Rock’n’roll’s outrageous pioneer
Jerry Lee Lewis b September 29, 1935 d October 28, 2022
With his unbridled performances and scandalous life, influential singer and pianist Jerry Lee Lewis defined the personal rebellion at the heart of rock-and-roll music.
On storming 1950s hits such as Great Balls of Fire, Breathless and High School Confidential, he slashed up and down the keys with his right hand, deliberately speeded up tempos mid-song and often finished songs by standing on the piano.
His high-energy music was a distinctly Southern synthesis of rhythm and blues, country, gospel and boogie-woogie, and his barely contained stage frenzy thrilled and unnerved audiences. He was called ‘‘The Killer’’ because of his ability to completely overshadow other performers.
His Rock & Roll Hall of Fame biography – he was inducted in 1986 as a member of the inaugural class – describes him as ‘‘the wild man of rock and roll, embodying its most reckless and highspirited impulses’’.
‘‘Among the early rock performers, Jerry Lee stands out as the transcendent experience that rock-and-roll can offer,’’ said rock historian Albin Zak.
Lewis recorded in 1956 for producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records, an incubator of talent that also launched the careers of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. The next year, he drew national attention and notoriety for his performance of his hit song Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On on The Steve Allen Show.
Kicking the piano bench away as he sang and played – host Allen kicked it right back to him – he implored the young women in the audience to ‘‘shake one time for me’’, then pounded the keys, his heavily pomaded hair dangling over his forehead in a sweaty mop. ‘‘The response was incredible,’’ Allen later said. ‘‘Jerry Lee was a star from then on.’’
A scandalous revelation soon cast a shadow over Lewis’ burst of success. During his 1958 tour of England, reporters discovered that the 22-year-old’s bride, Myra Gale Brown, was also his 13-year-old cousin. Their marriage was his third. His tour of Britain was cancelled, and Lewis lost further bookings and national TV appearances in the US. After the marital scandal, he struggled for hits and radio airplay and gradually re-established himself as a country performer.
He placed 26 songs in the Billboard Top 10 country charts between 1968 and 1981, including a rocked-up version of Me and Bobby McGee and a rendition of the standard Over the Rainbow.
In his personal life, Lewis grew addicted to pills and alcohol and was bedevilled by tragedy. His and Myra Gale Brown’s first son, Steve Allen Lewis, drowned at 3. Jerry Lee Lewis Jr, a son from his second marriage who was also the drummer in Lewis’ touring band, died in a car accident in 1973.
His estranged fourth wife, Jaren Gunn Pate, drowned in a pool in 1982. The following year, Shawn Stephens Lewis, his fifth wife, died of a methadone overdose within months of their wedding. Lewis maintained the methadone had been prescribed to him to wean him off addictive painkillers.
In 1976, Lewis shot and wounded his bass player during a drunken target practice at his 41st birthday party. The same year, he was charged with trespassing and public drunkenness after being arrested outside Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion with a loaded gun. In 1977, he crashed his Rolls-Royce while under the influence of tranquillisers. In 1979, the IRS confiscated Lewis’ fleet of cars in lieu of payment for back taxes.
Raised as a Pentecostal, Lewis often expounded on biblical scriptures, salvation and a belief that performing rock-and-roll had marked him for eternal damnation.
He initially refused to record Great Balls of Fire (1957), one of his biggest hits, because he considered the title blasphemous. ‘‘I’m a sinner, I know it,’’ he told writer Nick Tosches in 1979. ‘‘Soon you and me are going to have to reckon with the chilling hands of death.’’
In fact, Lewis lived on to become one of rock-and-roll’s oldest active performers and received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2005.
Jerry Lee Lewis was born in Ferriday, Louisiana, in 1935. His father, Elmo, a part-time carpenter, ran a family moonshine still and farmed land owned by Lewis’ wealthier uncle and namesake, Lee Calhoun.
Lewis started playing piano at 8, alongside cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart, at the Calhoun house. Swaggart would later become a singing televangelist. After hearing his son plunk out Jingle Bells, Elmo Lewis saw his promise and mortgaged the family house to buy a secondhand piano.
As a youngster, Jerry Lee hid behind the bar at Haney’s, an African American juke joint, listening intently to blues and boogie-woogie.
He took his first music job at 18, alternating on drums and piano at a honky-tonk in Natchez, Missouri. Lewis and his father sold eggs to finance trips to Nashville and Memphis to audition for record companies.
On their third trip to Memphis, he secured an audition at Sun Records. Phillips recalled: ‘‘They put that tape on, and I said, ‘Where . . . did this man come from?’ I mean he played that piano with abandon . . . I could hear the spiritual thing, too.’’
Although Lewis’ first Sun single, a cover of the Ray Price country hit Crazy Arms, didn’t sell, he did tour Canada in support of Sun artists Perkins and Cash. Perkins advised the inexperienced pianist to ‘‘turn around so they can see you, make a fuss’’. His second single, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On (1957), previously a modest hit for blues singer Big Maybelle, made the pianist a star.
Four marriages ended in divorce. In 2012, he married Judith Brown. In addition to his wife, survivors include four children.
Lewis continued to perform in recent years, although doctors limited his time onstage. In 2006, he released the album Last Man Standing, which featured duets with such performers as Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King and Willie Nelson. Another album of duets, Mean Old Man, followed in 2010.
Lewis was not known for his public expressions of humility. ‘‘There’s very few great talents left,’’ he once said. ‘‘I’m not saying I’m one of ’em. I’m saying I’m the only one.’’