piano. I learned to play like that." Music critic Robert Christgau wrote of Lewis: "His drive, his timing, his offhand vocal power, his unmistakable boogie-plus piano, and his absolute confidence in the face of the void make Jerry Lee the quintessential rock and roller."

  In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Lewis at number twenty-four on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. His 2006 album Last Man Standing sold more than a million copies worldwide, his best-selling release. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2022, the same year he died. His funeral was held on the 5th of November 2022 in his hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana, officiated by his cousin Jimmy Swaggart. Lewis was the last surviving member of the Million Dollar Quartet and the album Class of '55, which had also included Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley.