very good trip jerry lee lewis

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

Jerry Lee Lewis Was an SOB Right to the End

The talented hell-raiser of early rock and roll died at 87..

Jerry Lee Lewis was known as the Killer, and it wasn’t a casual sobriquet — a schoolmate called him that after he tried to strangle a teacher. He once shot his bass player in the chest; just about all of his seven wives, including one who was a child, said he beat them; and there’s a lingering suspicion that he murdered wife No. 5. He was the very model of a high-functioning sociopath and somehow defied hard living, drug and alcohol abuse, and serious health problems to make it well into his ninth decade.

The pianist, singer, and showman, who was one of the three or four people who decisively ushered in the rock-and-roll era — and utterly personified an unbridled and dangerous part of the music — died today, his family announced. He was 87 and, after the death of Little Richard in 2020 , the last man standing from the dawn of rock and roll.

Like most of his remarkable and rambunctious peers, Lewis got himself into trouble of his own making. He never backed down, and he viewed the world with a maniacal severity that hid a bleak sense of mischief that itself hid another layer of severity beneath it. He was a thief, a bigamist, an adulterer, a sexual predator, a family abandoner, and a liar, and felt — knew — society’s rules didn’t apply to him to such an extent that he acknowledged the fact flatly. There is one filmed interview with Jerry Lee Lewis that could be mistaken for an outtake from Mindhunter .

At least two of Lewis’s songs — “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” and “Great Balls of Fire” — stand with Little Richard’s work at the very outer limits of ’50s rock-and-roll extremity. Their titles alone capture Lewis’s character — his unbridledness — and by extension the music he came to personify. His other claim to fame was less elevated: Overnight, he vaporized what could have been a top-tier career with the most consequential sex scandal of rock’s early days.

Lewis could play by ear and re-create any song he had listened to even once from memory. But he also heard something deeply meaningful — something that just made sense — in all the music he’d absorbed as a child and teen: the hillbilly country, rollicking New Orleans piano, southern gospel, and deep blues.

He played with a concussive boogie-woogie beat, but that’s like saying Jackson Pollock painted. He didn’t have a friendly, ingratiating manner like his fellow Louisianans Fats Domino or Professor Longhair. In the compact three-minute packages that made his name, Lewis sat before his piano and — amid that boogie-woogie foundation — banged out maelstroms of intricate runs and cascading and sometimes dissonant chordage. It was a trip down a treacherous musical mountain road with no guardrails. Over this racket he keened, howled, and caterwauled in a way that gave fairly innocuous lyrics — what’s the big deal about “shakin’,” after all? — a lusty, unmistakable carnality that left very little to the imagination. When he pounded the piano and bounced up and down, the slicked-down hair on his head came loose from its grease and bounced with him, absurdly.

It seemed like chaos — but one of his secrets was, paradoxically, control and dynamics. Lewis in many ways was a slyly deliberate showman; he ratcheted up the intensity and emotion into a crossfire hurricane of sound and then brought it back down again, several times in the space of a single song. However unhinged his delivery, there was always a sense of detachment and control. Lewis knew what he was doing.

In his prime, he was the most musically sophisticated of the time’s wildest interpreters. Sam Phillips of Sun Records — who personally tended to Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, among others — called Lewis “the most talented man I ever worked with, black or white — one of the most talented human beings to walk God’s earth.”

The great rock writer Robert Palmer put it this way: “There has never been another American pop musician with Lewis’s particular mixture of egotistical self-confidence, innate taste and sensitivity, eclecticism (he will play Chuck Berry, Hoagy Carmichael, Jim Reeves, Artie Shaw, spirituals, blues, low-down honky-tonk or all-out rock & roll, as the mood strikes him), formidable and entirely idiosyncratic technique (both instrumental and vocal) and sheer bravura.”

Or, as Lewis himself said: “I never said I was the greatest. I’m the best.”

Lewis was not yet 10 when he became enraptured with the sound of the piano; he was soon devoted to the music he heard when the family could finally afford electricity and with it a radio — Jimmie Rodgers, the “Singing Brakeman,” whose lonesome cowboy yodels made him a superstar before his early death; Al Jolson, the most popular crooner of the era; and then Hank Williams, father of modern country music. Elmo Lewis, Jerry Lee’s father, was a pianist himself; when he heard his son deliver a version of “Silent Night” by ear at another family’s house, he managed to get him a sorry but serviceable instrument. By his early teens Jerry Lee was playing — with his cousins Jimmy Swaggart and Mickey Gilley — at church on Sundays. Lewis broke his hip playing high school football, but even in a thigh-high cast he continued to play, sitting half-sideways to the keyboard, one leg sticking out to the side.

Having discovered a musical calling, he didn’t know what to do with it, so he haunted the Black roadhouses in his hometown, seeing blues acts blow through. The oft-told story is that the young white boy hid under tables to see the great blues stars of the day until the proprietor ejected him. In the meantime he occupied himself by skipping school and embarking on a life of burglary. He went to a Bible college in Texas — and forever swore he could have been a great preacher — but was quickly thrown out for playing boogie-woogie in church. Back home, his criminal activities continued until a close call with a prison term at Angola straightened him up; then he tried selling sewing machines door to door.

People like Lewis are reflexively referred to as having come from a religious background, but the influence this upbringing has on their actual behavior can take almost any form. For example: Lewis married in 1952, at the age of 16 — properly, in a ceremony at his rich uncle’s house. The bride was a 17-year-old preacher’s daughter named Dorothy Barton. Lewis rued the union on the morning after the wedding night. He didn’t pay much attention to his wife moving forward.

As he began to play in public as a teenager, Lewis delved into the music of his past, Black and white — the ragtime and honky-tonk, the swing and boogie-woogie; the blue artists, the hillbilly country, and the swampy but percussive piano stylings of oddballs like Moon Mullican (who had played on Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya”). Lewis could do what they did and sometimes more, blasting out blistering, implacable lines with his left hand — a jazzy walking bass, steady as a piston — while his right hand dazzled with melodic, sometimes chaotic, sometimes mischievous melodies. Later even those with sophisticated understandings of music on their own would marvel at Lewis’s deep knowledge and understanding of everyone from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Frank Sinatra, B.B. King to Gene Autry. Lewis began to develop as a showman, too, turning his body to face the audience, shooting the piano stool off with his legs as he burst to his feet, banging the keys relentlessly, jumping on top of the instrument itself to dance.

The tale of the marriage to his second wife, Jane Mitcham, is somewhat murky; in one telling he’d met her in Natchez in between his spells at a local whorehouse. Mitcham got pregnant, and their wedding happened after her brothers tracked Lewis down in his hometown — never mind that he was not divorced from Dorothy. This was during his ascent to stardom, and he paid even less attention to Mitcham than he had to his first wife, even after the birth of their son, Jerry Lee Jr. It was an acrimonious four-year marriage; Jane Lewis once knocked out every one of the windows in his car. A second child, named Ronnie Guy, Lewis refused to acknowledge.

By 1954, Elvis Presley had come to popular acclaim and presented a world that Lewis could see himself in. He had an enormous appreciation of his own talents, and presented himself to RCA, Presley’s new label, and the Grand Ole Opry as well. Neither of them bit. Finally, he and his father made the significant trek to Memphis to meet Sam Phillips at what was then called the Memphis Recording Services, home of Sun Records. They shared a tiny (and expensive for them) $1.50-a-night motel room, the first time they had slept in a structure with running water. But Phillips was out of town; they were instead heard by a producer named Cowboy Jack Clement. Clement, another of the idiosyncratic geniuses who helped create the sound of rock and roll, spent hours listening to Lewis play. “He played that piano with abandon, ” he recalled, and eventually he set him up for a formal audition with some local players.

“It was like hearing a whole different music that you’d never heard before,” Sun session guitarist Roland Janes told Phillips biographer Peter Guralnick. “He played equally well with either hand. He could do full-ons with his left hand as good as most people do with their right hand, [and] he had this rhythm, this fantastic bass rhythm — I mean, the music never stopped.”

Sam Phillips could barely be contained when presented with the results, and Lewis was signed. His first single: a lazy swing number that had been a big hit for Ray Price, “Crazy Arms.” It was credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis With His Pumping Piano.” It sold a little and got on the charts. Emboldened, Lewis left wife Jane and their son and moved from Ferriday to his cousin JW Brown’s house outside Memphis, where he became a fill-in session piano player at Sun. He also embarked on a punishing touring regimen, including a month across Canada playing every night. It was the start of decades of wild, exhausting touring fueled by liquor; pills; rushed, casual sex; and sometimes violence.

Back at Sun in Memphis, one storied afternoon, Lewis was playing piano on a new single by Carl Perkins, a killer guitarist who’d written and recorded “Blue Suede Shoes.” By this time, Elvis Presley was a star but would still drop by the studio on occasion, as he did that day. In one version of this famous story, Phillips called Johnny Cash and alerted the local newspaper; a posed picture shows Presley at a piano with Lewis, Perkins and Cash arrayed behind him. This gathering became known as the Million Dollar Quartet, which would many decades later become the inspiration for a successful Broadway jukebox musical about the Sun studios.

The photo, however, belied the group’s actual personal relationships. Lewis was far from a star. It was in fact Presley’s first experience with Lewis, and he was cordial and complimentary, telling the reporter, “That boy can go. I think he has a great future ahead of him.” For the rest of his life, Lewis carped about how he should have been sitting at the piano instead of Presley. “Elvis came to see me ,” he’d insist. “ Carl Perkins was just there to make a record — another flop — and Johnny Cash came by to take advantage of the situation.”

Lewis’s name would be made with his next release. It was February 1957. Clement had brought Lewis one candidate for the important second single, a ditty the producer himself had written called “It’ll Be Me.” For the B-side, Lewis wanted to do a revved-up take on a tune called “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The producer reluctantly let Lewis proceed — and in some versions of the tale gave him only one take to do it.

The song is a good example of the percolating musical fusions coming together at the time — and Lewis’s recombinant sensibility. It was originally recorded by blues singer Big Maybelle , with Quincy Jones producing. In this recording the sound is brassy, with a thin guitar behind; her delivery is almost stately. Lewis apparently heard a different version that had been recorded by its co-writer, Roy Hall, as a jaunty white blues that was more insistent and had a guitar riff mixed up high.

Lewis brought his own hillbilly-country approach — faster moving and, in his hands, piano driven. Fats Domino may have made records that sounded something like that first, but Lewis’s version of the (slightly retitled) song — with its implacable drive, dramatic mood swings, raging vocals, and the frenzied finish — is not just a classic but an elemental piece of our cultural firmament.

Phillips was specifically on the hunt for new rock-and-roll hits out of his studio and could recognize something sensational. Even so, there was worry the label couldn’t release the song, so unbridled for the time was the record’s sound. But it was released. An appearance on The Steve Allen Show brought Lewis to widespread national attention and ultimately took the song to No. 3 on the Billboard pop charts. (It was a country and R&B No. 1.)

It also faced societal resistance for its smoldering, focused energy. Lewis went out on the road again, this time with Cash and Perkins and other rockabilly pioneers like Wanda Jackson (19 at the time, with her father along as chaperone). Lewis’s onstage audacity was immediately apparent, as was his arrogance. Tensions arose as Lewis’s dazzling playing and emergent showmanship pushed him to the top of the bill. Jackson recalled him being unhappy with an upright piano he’d found at a gig. “It was an old upright that had seen better days,” she wrote later. “He said, ‘Who would bring a piano like this and expect me to play it? I’ll tear this thing up before my show’s over so nobody else will have to use it. I’m gonna put it out of its misery.’ And he did, too, boy. He kicked the bottom of it in, put his feet up on those keys and busted as many of them as he could. He kind of frightened me. I didn’t want to be around Jerry Lee too much.”

Lewis followed “Shakin’” with “Great Balls of Fire.” (It was written by Otis Blackwell, author of Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up.”) This is actually a friendlier song than his first big hit; while plainly carnal, it has an unusually high-energy, almost a cappella opening, a whoop of a chorus, and some brutally hard piano playing leading back into the verses. This song, too, took off on the charts. Soon Lewis was playing in almost unimaginable places — at the Paramount Theater in New York, for example, with Fats Domino, for 12 days, breaking the house box-office record, or in Australia with Buddy Holly — and again generally found himself at the top of the bill as his touring cohort decided they couldn’t go on after him. (“Nobody, not even Elvis,” Johnny Cash would write years later, “wanted to go on after Jerry Lee.”)

There is one famous story that, on a trip the next year to New York, Lewis was feuding with Chuck Berry about going on last; Lewis is said to have gone on second to last and to have ended his show by setting the piano on fire and saying, “I want to see you follow that, Chuck,” as he walked off stage. (In some versions of the tale, he uses a racial epithet.) Lewis himself told this story to great effect, but there’s little evidence it actually happened. According to Bruce Pegg’s well-researched account of Chuck Berry’s life, Brown Eyed Handsome Man , it doesn’t square with the realities of the time: Berry didn’t care about going on last, Lewis was closing the shows in any case, and there’s no mention of fire in reviews of the evening. If there ever were an actual eyewitness to such a spectacle, he or she has never been quoted in any of the books on the era. Pegg also reports, however, that bad blood between the two culminated in a physical fight later in the tour; an eyewitness says both Lewis and his father used the N-word in a battle with Berry.

As society began to catch up to and accept rock and roll, the explosive “Great Balls of Fire” was a major step forward for Lewis’s career and celebrity. His next single was subtler, but still molten in its attack: the focused, sexy, riveting “Breathless.” It went to No. 7. On deck, Lewis had a fourth single, the relentless “High School Confidential” — you’ve heard it; the chorus goes “dancing at the high school bop” — pegged to a movie of the same name.

It was 1958. Lewis had had three top-ten hits. Elvis Presley was being inducted into the Army and would be largely out of the public eye for two years. To some, very much including Lewis himself, he was Elvis’s heir apparent.

That’s not how things worked out.

Where Presley passively went along with the career plans manager Colonel Tom Parker laid out for him, Jerry Lee Lewis — canny, opinionated, and pantingly desirous of stardom — didn’t have that sort of backstage support. And the sensible advice that he did get — from the Phillips brothers and others — was precisely the sort of thing an insensible man like Jerry Lee Lewis would ignore.

While living at his cousin JW Brown’s house, Lewis, then 21, grew close to the family’s 12-year-old daughter, Myra Gale. The pair spent increasing amounts of time together and, in Lewis’s own telling, after an evening spent messing around in his car, he resolved to marry her. By this time, Myra had turned 13. Technically, she was his first cousin once removed; Jerry Lee’s grandmother and Myra’s great-grandmother were the same person.

Lewis was clearly a predator, even within a culture where early marriages were common. (His own sister had married at 12 and then again at 15. Cousins had been marrying in his family for generations, too.) On this issue and many others, Lewis remained defiant, in blockheaded fashion, throughout his life. “She was a woman,” Lewis told Rick Bragg, unapologetically and unappetizingly, in his 2012 authorized biography. “She looked like a grown woman, blossomed out and ready for plucking.”

In reality, he was savvy enough to plan the wedding secretly — he was, after all, still married at the time. He took a preparatory trip south over the Mississippi state line with an older female friend to procure a fraudulent wedding license. A week later, he picked Myra up after school and drove her back to Mississippi, where they found someone to marry them — with no family or friends, much less a wedding ring, on hand. He took her home and dropped her off immediately after the wedding with no word to her family. It took a few days for the pair’s secret to come out. (JW is said to have been at least a bit exercised over the union. Myra Lewis wrote later that she got a “whoopin’.”) The two settled into a new house just south of Memphis and soon embarked, with Myra’s family, on Lewis’s first overseas tour, a trip to England.

The trouble began as soon as the group got off the plane in London. Reporters gathered around the star after he embarked; a more enterprising one cornered little Myra Lewis to ask who she was. According to Myra, the same writer came to their hotel room a short while later and Jerry Lee shared the whole story with him. By the time of the press conference that afternoon in the lobby of the hotel, the story was out, and Jerry Lee Lewis was facing an uproar.

It would be a highly amusing case study in failed celebrity damage control were there not an abused 13-year-old in the middle of it. At first, he was canny enough to lie but seems to have been caught between the exculpatory and the plausible. He told the reporters Myra was 15, perhaps thinking that this might translate to, “Well, she’s almost 16.” The British reporters smelled blood, and the papers the next morning carried blaring reports about the young American pop star’s very young wife.

Jerry Lee was stung, but, unaccountably, he kept talking, that day and the following ones, as the story in the U.K. grew bigger and bigger. The more ambitious papers discovered the bride’s real age and the messy details of the groom’s first two marriages, and still Lewis wouldn’t shut up. “It wasn’t nothin’ ,” Lewis insisted and embarked on ever-more-elaborate arguments about why this was so.

Indeed, in some interviews he argued that, since he hadn’t divorced his first and second wives before he’d remarried the second and third times, it might actually be the case that he wasn’t legally married to his 13-year-old cousin in the first place. The creativity of this tale was undermined by the fact that, if true, it meant that Lewis was sleeping with a 13-year-old girl he wasn’t legally married to. Myra Lewis chimed in, too. Heck, she told a reporter that back home, “you can get married at 10 if you can find a husband.”

The tour collapsed. The papers were insatiable — filled with news about the pair and official investigations into child abuse. Myra Lewis wrote later that an angry mob formed outside their hotel; after the extended family got into the limousine to take them to the airport, they were chased as they left.

On returning home, Jerry Lee found that audiences looked at him differently. He was chagrined to find that mainstream television talent bookers felt the same way. He kept recording tracks for Sun, but the label was paralyzed in the face of public reaction. To the end of his life, he marveled at what had happened. “I didn’t know the hole I was diggin’ was that deep,” he said many years later.

“High School Confidential” dropped off the charts. His career imploded; he was never a commercial threat on the pop charts again. Meanwhile, Presley duly went to Germany for his military service. Little Richard, who had sexual demons Jerry Lee couldn’t conceive of, had taken himself out of the pop game. The next year, a plane carrying Buddy Holly would crash on tour in Iowa. A few months later, Chuck Berry would be arrested on Mann Act charges and ultimately sent to prison. Rock and roll suddenly seemed as if it could be the passing fad its detractors always said it would be.

The cauterization of Lewis’s career that the marriage scandal accomplished meant he was never able to achieve his commercial potential. Lewis’s self-titled album debut on Sun, which did not include “Shakin’’ or “Great Balls of Fire,” lay dead in the water after the scandal; his second studio album, not released until 1961 and curiously called Jerry Lee’s Greatest , included “Great Balls of Fire” but not “Shakin’.” Neither made the charts. Sun had recorded scores of songs, of every imaginable musical genre, with Lewis before the scandal; most would not be heard for many years.

Phillips did what he could in an impossible situation, but it wasn’t enough for Lewis. Perkins and Cash had both soured on Phillips and ultimately left the label. Lewis handled things differently: He attacked the producer physically. Frustrated, he went back on the road with his small band. He survived on anger, pep pills, and the adrenaline that is always there when on any given night, for good reason or not, you might need to smash a microphone stand into an audience member’s face or whip a female fan with a fiddle bow.

With money suddenly tight, the Lewises had to give up their house outside Memphis. Lewis sent his pregnant wife home to live with his parents in a single-intersection town called Clayton, Louisiana — Myra Lewis said there was one drive-in restaurant in the town, called the Toot and Tell — and Lewis spent a large part of his time on the road. She had a son, Steve Allen Lewis, at age 14, in 1959, and then a daughter, Phoebe Allen. Myra later wrote that the pair had spent a total of 14 nights together alone at their home over 13 years of marriage.

As the 1960s stretched on, Lewis kept touring and even went back to England. He moved to Smash Records — Mercury Records’ Nashville imprint — and tried to get back into the rock world with an album called The Return of Rock . That didn’t work.

But then, almost accidentally, he became a country star. A label executive sensed he could sell Jerry Lee to a less persnickety audience. It started with a timeless track, Lewis’s reading of “Another Place, Another Time” — his voice effortlessly hitting the notes, some deep well of craft shaping his phrasing and emotions. It’s a perfectly realized piece of country heartbreak, a courtly, rueful modernization of the Hank Williams balladry he loved.

That and a few other ballads, like “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me),” established Lewis in the country firmament, and from the late 1960s through the ’70s he had an impressive string of top-ten country hits. Given his highly regional appeal, it seems fair to say even this understates his prominence in the South. The musical legacy from this period is mixed, however; after those promising beginnings, there are many inferior covers, mediocre slow numbers, and tepid novelty things. Lewis never retained good producers, and most of his country output is schlocky and tedious.

As time marched on, he would embark on truly bizarre projects, like playing Iago in a rock-and-roll version of Othello in Los Angeles and appearing in a psychedelia-themed Monkees TV special. He could always be relied upon to do the wrong thing. One day at a Nashville recording studio, according to Dylan biographer Howard Sounes, a producer he knew brought by another artist recording in the building:

‘Jerry Lee, this is Bob Dylan,’ said Bob Johnston, making the introductions. ‘So?’ ‘Man, maybe we could do something together some time?’ suggested Bob, politely. ‘No!’ exclaimed Jerry Lee, and pounded his piano with fury as Bob and Johnston made their retreat.

His tours became even wilder rides, with cars full of pills, cash, and guns, punctuated by occasional arrests and occasional announcements that he was giving up rock and roll for Jesus. Full pages of the  Hellfire biography are filled with accounts of his various arrests for drunk driving, car accidents, drug possession, and assault. In 1976, drunk, he drove to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s mansion, and rammed the gate with his Lincoln; he emerged from the car half-dressed and bleeding, brandishing a gun. “You tell him the Killer is here,” Lewis told the guards. Presley told his guards to call the police, and Lewis was arrested. That same year, drunk on his 41st birthday, he was playing around with a .357 revolver and shot his bass player in the chest.

He was a determined tax cheat as well, and never seemed to learn. Periodically, the IRS would raid his house and cart off most of his belongings to sell at auction; one time they did the same to one of his estranged wives. In 1984, he was tried on tax charges; he was not convicted but was still left with a $600,000 bill. In 1988, he declared bankruptcy, citing some $4 million in debts. In 1993, trying to escape the tax authorities, he moved to Ireland. More legal problems followed there. At one point, Lewis’s lawyers had to explain to a judge why he was purportedly too sick to come to court but not too sick to embark on a new concert tour.

Even in the 1980s, journalists were describing Lewis as frail, noting the debilitating effects the drinking and pills and other drugs were taking on him, but the star’s tough constitution held him together. “I thought [tonight’s show] was the best damn show you ever seen in your whole life,” he said to a Creem writer in 1987. “And if you give me a bad write-up, you dead.” Biographer Bragg talked to a man who saw Lewis in a juke joint playing four hours or more in a single set: “He played every song I’d ever heard in my life, including ‘Jingle Bells’ and the Easter Bunny song. And it was July.”

Lewis was away when his son Steve Allen, then 3, died by drowning in the family’s swimming pool. His marriage to Myra staggered along for another eight years, each bleaker than the next, as she contended with his atavistic views of women (she wasn’t allowed to cut her hair or dress up), drug use, and ongoing infidelities. They divorced in 1970. By the end of 1971 he had married again, for the fourth time, to a woman named Jaren Gunn Pate; she moved out within the month. She had a child, Lori Leigh Lewis, but again Lewis insisted he was not the father. He and Pate never lived together but were married for nearly a decade, a non-alliance punctuated periodically with child-support suits. She was found dead in a swimming pool in June 1982.

Lewis lost his son with his second wife, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., in a car crash in 1973. Wife No. 5 was Shawn Michelle Lewis, whom he married in 1983. She was found dead in Lewis’s house after 77 days of marriage. Her death was examined by investigative reporter Richard Ben Cramer in a very long Rolling Stone story the next year. In Cramer’s telling, the marriage included episodes of violence, alternating with Lewis’s fixation on having Shawn participate in a threesome with her sister. What exactly happened the night of her death remains a mystery, but all sorts of evidence — including the blood and broken glass in the house and the fact that the body had been moved after she died — suggests that the full story has not been told.

A year later he married wife No. 6, Kerrie McCarver, who ended up nursing him through a succession of severe illnesses, including infections in his thigh — he’d been using needles to inject speed into his system in his leg — and a ruptured stomach that nearly killed him. They had a child, Jerry Lee Lewis III, in 1987, then separated but stayed married for another 17 years.

In interviews during this period, Lewis spoke of the Lord and the devil and Jerry Lee Lewis, dominating every conversation, interrupting captiously, correcting his questioners, and mixing history, boasts, and fabrications in a way that makes it difficult to keep track. To one interviewer he made plain his place in the pantheon: “You’ll never find anyone that Jerry Lee Lewis has taken anything from, brother. I’m a stylist. Just like Jimmie Rodgers — the late, great Jimmie Rodgers— just like Hank Williams — the late, great Hank Williams — just like Al Jolson — the late, great Al Jolson. There’s only four stylists, and that’s Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Williams, Al Jolson, and Jimmie Rod­gers. Rest of ’em are just imitators.”

His last years were relatively quiet save for one last twist in the branches of his incestuous family tree. Myra Lewis wrote a memoir in the 1980s, Great Balls of Fire , designed by her publisher to exploit her tale of marrying Lewis at 13. (This was the basis for the insipid 1989 biopic starring Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder.) In her less-noticed second book, The Spark That Survived , published in 2015, Myra Lewis looked back in a clearer-eyed fashion; while obviously ghostwritten and filled with the homilies of a 70-something southern lady, the book is a fairly raw survivor’s story that fairly convincingly sets the record straight on many aspects of the Jerry Lee Lewis mythos. Myra’s version of her wedding day — a 13-year-old girl leaving school that day not knowing she would never return, being picked up by Lewis, driven to Mississippi and married, and then dumped back at her parents’ house — is particularly bleak. She persuasively details Lewis’s dominance and abuse of her over the course of their marriage and presents an insider’s view of the family that is both tonally and factually at odds with much of the other books written about Lewis over the years. She says flatly, for example, that her father and Lewis had an important partnership, including a corporation they had formed together, that the Lewis family, who didn’t understand such mechanisms, eventually abrogated. In an elegant bit of trolling, she also further complicates the clouded paternity of the children of Jerry Lee’s various marriages, claiming that a DNA test at the time showed that Jerry Lee Lewis III, who was born during Lewis’s marriage to Kerrie McCarver, is not actually his child.

After Lewis and McCarver divorced, daughter Phoebe brought on a woman named Judith Brown to be her father’s housekeeper in 2010. Judith Brown was Phoebe’s aunt; she’d gotten the name Brown from her husband, Rusty Brown — a brother of Myra and another child of Lewis’s bass player JW.

Judith Brown eventually divorced Rusty — and took up with Jerry Lee Lewis. The new couple began to square off with his daughter over money and eventually locked Phoebe Lewis out of the house. In 2012 Lewis married her: his former sister-in-law, who was also something like a second-cousin-in-law, his ex-wife’s former sister-in-law, and his ex-brother-in-law’s ex-wife. Judith Lewis survives him. Myra, now Myra Williams, 77, ended up working in real estate in Atlanta and has been happily married to a fellow agent for more than 30 years.

• vulture homepage lede
• remembrance
• jerry lee lewis
• great balls of fire

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 61: May 20, 2024
• The Substance Is Disgusting, Twisted, and Instantly Divisive
• Can You Handle Another Bennifer Breakup?
• The Identical Puzzle
• It’s Time to Bet on Slow Horses
• The Real Housewives of New Jersey Recap: Valley of the Blow-Up Dolls
• All 245 Taylor Swift Songs, Ranked

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

• Manage Account

Jerry Lee Lewis’ 10 Best Songs: Critic’s Picks

Here's a list of the top 10 best Jerry Lee Lewis songs.

By Chuck Dauphin

Chuck Dauphin

• Share this article on Facebook
• Share this article on Twitter
• Share this article on Flipboard
• Share this article on Pinit
• + additional share options added
• Share this article on Reddit
• Share this article on Linkedin
• Share this article on Whatsapp
• Share this article on Email
• Print this article
• Share this article on Comment
• Share this article on Tumblr

There’s no doubting that Jerry Lee Lewis is one of the architects of both the rock and roll sound and lifestyle. That’s a given. His wild concert performances have made him a legend, and there’s been enough behind-the-scenes drama in the life of “The Killer” to fill two or three lifetimes of mere mortals. Of course, at age 82, the singer is still living up to the mystique that he has created with an image that is larger than life.

Jerry Lee Lewis

See latest videos, charts and news

If all you know about Jerry Lee Lewis are the tales of his marriages and legal escapades over the years, you need to educate yourself on the Jerry Lee Lewis song catalog. In 1968, the singer signed a deal with Smash Records, and began working with renowned producer. The resulting factor of that partnership was some of the best country music ever made–bar none. We shine the spotlight on many of those hits from the Smash/Mercury years and include a couple of Sun classics that were actually higher charting country hits than pop on this list that will hopefully make you take another look at this unique American music legend!

See more:    Billy Currington  |  Billy Ray Cyrus  |  Brett Young  |  Brooks and Dunn  |  Chris Young  |  Clint Black  |  Colt Ford  |  Dierks Bentley  |  Don Williams  |  Dustin Lynch  |  Dwight Yoakam  |  Easton Corbin  |  Gordon Lightfoot  |  Hank Williams  |  John Denver  |  John Prine  | Jon Pardi |  Kacey Musgraves  |  Kane Brown  |  Keith Whitley  |  Kelsea Ballerini  |  Kip Moore  |  Kris Kristofferson  |   Little Big Town  | LoCash |  Maren Morris  |  Martina McBride  |  Merle Haggard  |  Montgomery Gentry  |  Oak Ridge Boys  |  Patsy Cline  |  Randy Travis  |  Reba McEntire  |  Tanya Tucker  |  Willie Nelson  |  Zac Brown Band

Trending on Billboard

Jerry lee lewis doesn't get country music hall of fame snub.

10. Jerry Lee Lewis — “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On” 

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/GN8VV8CHnrk” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

A staple of the Jerry Lee Lewis song catalog, this seminal rock & roll tune was recorded at his second session for Sun Records in 1957. Believe it or not, though it remains one of his signature tunes, Lewis was not the first to cut the song. Two years earlier, it was recorded by R&B performer Big Maybelle. The song became Lewis’s breakthrough hit, topping the country charts, and hitting No. 3 on the pop listing.

9. Jerry Lee Lewis –“Chantilly Lace”

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZhktsJzXdcI” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

 Lewis handled his transition to straight-ahead country so well that one might have forgotten that he was one of the pioneers of rock and roll. This 1972 cover of the Big Bopper hit reminded listeners just how lethal Lewis could be when the tempo was fast. 

8. Jerry Lee Lewis — “Once More With Feeling”

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/Do-gdfbFz-c” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Pulled from Lewis’ album  She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye , this 1970 hit featured Lewis lamenting his feelings about a relationship that had grown stale. The song just narrowly missed the top spot on the charts, hitting No. 2

7. Jerry Lee Lewis — “Thirty Nine and Holding”

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/n4ONdphMQnU” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

The last major singles hit of Lewis’s country career, this 1981 hit featured a man in search of his lost youth. Recorded while Lewis was in his early 40’s, you could tell that the singer felt each and every word of the lyrics of this track from his album  Killer Country .

6. Jerry Lee Lewis — “Another Place, Another Time” 

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/bXor69G-Xhg” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

It had been a few years since Lewis was a force in contemporary music, as the singer was still fighting his public image throughout the 1960s, but this Jerry Chesnut composition was the first Jerry Lee Lewis song to become relevant to a wide audience in a decade when it peaked at No. 4 in 1968.

5. Jerry Lee Lewis — “She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye” 

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/3IUnUybLD00″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

From the pen of the timeless Mickey Newbury, who co-wrote the pain-ridden track with Doug Gilmore, this song served as the title cut for his 1969 album. It just narrowly missed the top of the charts, hitting No. 2, but was proof that just like with his Sun output being a primary piece of the rock and roll puzzle, he was on the way to creating something equally legendary with his Smash-era recordings. 

4. Jerry Lee Lewis — “Great Balls of Fire”

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/V_FAqr6rP4w” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Though the song was recorded some sixty years ago, there has been no burn factor in this Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer song that became Lewis’ ultimate calling card. The song was a showcase for the up-tempo fervor that seemed to define the music of the time, and “The Killer” approached the song with full steam, making for his second straight country chart-topper the first week of 1958.

3. Jerry Lee Lewis — “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous”

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/lGwQQydz-xQ” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

This Jerry Lee Lewis song became one of the greatest drinking songs in the format’s history, praising the effects that a certain kind of brew could have on a man’s outlook on life and love, though it might also have a detrimental effect on his actions. 

2. Jerry Lee Lewis — “Middle Age Crazy”

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/d87XQ6S8Dz0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Sonny Throckmorton’s wistful lyrics about a man realizing that time is swiftly passing him by a little quicker each day found the perfect interpretation in Lewis’s heartfelt delivery, as this track became a fan favorite upon its release in 1977. 

1. Jerry Lee Lewis — “Would You Take Another Chance On Me”

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/k7HIcty6D4s” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

There were few songwriting teams any more successful in country music than that of Jerry Foster and Bill Rice. This 1971 release wound up becoming one of the finest Jerry Lee Lewis song moments of his entire career, let alone his country years. As great as the lyrics and Lewis’s performance of the song were, the song might not have had as much power were it not for the dramatic intro of this Jerry Kennedy production that was straight out of the era of the 1970s. 

Get weekly rundowns straight to your inbox

Want to know what everyone in the music business is talking about?

Get in the know on.

Billboard is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Billboard Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

optional screen reader

Charts expand charts menu.

• Billboard Hot 100™
• Billboard 200™
• Hits Of The World™
• TikTok Billboard Top 50
• Song Breaker
• Year-End Charts
• Decade-End Charts

Music Expand music menu

• R&B/Hip-Hop

Videos Expand videos menu

Culture expand culture menu, media expand media menu, business expand business menu.

• Business News
• Record Labels
• View All Pro

Pro Tools Expand pro-tools menu

• Songwriters & Producers
• Artist Index
• Royalty Calculator
• Market Watch
• Industry Events Calendar

Billboard Español Expand billboard-espanol menu

• Cultura y Entretenimiento

Get Up Anthems by Tres Expand get-up-anthems-by-tres menu

Honda music expand honda-music menu.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Jerry Lee Lewis: ‘I worry about whether I'm going to heaven or hell’

At nearly 80, Jerry Lee Lewis has outlived his rivals and is preparing for his final tour. He talks about why his seventh wife is the love of his life, how he became known as ‘the Killer’, and why Elvis was just a hillbilly

W e’re waiting for the Killer to get home. Judith, wife number seven, is telling me how best to get on with her husband. Jerry Lee Lewis , one of the founding fathers of rock’n’roll and reputedly the baddest of the bad boys, is known to have a temperamental side. There was the time he drove up to Graceland, drunk on liquor and high on pills, with a gun on his dashboard, demanding that Elvis come down from the house on the hill to prove who was the real king. And the time he shot his bass player, Butch Owens, in the chest, accidentally, he insists – Owens won $125,000 in damages. There were the two wives who died in tragic, some have said suspicious, circumstances. But this is the past, says Judith in her deep Mississippi drawl, and the past is a faraway country.

“OK, you have to talk loud and slowly to Jerry. And don’t mention any bad words, and nothing negative,” says the formidable Judith, a former basketball player, and ex-wife of the brother of wife number three, Myra. Myra was the most controversial, because she was only 13 years old when Lewis wed her. “You can ask about me, but as far as all his wives and stuff goes, he doesn’t like to talk about personal stuff,” Judith says.

Jerry Lee Lewis is preparing for his final tour to the UK next month, to coincide with his 80th birthday. Sixty years on from the birth of rock’n’roll, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and Great Balls Of Fire remain two defining songs of the 20th century. And Lewis, growling and yelping, beating seven bells of hell out of that piano with his hands, feet and elbows, snakes of hair falling over his forehead, is one of its most memorable performers. His music has been played around the world, and further. On the wall is a letter from astronaut Stuart Roosa , dated 25 May 1971. “Dear Mr Lewis, Our most heartfelt thank you for the tremendous tape you cut for me to take on Apollo 14. I can’t really describe how much it meant to me to have your music on board when we were 240,000 miles from home and the Earth had shrunk to a tiny ball.” Lewis was in the first group of artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame . John Lennon kissed his feet when they met .

Lewis could play anything brilliantly on that piano – blues, jazz, country, you name it. He rarely wrote his own songs, but few interpreted them like the Killer. Lewis has been known as the Killer since school. Why, depends on who you listen to and when. As I discover, it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction when it comes to Jerry Lee.

A black piano is sculpted into the huge iron gates outside Lewis’s home in Nesbit, near Memphis. Above it, in 18in-high capital letters, are the words THE LEWIS RANCH. From the kitchen, we hear a car humming up the huge drive, past the private lake, the barking guard dogs and the Jeep parked outside (registration Killer8). Eventually a white Rolls-Royce Corniche carrying Jerry Lee Lewis rolls up to the mansion.

You can see the panic in Judith’s face. “Don’t approach him,” she whispers. “Don’t let Jerry see you.” She explains that he won’t want anybody to see him before he is fit for presentation; before he becomes the great Jerry Lee Lewis. As I am shooed into the den, I peek out of the window and see the Killer climbing out of the Corniche, walking with a stick and smoking an e-cigarette. Lewis is accompanied by his road manager of 40 years, JW Whitten. They disappear for his transformation.

Meanwhile, Judith returns to play the hostess. She and Lewis have known each other for a quarter of a century, and are now into their fourth year of marriage. They had much in common – they both grew up in the south, with the snakes and swamps, the sweltering heat, the Pentecostal Christianity and fear of sin. She started nursing him when he was in bad health six years ago, then things grew from there. “He was very sick, so in taking care of him and talking about the way we grew up, we fell in love with each other.”

Ahead of me, by the grand piano, is a mountain lion, eyes sharply focused, teeth still gnashing, now reduced to a tawny rug. “Oh, don’t you worry about her,” Judith says, smiling. “That’s Jane. Jerry’s second wife!”

“She’s been skinned,” says Greg Ericson, his manager, who has joined us.

“Jerry called her Jane!” Judith says, now laughing.

His second marriage to Jane Mitchum had been combustible – he has said she threw claw-hammers and Father Christmas figurines through his car windscreen, and that he deserved it. Did Lewis’s track record with wives make Judith worry about marrying him? “No, no, I love these women who loved him. But those wives were much younger than him, most of them, and past is past.” Judith, 65, looks down at Jane. “We like her. She’s no trouble at all. She doesn’t talk or anything. She even lets you step on her.” A number of wives said he was violent.

Lewis emerges, black suit, red shirt, white leather shoes and cane. At 79, his face is waxy and thunderous – whiter than any I’ve ever seen. His eyes are red, and look as if they have seen too much. His hair is thick and silver, with boyish curls. Cross Marlon Brando’s mumbling Don Corleone in The Godfather with Daniel Day-Lewis’s roaring prospector in There Will Be Blood and you have something approaching Jerry Lee Lewis. When we shake hands, I hear my knuckles crack. He poses for photographs, polite and patient. Until he is unhappy. Then he cracks his cane in anger.

We retire to the den. Lewis is propped up by cushions, one leg lying on his zebra skin stool, Judith at his side. I ask him if he’s reflective as he approaches his 80th birthday. Well, he says, he always thinks about his parents. “I would say 90% of my ability to do what I do is from my mother and father,” he says in his southern slur. “They were the greatest parents anyone in the world could ever think about having. I loved my mom and daddy. They did everything they could in the world to see me successful, and my music.” In the background, a phone rings. Lewis looks up, sharply. “Cut that phone off please,” he bellows.

His father, Elmo Lewis, was a farmer, carpenter and convicted bootlegger; his mother Mamie adored music and sang with Elmo. When Jerry was three, his seven-year-old brother, Elmo Jr, was hit by a car and killed. It was the first of many tragic deaths in Lewis’s life. Elmo Jr had shown great promise as a musician.

When Lewis was seven, his father mortgaged the house to buy him a piano for $250. The story goes that he took one look at it and began playing. Before long, father and son realised their fortune lay in that piano (which still resides at the Lewis ranch). Elmo would hoist it on to the back of a wagon and they would travel from town to town, looking for any space to play in. At night, Jerry Lee would sneak into the local blues club, the only white kid in the building, where he would hide under tables and listen to the music.

The young Lewis was tough, passionate, God-fearing and precocious. By 14, 15 or 16 (depending on his mood), he was married to Dorothy, whose preacher father had brought his Travelling Salvation show to Lewis’s home town of Ferriday, Louisiana. Lewis almost became a preacher himself, enrolling at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Texas. But rock’n’roll got the better of him. When he turned from hymns to boogie-woogie, he was expelled. Ever since, this has been the dichotomy in Lewis’s life: a man raised on the threat of hell, fire, damnation, who could not resist the lure of the devil’s own music.

When I mention this today, he’s not having any of it. Say something’s white to Lewis, and he’ll swear it’s black. “How can it be the devil’s music? Satan didn’t give me the talent. God gave me the talent, and I’ve always told people that.”

Yet listen to an early recording made at Sun Studios, and he’s railing at boss Sam Phillips, half crazed with the notion that he has the devil inside him. There is also a famous story that he asked Presley if he believed a rock’n’roller could go to heaven.

Lewis smiles when I mention this. “I said, ‘Elvis, I’m going to ask you one thing before we part company here. If you die, do you think you’d go to heaven or hell?’ And he got real red in the face, and then he got real white in the face, and he said, ‘Jerry Lee, don’t you ever say that to me agin .’ I said, ‘Well, I won’t even say it to you again .’ Hahahaha!” He laughs, mockingly, at Elvis’s country accent. “He was very frightened.”

But Elvis wasn’t the only one who thought about hell? Lewis nods. “I was always worried whether I was going to heaven or hell,” he concedes. “I still am. I worry about it before I go to bed; it’s a very serious situation. I mean you worry, when you breathe your last breath, where are you going to go?”

Maybe it wasn’t the music itself but the lifestyle he thought was ungodly. “Well, I don’t know, I done the best I could,” Lewis says.

“That’s all forgiven,” Judith says. “He’s going to heaven. We’re going to change the subject.”

“Well...” says Lewis, unsure.

“I know you are, baby,” Judith says, brooking no dissent. “If the lifestyle’s got anything to do with it, that’s over.”

B efore succeeding in music, Lewis worked as a sewing machine salesman. Only he didn’t sell them. He told “customers” that they had won the machines and all they needed to pay was $10 in tax. He made a fair bit of money before being found out. At 20, he hitched up at Sun Records, and said he wouldn’t leave until Sam Phillips had heard him play.

Lewis sold 300,000 copies of his first single, Crazy Arms , in 1956, the year that Elvis had his first hit with Heartbreak Hotel . A year later, he became an international star with Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and Great Balls Of Fire. Both songs represented the freedoms and desires of newly-named teenagers. The establishment was outraged, some radio stations banned him, but the greater the condemnation, the more successful he became.

Why does he think his music was controversial? “They said Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On was a really vulgar record. I never thought there was anything vulgar in it. Risqué. They said the same about Great Balls Of Fire. What are they talking about, risqué? All I hear is the beat, the rhythm, the words.”

Lewis’s reputation was cemented by his feral performance. He decided that nobody would outperform him, and nobody would follow him on the bill. Yet another story has it that when he was touring with Chuck Berry, and due to close alternate shows, Lewis saw red. Nobody closes a show but Jerry Lee Lewis. So, according to legend, he set fire to the piano with lighter fuel at the end of his act, walked off and told Berry “Follow that, boy.” Nobody followed Lewis after that.

Did he think he was the best? “I knew that, yeah. Rock’n’roll, blues, boogie woogie, you can look at BB King, look at Elvis Presley , you can look at the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but when it comes down to it, it’s Jerry Lee Lewis. His music is definitely way ahead of its time.”

How was his music ahead of, say, Elvis? “Elvis was more rockabilly. Not rock’n’roll. Rockabilly – which is close to hillbilly.” He laughs, as does Judith. Poor Presley was just a country bumpkin.

Who were his music heroes when growing up? “Me.”

No, I say, before you? “Me.”

Anybody else? “Nobody,” he barks.

Judith knows this isn’t true. “Hank Williams? Jimmy Rodgers,” she cajoles gently.

“Well, I listened to other people, I liked them, but I could never find anybody that was better than me. That’s why I always come back to my own sessions, over and over again.”

In 1958, at 22, Lewis became one of America’s first rock’n’rollers to tour Britain. He had made it his ambition to overtake Elvis, and it looked a possibility – not least because of Presley’s fear of flying. He arrived at Heathrow, and gave a now infamous interview alongside wife Myra .

Lewis claims he didn’t know that marrying a 13-year-old was taboo in Britain – he always said it was the norm in the southern states of America. So he had no qualms about showing Myra off to the press. A shocked journalist asked how old she was and Jerry claimed she was 15. The next day’s newspapers splashed with headlines about Jerry Lee Lewis and his child bride. After further digging, the newspapers revealed that Myra Gale Brown was actually 13, his cousin, and that for the second time, Lewis had failed to get divorced before remarrying. Lewis was shunned and concerts were cancelled. On his return to the US, it was said he had brought shame on the nation. As a rock’n’roll star, he was destroyed.

Lewis went from earning more than $10,000 a night to $250. But he carried on rocking, harder and wilder than ever before. He would gig in tiny clubs to the backdrop of drunks fighting. Sometimes he would play for nine-hour stretches through the night. If anything, failure made him even more unrestrained. Fifty-one years on, his album Live At The Star Club, Hamburg still shocks with its raw, filthy energy.

Then, in the late 1960s, Lewis found commercial salvation in the country music he had grown up on. He cast aside the devil’s best tunes for songs about love, loss and faith. Jerry Lee Lewis became one of the great country singers with songs like What’s Made Milwaukee Famous and Another Place, Another Time .

T here have been films made about Lewis’s fabled bad behaviour ( Great Balls Of Fire, with Dennis Quaid as Lewis ) and books written about it ( Nick Tosches’ Hellfire was named by the Observer as the best music book of all time in 2006 ). Yet today he tells me he was misunderstood. “I never done anything I’m ashamed of.” He pauses. “I wasn’t the kind of guy who’d take a girl and put her up on a hill, and live with her for eight years, and then just marry her when I got her pregnant.” And a lot of men would do that? “That was a fact. I’m not mentioning any names.”

Judith gives me a helping hand. “The initials are EP,” she says.

I look at Lewis and ask if he’s talking about Elvis Presley.

He stares me back in the face. “I wouldn’t be talkin’ about Elvis Presley unless I was talking about Elvis Presley.”

“He did that?” I ask.

“Sure he did it. It’s well known. I married my girls.”

Elvis is said to have moved his then girlfriend Priscilla into Graceland when she was 14 and he was 24. Lewis has never understood why he was singled out for marrying Myra.

I look at Judith and ask how he’s doing with his seventh wife. “She’s the one I’ve been lookin’ for all the time,” he purrs.

Has he found love with Judith? “Yes, I definitely think so.”

Had he found love before? “That’s a good question.”

Was it love with Jane?

“No,” Judith replies.

Had he been in love before Judith? Suddenly, Lewis decides this isn’t such a good line of questioning after all. “That’s none of your business,” he roars.

Good answer, I stammer.

“I wouldn’t tread too much on thin ice.” He throws me a cold stare, then shuts his eyes. We change the subject.

Whitten asks me how Cliff Richard is. “He was a big friend of Jerry’s. Is he OK? He been sick or what? It’s been years since we’ve seen him. He used to come around… in the 70s. A lot of them used to come around who don’t come no more.”

The truth is many of them are dead, and astonishingly Lewis has outlived them. In 1956, Sam Phillips recorded a jamming session with Lewis, Elvis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins that became known as the Million Dollar Quartet. All four were hard-drinking pill-poppers, and Lewis is the only survivor.

How does he explain it? “I never drank that much,” he protests. You took plenty of pills? “Well, I have took a few pills in my life, but who hasn’t?” That was how rock’n’rollers kept going: amphetamines to speed them up, opiates to slow them down. In 1984, doctors cut away a third of his stomach, after he was diagnosed with perforated ulcers. He was given a 50% chance of survival. Of course he survived.

But many of those closest to him didn’t. In 1962, his son, Steve Allen, drowned in a swimming pool, aged three. In 1973, his eldest son, Jerry Lee Jr, aged 19, overturned his Jeep and died. In 1982, his fourth wife, Jaren Gunn, drowned in a pool, shortly before their divorce settlement was finalised. A year later, after 77 days of marriage, his fifth wife, Shawn Stephens, was found dead at their home after overdosing.

Rolling Stone published an article that more or less accused Lewis of killing Stephens, intentionally or otherwise, pointing out that the bed she was found in hadn’t been slept in, she was bruised and bleeding, had taken 10 times the safe amount of his methadone, and that Lewis had paid for a private autopsy. A grand jury cleared Lewis of any crime. He did admit that they had been fighting that night – and that they fought most nights. What seems clear is that, back then, he was so incapacitated by his addiction to prescription drugs, he became an unreliable witness to his own history.

The death of his two sons caused the most pain (Jerry Lee Jr had played drums in his band). Does he think his losses have made him stronger? “Well, I don’t know if it made me stronger or not, sir, but it got my attention real good, I know. That was a very hard time, a very sad time for me. But I pulled through it. I buried my own. I took care of everything.”

“I think God gave him the ability to not be angry at him,” Judith says.

He gives her a look as if to say, how could I ever be angry with God?

Judith says when her brother, who had raised her, died, it was Lewis who provided comfort. “He said to me, ‘Baby, you’ve got to come out of this grief, or you will grieve yourself to death. He was right.”

I ask Lewis if he ever felt he would grieve himself to death. “No,” he says. “I get down sometimes. A little bit down. I pull myself out of it. I pray, and I think about the things I have now.”

How many times a day does he pray? “Just about as many hours as there are in the day, I pray. I pray all the time.”

“He talks to God like he’s just talking to you, it’s amazing,” Judith says.

Is death something he fears? “No, I’m not too much on fear. Well, I love God, I love Jesus Christ, and I worship the precious, precious, precious Holy Ghost. But I love living, breathing, I thank God for that all the time.”

Has he always loved life? “Always have. We have made our mistakes through life. But we learn through our mistakes. Big-time mistakes.”

I ask about the biggest. He mumbles incoherently about beautiful red-headed girls, fooling around, temptation. “And you’ve got to handle it the best way you can. You can’t hurt people’s feelings.”

Lewis has been clean for decades. Is he happy? “Yeah. I got my old girl here. She’s the best of them. Better than all of ’em put together. I done pretty well. I got myself a fine place here. I’m happy now. That’s all I know.” He talks about his surviving children, how Jerry Lee III is the chef at his club, how his grandson Jerry Lee IV was born only a couple of weeks ago. “I’ve got a good wife, good friends. I’m a pretty good old boy myself.”

Through much of the 1990s and early 2000s, Lewis didn’t make records. He was in poor health, unhappily married to his sixth wife, Kerrie McCarver, and he couldn’t find anybody to produce his work. But over the past decade he has made three critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums of duets, mixing rock’n’roll and country. Creatively, he’s on a high. Yes, this will be his final tour abroad and, yes, his fingers are a little gnarled, but he says he plays as well as ever, and there will be at least one more album coming. He can’t wait to get to Britain and prove he’s still the greatest showman on Earth.

Does he still like to use his guns? “If somebody breaks into my house to kill me and my wife, I will stop ’em, yes.” So he never shoots in temper now? “No!” Was that exaggerated? “That’s a bunch of baloney. Every bit of it. Yeah.”

Perhaps you weren’t helped by your nickname? “Ach, that,” he says. “I didn’t mean nothing bad by that.” How did it come about? “I was leaving high school one afternoon with my friend, and he or me said, ‘I’m going home now, I’ll meet you at the pool hall.’ And he or me said, ‘OK, I’ll see you there, killer.’ And that’s how it got started.”

But in Rick Bragg’s authorised memoir , you say you were named Killer after trying to strangle your teacher? “The what?” he shouts.

“Did you ever get involved in a fight with a teacher?” Judith asks.

His face lights up. “Yes, I was strangling him by his necktie. I was swinging on it. He was weakening, losing his breath.”

Despite a number of run-ins with the law, Lewis has never received a custodial sentence. Does he think he’s lucky? He laughs. “Well, I only strangled one!”

I ask if he has ever been scared of anybody. Eight, nine, 10 seconds pass. “Why would you be scared of somebody?” he eventually replies. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Are people scared of you?”

“I expect so, yes,” he says quietly.

“Do you like that?”

“No. That’s all just a bunch of baloney.”

“A lot of people are just afraid of celebrities,” says Ericson, gently. “You’re the biggest celebrity, so a lot of people are afraid of you just for that.”

There is also the name, I say, and all those stories.

“All the rumours,” Whitten says, nodding.

Earlier in the day, Whitten told me how Elton John was shaking when he met Lewis in New Orleans recently.

“No wonder,” I say, trying to lighten the mood, “he probably thought you were going to pull a gun on him.”

“No, he was nervous because Jerry’s his idol,” Judith says.

“He was just nervous because he was meeting me,” Lewis says. “He wasn’t scared I was going to hurt to him. I don’t want people to be scared of me.”

I feel as if Lewis and I have gone 15 rounds. He’s won, of course. But as he is helped out of his chair, I see a gentler side; the polite, elderly gentleman from the deep south, doing battle with a bad back. When the photographer asks him if he would sit at the piano, he does so and within seconds his fingers are moving along the keyboard. He can’t help himself. Before long he’s blocked out the world – mellow jazz, grumbling blues, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, and on and on he plays. It brings a lump to my throat.

He shakes my hand as he leaves for his summer hideaway just outside Memphis, and hobbles to the Rolls-Royce Corniche. Lewis bends himself into the driver’s seat and reverses down that endless drive. “See ya later, Killer,” he says.

• Jerry Lee Lewis
• Elvis Presley
• Pop and rock

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

The Best of Jerry Lee Lewis [Trip]

Jerry lee lewis.

STREAM OR BUY:

Release Date

Discography timeline, user reviews, similar albums.

Rock’n’Roll Heroes – Jerry Lee Lewis

By Dan Biggane | April 15, 2024

• 8 minute read

In celebration of the life of Jerry Lee Lewis, we look back at the thrilling rise of one of rock’n’roll’s most volatile originals

It’s inevitable that the life choices of a 22-year-old Killer will always cause raised eyebrows, but there’s also no doubting his ferocious and fearless piano playin’ will forever get hearts pumpin’. More than sixty five years since he first whipped up a storm in both the British singles chart and the tabloid press, the controversial whirling dervish Jerry Lee Lewis will always be rock’n’roll’s first great wild man.

Ferriday Fireball

Born into a poor but devoutly religious family, in Ferriday, Louisiana, Lewis became infatuated by the piano at the tender age of nine while visiting his aunt. When his parents mortgaged their farm to buy a used upright piano, the young Lewis started taking lessons and played alongside his cousins Mickey Gilley (who’d go on to find fame as a country music artist), and future US TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart.

Fascinated by the skills of older cousin Carl McVoy, who had developed a boogie woogie-style of playing, Lewis spent the summer of 1945 with him in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and returned six months later with, as Swaggart would state, “more piano skills than the stodgy teacher could have drilled into him in a lifetime.”

At the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis, McVoy would go on to record You Are My Sunshine , the debut single release for the Hi Records label, and later joined The Bill Black Combo. However, his handiwork would be overshadowed by the exploits of the precocious young talent whose skills he helped nurture.

Bags Of Bravado

With dreams of eclipsing the success of Elvis Presley , 21-year-old Lewis left his hometown for Tennessee a twice-married, Southwest Bible Institute dropout with nothing but bags of bravado and an unbelievable ability to bang on the piano.

Initially turned down by the Grand Ole Opry and having had a Nashville recording executive suggest that he switch to the more fashionable guitar – to which the irascible youngster reportedly suggested they took said six-string and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine – Lewis headed south-west for an audition with Sun.

While Sam Phillips was away in Florida, producer and engineer Jack Clement was working the control room with Roy Orbison , when office assistant Sally Wilbourn interrupted the session claiming, “there’s a guy here who says he plays the piano like Chet Atkins”. On hearing such a boast, Clement surrendered studio time to the mysterious braggart.

Suitably impressed by renditions of country numbers Wildwood Flower , Seasons Of My Heart and Window Up Above , Lewis was invited to cut an acetate. When he first heard the rocking rendition of Ray Price’s country hit Crazy Arms , Phillips exclaimed, “where did this man come from?”

Well, you could say he hailed from somewhere situated on the highway between Heaven and Hell. In a heated soundbite, captured during a break during recording, Phillips and his tormented new signing can be heard arguing theology. It is evident that Lewis, a man raised with the threat of hellfire and damnation, was torn by his predicament and one can’t really tell if he feared eternal punishment for playing such hellraising music, or if the Devil – which raged inside him – only helped stoke the flames for the trail that he blazed.

“I was just blown away,” Phillips recalled in 1998. “The guy was different… The expression, the way he played that piano and how you could just feel that evangelical thing about him.”

Having sold 300,000 copies of Crazy Arms in 1956 – the year Elvis scored his first Billboard Top 100 No.1 with Heartbreak Hotel for his new label RCA – Sam Phillips transferred all his attention on to his troubled new protégé… the Devil be damned.

The Wild One

Following recording sessions for Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash , Lewis supported the duo on tour and fully embraced his ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ stage persona. With a shock of wild wavy blond hair, Jerry Lee mesmerised fans with his flamboyant attitude and brazened showmanship: standing on top of the piano, bashing it with his feet and arms, and even setting it on fire.

A cover of Big Maybelle’s 1955 release, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, had become a permanent fixture in his stimulating set and, once it received a complete boogie-woogie makeover in the studio, even Phillips feared if might prove too risqué for a God-fearing public. However, despite its suggestive overtones, Whole Lotta Shakin’ thrust itself to No.3 on the Billboard chart. Entering the UK hit parade at No.29 on 3 October 1957, the single would go on to pierce the Top 10 four weeks later and peak at No.8.

All Shook Up

The touch paper had most certainly been lit and Lewis was set to explode with his next incendiary single. When songwriter Otis Blackwell had been invited by Paul Case at Hill & Range to become musical director on the upcoming film Jamboree (aka Disc Jockey Jamboree in the UK), a Dick Clark vehicle to rival the rock’n’roll movies of Alan Freed, a host of rock acts had already been lined up to appear.

After hearing Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On , Blackwell suggested that Lewis joined the likes of Carl Perkins, Fats Domino , Buddy Knox , Charlie Gracie and Connie Francis on the bill. Teaming up with fellow songwriter Jack Hammer, Blackwell penned Great Balls Of Fire for rock’s hottest property and a Sun session was swiftly arranged. Featuring bassist Sidney Stokes and drummer Larry Linn, Great Balls Of Fire burst into the UK singles chart at No.12 in December 1957 and would climb to the top four weeks later.

Hot on the heels of securing his debut No.1, another Blackwell composition, Breathless , followed suit and dropped into the Top 10 on 1 May 1958. Anticipation for the inflammable star’s imminent arrival on UK shores for a 37-date tour could not have been much higher. However, things would dramatically implode almost immediately on touchdown at Heathrow.

Rise & Fall

When Lewis landed in London with his third wife in tow, all hell broke loose among the British press on discovering that Myra Gale was only 13 years old when they married… and his first cousin once removed. The scandal became front-page news, and the tour was cancelled after just three shows.

The furore followed him back home when it was also revealed it may have been a bigamous marriage as he hadn’t yet divorced his second wife, whom he’d married aged 17.

Blacklisted from the radio waves, public appearances scrapped, and record sales suffering, Lewis was forced out of the limelight for a couple of years and took gigs for a fraction of the price that he had previously commanded.

With Perkins and Cash following Presley by moving away from Sun, it’s fair to say 1958 was not the brightest of years for the label. However, in September 1960 Sam Phillips opened a state-of-the-art studio at 639 Madison Avenue in Memphis, and Lewis would be the first to record there with a cover of Ray Charles’ R&B classic What’d I Say . Entering the UK chart on 10 May 1961, the single reached No.10 and proved to be his first notable release since Lovin’ Up A Storm had broken the Top 30 in 1959. Riding a wave of renewed interest Lewis returned to a Britain buoyed by the rock’n’roll success of homegrown acts like The Beatles in 1962 and received a much warmer welcome from fans desperate to see one of the original pioneers.

Turning Country

As his contract with Sun came to an end, Lewis changed gear and shifted towards country music. In the US it proved a rather fruitful move, with the 1968 Top 5 country hit Another Place, Another Time , from the Smash label album of the same name, kickstarting a run of success in the country charts which lasted well into the 70s and included three No.1s: There Must Be More To Love Than This , Me And Bobby McGee / Would You Take Another Chance On Me , and a boogie-woogie cover of The Big Bopper ’s Chantilly Lace .

“The only time I saw him slip up was when I was touring with him in the late 70s and early 80s,” recalls Matchbox ’s Graham Fenton. “He decided to come over here and not play any rock’n’roll – just the country stuff. The crowd turned very quickly, and he was greeted with boos… but what can I say, he still had this air of ‘I’m Jerry Lee, you can either like it or lump it.’

“Jerry Lee was, of course, one of the US legends who performed at the 1972 London Rock & Roll Show at Wembley Stadium which I opened with my band, The Houseshakers. He was only about 37 or 38 then, but was just as flamboyant as you’d imagine. He wasn’t nasty, rude, or horrible… just a bit flash and such a great performer. When I think about his talents, I do believe Jerry Lee was blessed with a God-given gift for playing the piano. As for his flamboyancy, well, I’d say that probably came from the Devil!”

Feeling At Home

In 2022, 36 years after his entry as part of the inaugural class of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, Lewis was inducted into the Country Music Hall Of Fame. While he wasn’t able to make it to the October ceremony, some of country music’s biggest names still embraced the star. Lee Ann Womack performed Middle Age Crazy and Chris Isaak played Great Balls Of Fire , while the McCrary Sisters sang My God Is Real alongside pianist Kevin McKendree. Hank Williams Jr. presented fellow Hall of Fame member Kris Kristofferson with Jerry Lee’s medallion and delivered a letter written by Lewis: “For over 60 years singing music professionally, country has always been the genre where I felt the most at home. I’m honoured to be going into that Hall of Fame rotunda with some of my heroes.”

Jerry Lee’s colourful life and breathless dalliance with the fame game proved anything but straightforward.

Even the reporting of his death was a bewildering affair with his representative initially calling “bulls***!” after the TMZ website erroneously claimed that he had passed away two days before the sad news broke that Lewis had, indeed, died.

Unapologetically Jerry Lee

“I would have to be at least dead or 5,000 years old to do all the things they say I have done,” Lewis wrote in his 1993 biography Killer! The Life & Times Of Jerry Lee Lewis . “I am what I am, I’ve always said what I’ve wanted to say, done what I wanted to do and been what I wanted to be. I’ve never tried to hide anything, everything I’ve done has been out in the open. If people don’t like that then that’s their problem.”

While time might’ve tempered Jerry Lee’s unpredictable nature towards the end of his life, he remained, unapologetically, Jerry Lee Lewis. He could never be accused of fakin’ and rest assured, there will still be a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on to his music now that the last man is, sadly, no longer standing.

Visit the Jerry Lee Lewis website here

Did you enjoy this article? Check out When rockabilly shook the world

Dan Biggane

Dan Biggane is a writer for Vintage Rock and Classic Pop magazines. A former entertainment editor at the Bath Chronicle newspaper, he’s interviewed numerous big names from the world of rock’n’roll, including Dion, Jerry Allison, and Slim Jim Phantom. He has also contributed a number of cover features for Vintage Rock including Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Billy Fury and Bo Diddley.

In Dreams: Remembering Roy Orbison

Marty wilde scoops first no.1 on 85th birthday, you may also like.

Soundtrack Of My Life – Greg Townson

Remembering Elvis’ Follow That Dream

Vintage Rock writer John Howard pays tribute to Scotty Moore

Soundtrack Of My Life: Lyndon Needs

Issue 21 Of Vintage Rock Out Now !

Search vintage rock.

On this day in 1972, 39-year-old Clyde McPhatter, who performed with The Dominoes and founded The Drifters before starting a solo career, died in his sleep after years of alcohol abuse left him with heart, liver, and kidney disease. youtu.be/XrqW1EBLyJA pic.twitter.com/jj49FTsmug

Last year from Vintage Rock's Twitter via LaterMedia · reply · retweet · favorite

Have you got your new copy of Vintage Rock Presents: Rockabilly Vol. 2 yet? Order yours today at vintagerockmag.com/rockabilly pic.twitter.com/jgcinwiIy7

A low-budget movie designed to cash in on the emergence of rock’n’roll, Jamboree captured performances by Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, Charlie Gracie and others… vintagerockmag.com/2023/05/ja… pic.twitter.com/rgLrOTgf1b

On this day in 1957, Elvis released the single (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear. It would eventually hit No.1 on the Billboard, staying there for seven weeks. pic.twitter.com/22cXYCY2eE

Give Dad the gift of music nostalgia this year, from the pop music of the 70s, 80s, and 90s with Classic Pop magazine, to the Golden Age of rock'n'roll with Vintage Rock magazine – all under £25!⁠ ⁠ Browse our Father's Day offers at vintagerockmag.com/fathersday pic.twitter.com/J2a9soulrn

Input your search keywords and press Enter.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Jerry Lee Lewis has died at age 87

Blake Farmer

Anastasia Tsioulcas

Jerry Lee Lewis, in a photo taken during his infamous trip to London in June 1958, when it became public that he was married to his 13-year-old cousin. Evening Standard/Getty Images hide caption

Jerry Lee Lewis, in a photo taken during his infamous trip to London in June 1958, when it became public that he was married to his 13-year-old cousin.

Rock 'n' roll's first great wild man, Jerry Lee Lewis — the singer and pianist nicknamed "The Killer" — has died. He was 87 years old.

Sam Philips, the founder of Sun Records — and the producer who also discovered Elvis, Howlin' Wolf, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison — called Lewis "the most talented man I ever worked with, black or white ... one of the most talented human beings to walk God's earth." But almost as quickly as his star ascended, his career collapsed, after he married his 13-year-old cousin in 1958 — mere months after his first hit song was issued.

Born Sept. 29, 1935 in Ferriday, La., Jerry Lee Lewis grew up caught in a binary quandary over music and morality, perpetually torn between his religious upbringing and a burning desire to boogie. His mother was a Pentecostal preacher who disapproved of secular music; his cousin, the influential and eventually infamous evangelical preacher Jimmy Swaggart, was also fond of condemning "the devil's music." But when Lewis was just eight years old, his father (who had served time in prison for bootlegging), took out a mortgage on the family farm to buy young Jerry a piano. And he grew up sneaking into the black clubs, hiding under the tables until he got kicked out.

In a 1987 documentary called I Am What I Am , Lewis described the music he heard there: "Something different about it — it was blues and it was kind of rock. I just loved the blues. It was the real thing. I kinda always figured I was the real thing too."

He taught himself to play, combining the boogie beats from the Black clubs and some of what he heard on Sundays at his Pentecostal church. Religion influenced more than the music; this was a time when rock 'n' roll was deemed downright demonic.

As a teenager, Lewis was thrown out of the school he was attending, Southwest Bible Institute in Texas, for playing boogie-woogie on a school piano.

In late 1956, Lewis was signed to Sam Philips' Sun Records, the Memphis record label that became legendary and where his labelmates included Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. At first, he was a journeyman side player to artists like Carl Perkins — but that proximity meant that he was also played in a legendary single session in December 1956 at Sun Studios. Playing alongside Presley, Cash and Perkins, Lewis was part the one-night foursome that became known as the "Million-Dollar Quartet," which inspired a Tony-nominated musical of the same name that opened on Broadway in 2010.

When Lewis was 25, he struck gold with a career-defining hit: "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." It was a song first recorded in 1955 by a black artist, Big Maybelle, for Okeh Records (a side that was produced, notably, by a promising young man Quincy Jones). But it was Lewis' rockabilly version, released in 1957, that became a hit on the pop charts — and put a piano at the center of rock 'n' roll.

In 2000, the late producer Jack Clement described that Sun Studios session to NPR: "All I did was turn the machine on, and we cut 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Going' On' in one take." Lewis would later say that he knew he had a hit if it came out in one take.

The tape was rolling during a whiskey-infused exchange between Lewis and Sam Phillips, who believed Lewis could do good with rock 'n' roll.

"You can save souls!" said Philips.

"How can the devil save souls?" Lewis replied. "What are you talking about? I've got the devil in me. If I didn't have, I'd be a Christian."

That was the session when his biggest hit was also captured on tape: "Great Balls Of Fire."

Lewis started going out on the road alongside Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry — and before long, "The Killer" was the closing act. His performances were sexually charged; he'd suggestively work the microphone as he stood up and pounded the keys.

The adulation came to a screeching halt when the 22-year-old Lewis went to England in June 1958 on tour, and British reporters asked about the pretty young girl at his side. It was Lewis' new wife, Myra — who was just 13 years old. As the press went digging, they realized even more: not only was "Mrs. Lewis" still a child, she was his cousin. And this was already Lewis' third marriage — one which took place while the artist was still legally married to his second wife.

Lewis made it through a just a few tour dates before succumbing to the press and public's censure, and retreated back to the U.S. That doesn't mean that he was ever publicly regretful. His marriage to Myra lasted a decade, and in Rick Bragg's best-selling 2014 biography, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story , Lewis says, "She looked like a grown woman, blossomed out and ready for plucking ... I thought about her being 13 and all, but that didn't stop her from being a full-fledged woman." Meanwhile, Lewis' own sister had reportedly married at age 12, giving credence to the idea that this was a cultural norm.

In later years, the former Myra Lewis alleged that her former spouse abused her, but more recently, appears to have created an affable relationship with her ex-husband, and has called their marriage "ten incredible, wonderful years." (Over the years, Lewis married a total of seven times.)

She told WHYY's Fresh Air in 1989 that her husband was a walking contradiction — a wild man on stage, boozing and womanizing, who wouldn't allow a drop of alcohol in his own home. "Jerry sat in judgment of himself continuously," she said, "because he could never get away from the raising and the teaching that he had. That first off, he wasn't supposed to be playing that kind of music. He was supposed to be living the life that he lived."

After that fateful trip to England in 1958, Lewis' career fell apart. Pretty much overnight, Lewis went from commanding fees of thousands of dollars per show to playing in bars and doing occasional tours to Europe, where he could only afford to perform with pickup players, not his own band.

"For ten years, Jerry's records were held off the air," Myra told Fresh Air . "He could not get a decent concert date. There were certain radio stations that would not touch him at all."

Even so, as The Guardian noted in 2015, "If anything, failure made him even more unrestrained," and his marathon-all-night shows became the stuff of legend. Still under contract to Sun, Lewis released a few more charting songs, including a cover of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" in 1961, and "Good Golly Miss Molly" in 1963. Working under the pseudonym "The Hawk" to evade his Sun contract, Lewis also released a boogie-woogie version of "In The Mood," the Glenn Miller Orchestra's big-band staple — but there was no mistaking Lewis' instantly recognizable sound.

By the 1960s, Lewis' contract with Sun had come to its close, and he was foundering professionally. He signed with a label called Smash with hopes to reignite his career. It didn't work, but one great artifact from this era became legend: his 1964 album Live At The Star-Club Hamburg , recorded by the Dutch label Philips as part of a series of live recordings from the German venue, and about which Rolling Stone Magazine later raved, "It's not an album, it's a crime scene ... with no survivors but The Killer."

Even so, Lewis was desperate to get back into the public eye in the U.S. — which, between his child-cousin-bride reputation and the British Invasion upending the American pop scene, seemed more and more unlikely. He landed upon an idea that hearkened to his roots: to record as a country artist, beginning with the 1968 album Another Place, Another Time . The gambit worked. Within a little more than a decade, Lewis released 23 songs that became Top 10 hits on the Billboard country chart.

He would later play at the Grand Ole Opry, famously declaring from the stage that he was a "rock and rollin', country-and-western, rhythm-and-blues singing [expletive]." He earned the nickname "The Killer" — not for his music or wild life, but because that's what he called everybody else when he couldn't remember their names. So that's what they called him.

Lewis' personal life continued to be addled, studded with trauma, and laced with massive amounts of prescription drugs and alcohol. His fourth wife, Jaren Gunn, drowned in 1982, shortly before their divorce was finalized; Rolling Stone published a long, damning account of Gunn's demise. Lewis' next wife, Shawn Stephens, died of an overdose less than three months after their marriage, which took place barely a year after Gunn's death. Though a grand jury cleared him of culpability in Gunn's death, the 2015 Guardian profile observed , "What seems clear is that, back then, he was so incapacitated by his addiction to prescription drugs, he became an unreliable witness to his own history.") Two of Lewis' children died as well: In 1962, his son Steve Allen drowned in a swimming pool at age three, and in 1973, his eldest son, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., died in a car accident. He ran afoul of the IRS and the DEA. There was also an incident in 1976 in which a drunken Lewis slammed his car into the gates of Graceland, demanding to see Elvis, with a gun on the dashboard.

"Most of us are amateur sinners, at best, when compared to Jerry Lee," says author Rick Bragg. "But then there are times when he is evangelical." Bragg says that in his old age, Lewis tried to set things right and was able to find redemption. He gave Hank Williams credit for getting the white working man off his knees long enough to enjoy some music.

"But it was Jerry Lee that put 'em to dancing," Bragg continues. "And I thought that was the prettiest thing he said. And how can that be a sin?"

Or as Lewis himself put it to NPR in 2010: "I been up and down the road and done some hard living — and some hard rocking and some hard rolling."

Lewis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 — one of the first artists to be so immortalized. He was also given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, despite never winning a Grammy for his recorded music. (He won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Recording in 1986, for a recording of interviews gleaned from The Class of '55 , an album that brought him together with Cash, Perkins and Roy Orbison.) A 1989 biopic, Great Balls Of Fire , starring Dennis Quaid as the young Killer. But by that era, Lewis' performance career had already largely petered off again.

Nevertheless, Lewis' career entered a third act during the last two decades of his life. Beginning in the mid-2000s, Lewis found renewed interest in his music via a string of duet albums, featuring performances with an unlikely constellation of collaborators that included Mick Jagger, Tom Jones, Bruce Springsteen, Kid Rock and Gillian Welch.

Even so, Lewis knew that the public still wanted "The Killer" of 1958, before his great downfall. "'Great Balls of Fire,' 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On' is what people who come to see me want," he told The New York Times in 1996. "If I didn't do those songs, they'd shoot me at the end of the show."

• Jerry Lee Lewis

The Lewis Ranch

Top ways to experience nearby attractions

Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as waiting time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

The Lewis Ranch - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

Artist and Musician Biographies

Jerry lee lewis.

Here is Jerry Lee Lewis singing Great Balls of Fire.

Jerry Lee Lewis was born to a poor farm family in Ferriday, Louisiana in 1935. Broadcasts of the "Grand Ol' Opry" and "The Louisiana Hayride" were just a small portion of the music that influenced his career. Like Elvis Presley, Lewis was also influenced by the music of the church as well as some less-than-holy music he heard in Haney's Big House. This was a honky tonk bar catering to a black clientele that just happened to be owned by Jerry Lee's uncle, Lee Calhoun.

Lewis's parents, Elmo and Mamie Lewis, listened mostly to country and swing music that would also play a hand in developing their son's style. Luckily for Jerry Lee, his parents noticed that the boy had a flare for music when he began to play an aunt's piano at age 8. They subsequently purchased a used Stark Upright by taking a mortgage on their farm. Once the piano was acquired, Jerry Lee, along with his cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Lee Swaggart, began taking piano lessons.

It soon became evident that Jerry Lee possessed a talent for piano playing. Upon the visit of an older cousin who also played piano, Carl McVoy, Jerry Lee was introduced to the technique of playing the boogie-woogie style that he often heard on the radio. By the time Jerry Lee Lewis was 14, he had proven himself to be quite apt at the piano and had even worked on designing his own style.

His technical method involved playing a solid boogie background on the lower keys with his left hand while his right hand was working on the high keys with a showiness that would become a signature of his style. This style, which is called Rockabilly, is a combination of honkytonk, country, blues, gospel, and boogie-woogie. During the 1950's, Rockabilly became a very popular style among Southern white singers.

Mamie Lewis did not wish for her son to enter show business and instead enrolled him in a Bible school in Waxahatchie, Texas. Despite his mother's good intentions, legend tells that Jerry Lee was expelled from the school for playing a rock and roll version of the hymn, "My God Is Real". Still, it was through the financing of his parents that Jerry Lee made his trip to Memphis in 1956 to try and market his talent to Sun Records. Lewis was only twenty-one at the time and had a record of mishap trailing behind him that included two failed marriages, his expulsion from the Bible school, an unsuccessful job as a sewing-machine salesman as well as rejection from several Nashville record companies and "The Louisiana Hayride".

Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, was on vacation when Lewis arrived. However, Phillip's assistant concocted a band to play backup for Lewis that was made up of Roland Janes on guitar and J.M. Van Eaton on drums. This group would remain with Lewis throughout much of the seven years he recorded with Sun. Jerry Lee's first single was a remake of Ralph Mooney's song "Crazy Arms" that sold enough copies that Sam Phillips continued to record Lewis.

Once Jerry Lee began performing, he created the stage style and image that he would become legendary for. Because he was a piano player, he was supposedly bound to the stool. Jerry Lee, though, became famous for kicking the stool away so as to have more freedom of movement. Lewis was a wild performer, who shouted the lyrics to his songs while almost demolishing the piano with his hands and feet in a sustained boogie assault on the instrument. Once, angry over second billing at a concert to Chuck Berry, Lewis set his piano on fire at the end of his act, challenging Berry to "beat that." This, of course, began a long-standing tradition of the destruction of musical instruments on stage that was followed by many performers, including The Who and Jimi Hendrix .

With the song, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", that was released in 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis's career began to soar. Once the latter piece was performed on the Steve Allen Show, it gained the number one spot on the Country charts as well as in Rhythm and Blues. It was kept in the number two spot by Debbie Reynolds's long forgotten hit, "Tammy" on the pop chart.

Jerry Lee Lewis, known as the "Killer", a nickname from his youth, soon topped the charts with another single, "Great Balls of Fire", which also resulted in Jerry Lee getting a part in the rock and roll movie, "Jamboree". At this time, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins left Sun Records to move on to Columbia Records. Lewis had one more hit for Sun with "Breathless", which had a promotional connection to Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" show. In the summer of 1958, Lewis's twelve-day concert engagement at Paramount Theater in New York broke all attendance records.

Unfortunately, by the autumn of 1958, Lewis's career was virtually destroyed by his marriage to his thirteen-year old cousin (twice-removed), Myra Gale Brown. This apparent indiscretion was compounded by the fact that he and his second wife had not yet divorced. While on tour in England, the British press discovered the details of his marriage and attacked him mercilessly. With the tour canceled, Jerry Lee returned to the states to find that his records had been banned across the nation by radio stations.

The man who had once been paid $10,000 a night per booking now found that he could only make $250 a night if an establishment would even sign him. It took the "Killer" nearly 12 years to get back on his feet. He was taken on by Smash Records in the late 1960's and 1970's, but this time he recorded only country music.

Jerry Lee Lewis experienced much hardship throughout the 1960's and 1970's as well. His thirteen-year marriage with Myra was dissolved, his oldest son died in an auto accident and his young son drowned in 1962.

Lewis has been married a total of six times throughout his life. His fourth wife, Jaren Gunn Lewis drowned just shortly before their divorce settlement. Shawn Stephens Lewis, his fifth wife, was found dead only 77 days after their wedding, although no charges were ever brought against Jerry Lee.

With his family consisting of one daughter from his union with Myra, Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive and recording today. Sadly, his life has been troubled by addictions to painkillers and alcohol as well as disputes with the IRS.

In 1989, he experienced one more time in the spotlight when the film of his life, "Great Balls of Fire" was released starring Dennis Quaid as Lewis.

Despite his struggles, he was one of the first ten artists to inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. Lewis also produced an album in 1995 entitled "Young Blood" on the Sire Records label.

Page author: N.G.

Jerry Lee Lewis’ teenage bride speaks out: ‘I was the adult and Jerry was the child’

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

When Myra Williams looks back on her life — her marriage to her cousin, singer Jerry Lee Lewis, in 1957 when she was just 13 years old, their good and bad times together, the two children they had, the permanent damage that their relationship inflicted on Lewis’ career and legacy — she sometimes wonders whether it was all a dream.

“But it happened,” the 78-year-old author and former real estate agent told The Times by telephone from her home in Atlanta, one day after Lewis’ death. “It did. It all happened to me.”

Everything “gigantic,” she said, occurred in her teenage years, cataloguing the milestones: married at 13; a mother at 14; losing her firstborn child when she was 17; giving birth to her second child at 19.

“Yes, it was turbulent as a teenager to be a wife and mother,” Williams said. “But in going through it, I’ve found my strength. And there’s almost nothing that can knock me off my block at this point.”

Jerry Lee Lewis, original wild man of rock ’n’ roll, dies at 87

Lewis upended pop music with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ but his personal life was a chronicle of scandal and controversy.

Oct. 28, 2022

In the hours after Lewis died at age 87, obituaries of the rock legend flooded the internet, each featuring a transitional paragraph noting that Lewis’ star fell as quickly as it rose when his marriage to Williams became public during a tour of Britain a year after his debut album featuring the smash hit “Great Balls of Fire” rocketed to No. 2 on the pop charts.

“I was the bad thing in his life,” said Williams, describing how people saw her. “It was because of our marriage that his career hit the pavement. You know, you were judged for everything you did back then.”

And that judgment was swift and fierce. Radio stations stopped playing Lewis’ music. His label, Sun Records, stopped promoting him, and offers to perform evaporated. It was a lot for a young girl to shoulder, Williams said, adding that the misconception that plagued her then holds true to this day.

“I was called the child bride, but I was the adult and Jerry was the child,” Williams said. “When I look back on it, how can you defend yourself when you’re 13 years old? I mean there’s no excuse good enough for that to be OK.”

Williams said that she nonetheless took on all the responsibilities that came with her new role. “And I didn’t miss a beat. I took care of everything.”

She bought the couple’s home when Lewis was on the road, and also the car Lewis wanted. He told her to find a red Cadillac convertible, Williams remembered, and she did.

“I mean, I didn’t even have a driver’s license,” she said. “I did all the work and made all the decisions and did all the running and taking care of business and that kind of stuff.”

Williams even managed the finances, she said.

“One time I went to the bank with a big sack of money to deposit it ... and the teller said to me, ‘Myra, there’s a policeman sitting there outside in his car and he followed you here. So when you get ready to leave, I’ll drive you home,’” she said.

The Cadillac stayed in the bank parking lot that day.

What happened to Jerry Lee Lewis’ 13-year-old bride? She’s been here the whole time

Myra Lewis Williams, who married her cousin Jerry Lee Lewis when she was 13, wrote two books and said in 2015 that he is ‘no longer part of my life.’

Williams said drugs caused irreparable damage to her marriage. Before Lewis began using drugs, she said, he was silly, playful and kind. The couple would have pillow fights, crack jokes and pull goofy pranks, like holding on to the doorknob from the other side of the door to stop each other from getting in. When the drugs became a permanent fixture, she said, Lewis changed.

“His personality just became mean. And nasty. It was like a whole different man. Just bad, you know?” she said.

Williams and Lewis divorced in 1970, with Williams filing on the grounds of adultery and abuse. But they stayed in touch over the years because of the bond they shared through their daughter, Phoebe Allen Lewis. The couple’s son, Steve Allen Lewis, drowned at the age of 3.

Williams married briefly after that — an 18-month romance that she described as “an absolute fiasco and stupid.” She has been married to her current husband, Richard Williams, for going on 39 years. The couple own a real estate company in Atlanta but have both retired from day-to-day business.

“We just putter around, you know. We don’t have to do anything,” she said, adding that their office manager takes care of almost everything and they just stop by the office every once in a while to chat. “We just live a real simple life of sleeping late and watching ‘I Love Lucy.’”

Williams did her best to hold back tears when talking about Lewis’ death, which occurred a few weeks after the death of her father, J.W. Brown, a musician in his own right and Lewis’ cousin. It was Brown who went to Natchez, Miss., where Lewis was living as an unknown musician and brought him to Memphis, Tenn., to record with Sam Phillips at Sun Records, Williams said. He also invited Lewis to live in his home with his family, which is how Lewis and Williams fell in love.

When Brown heard the young couple had eloped, “he got his gun,” Williams said. “That was not a happy moment. Daddy felt very betrayed by that. I was his 13-year-old little girl.”

Brown went after Lewis, but Lewis was gone.

“The minute Daddy left the house, my mother called Sam Phillips and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re not gonna believe what’s happened, Sam,’” Williams said. “Mom said, ‘Jerry and Myra have gotten married. And Jay [J.W.] has his pistol. He’s on his way to Sun Records. You better get Jerry out of there.’”

Phillips “ran Jerry off” and told him to get on a plane. He said, “I don’t care where you go, just go,” Williams said.

Lewis was gone for three or four days, during which time Phillips sat Brown down and did his best to calm him, Williams said.

“Sam Phillips was a real talker, let’s put it that way. He could convince you that whatever you were seeing wasn’t there,” Williams said.

Brown came to accept the marriage after that, Williams said.

“There was just no choice. I mean, killing Jerry was not an option. It was his first thought, but it wasn’t an option,” she said.

When Lewis came back, Brown shook his hand and said, “You better be good to my girl.”

Williams stopped speaking with Lewis after he married her former sister-in-law, Judith Brown, in 2012. It was a hurt that cut deep, Williams said. Judith had been a friend and part of the family. (Brown was the former wife of Williams’ younger brother.)

Williams doesn’t recall the last time she spoke with Lewis, but said she tried to contact him about two years ago. She had asked Phoebe whether it would be OK if she called Lewis, and when she did, “I didn’t know what I was gonna say to him or tell him, and I made the call and he came to the phone, and I couldn’t talk. I hung up the phone.”

If Williams could give advice to her 13-year-old self, she said she had no idea what it might be.

“I wouldn’t go back and change it if I could,” she said. Then she stopped and thought for a second and began to laugh. “I might tweak it a little. I would tweak it a lot. I would tweak the hell out of it. I would be smarter.”

“But how smart can you be when you’re 14 years old?” she asked. “You’re a stupid kid at that age. You’re just not ready for it. You’re not ready for prime time.”

More to Read

L.A. Affairs: I almost kissed my ex-boyfriend. Did I have feelings for him again?

May 17, 2024

Jeezy wants more than Jeannie Mai divorce: primary custody over 2-year-old daughter

April 12, 2024

Lukas Gage is sorry, Shania Twain. This is all about his fur-coat, face-palm Vegas wedding

March 21, 2024

The biggest entertainment stories

Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Jessica Gelt is an arts and culture writer for the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Katy Perry says goodbye to ‘American Idol’ as reality show crowns another winner

May 20, 2024

Entertainment & Arts

‘Pathetic’: Cassie slams Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ apology for 2016 assault caught on video

Why some see hypocrisy in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ apology over Cassie Ventura attack

Ricky Martin and ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ ushered in pop’s ‘Latin explosion’ in 1999. Too bad it wasn’t real.

Jerry Lee Lewis on touring with Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins: "They knew, even then, they were seeing the greatest thing"

Cash, perkins, jackson -- they were all legends, they were all young, and the early tours were unforgettably cool, by rick bragg.

You need a great gift. We have excerpts from some of the season's biggest entertainment biographies and memoirs all day -- guaranteed perfect for someone on your list. Excerpted from "Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story"

Jerry Lee Lewis did not know where he was, precisely, just somewhere in Canada. The caravan thundered down highways that were barely there, the roadbed eaten by permafrost, the gravel flying like buckshot against the bottoms of the big cars. There was a long Lincoln Continental, a Fleetwood Cadillac, a mean-looking Hudson Hornet, and a brand-new Buick Supreme; it was new for only a thousand miles or so, till the potholes got it. The big sedans might have been different colors, once, but now they were all a uniform gray, the color of the blowing dust. Jerry Lee rode in the passenger seat of the Buick, sick of this great distance between crowds and applause, six hundred, seven hundred miles a day. “I didn’t drive. . . . I was paid to play piano and sing. Stars don’t drive.” Instead, he read Superman , or used a cigarette lighter to fire up one cherry bomb after another and flung them out the half window to explode under the trailing cars.

“That first tour was me, Johnny, and Carl, and Sonny James, Marvin Rainwater, Wanda Jackson. We put eighty, ninety thousand miles on that Buick, across Canada, across everywhere . . . throwing cherry bombs the whole way.” Sometimes he missed high and the cherry bombs exploded against windshields or on the hoods, and Johnny and Carl would curse him mightily, curse unheard, but one time he misjudged and the cherry bomb bounced off a window frame and into J. W.’s lap, and J. W.’s screams echoed inside the Buick for a good long while, longer than was seemly for a man. They could have used a chaperone, all of them, or a warden. The lead car was jammed with drum kits, guitar cases, and sharp-cut jackets and two-tone shoes. The only other provisions they packed were whiskey, cherry bombs, and comic books.

He cannot really remember all the little cities and towns they traveled through, not even the names on the road signs, only the vast, empty spaces in between. They would go two hundred miles or more and not see a café or a motel. “We’d stop at a store and get some Vienna sausages and bologna and bread and pickles and mustard, and pull over to the side of the road and have a picnic. . . . Calgary, that was one of the places. Quebec. They went crazy in Quebec. Pulled their dresses up.”

To the owners of the motels and truck stops, it must have seemed like the lunatics had wandered off the path, had stolen some good cars, and were terrorizing the countryside. “Johnny came in my room and saw this little bitty television in there, and he said, ‘You know, my wife’s always wanted one of them.’ And I told him, ‘Fine, go steal one from your own room.’ ” And it went that way, eight hundred, nine hundred miles a day, half drunk, pill crazy, larcenous, and destructive and beset by loose women and fits of temper, and it was perfect.

“We had some good fights,” says Jerry Lee. “A good fight just cleared the air.”

Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash had begun the tour as headliners. They were still the big names at Sun then and, Sam Phillips believed, his best moneymaking ventures. The problem was this newcomer, this blond-haired kid, who did not know his place and had no governor on his mouth, and in such close proximity, they could not tune him out and could not run away and could not kill him, either, though they considered it. He even had the gall to suggest, as the days wore on, he should close the shows, him with just two records cut and shipped and not even one yet on the charts. Who, they wondered aloud, did that Louisiana pissant think he was?

They were starting to call the music “rockabilly” now, but the kid refused to label himself as that, to endorse any kinship with that hillbilly-heavy blues that sold so well in any town with a tractor dealership on its main drag. To Jerry Lee, the word was denigrating, something imposed on these country boys and their music by the outside world. “I wasn’t no rockabilly,” he says, “I was rock and roll .” Carl was pure rockabilly—“Blue Suede Shoes” was the music’s anthem—and Johnny, the storyteller, was more country than most young rock and rollers aspired to be, though his “Get Rhythm” rocked out good and strong, as Jerry Lee recalls. The audience loved all of it, bought tickets by the handful and just moved to it, man, because it made old, traditional country music seem like the record player was too slow, and in town after town they lined up, hungry. But increasingly, as his stage presence swelled and swelled, it was Jerry Lee who created the excitement, who got them dancing, and so he demanded more and more of the spotlight. It was, he believed, only his due.

More than one music fan, more than one historian of rock and roll, have wished for a time machine, just so they could travel back to this one time, this one tour, to wedge into those packed auditoriums on the vast plains and in the Canadian Rockies, to see it all happen the way it did, to see Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, young and raw and wild, singing into big Art Deco microphones that looked like something that shook loose off the hood of an Oldsmobile, on stages scarred by a million metal folding chairs, in auditoriums where next week the featured attraction would be a high school production of The Merchant of Venice .

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, from Maud, Oklahoma, it’s the Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda...” And before the announcer could even get it out, the crowd was hollering and hooting—with here and there a wolf whistle or two—as Wanda Jackson came out from the wings in high, high heels, hips swinging free and easy like she walked that way going to the mailbox. She had not a made a sound yet, and already the loggers, drillers, and insurance men were beginning to sweat. This was no cowgirl. Her dresses were fringed, to accentuate her flying hips, and low-cut, to accentuate something else, and her legs were slim and perfect and her waist was so tiny a big man could encircle it with his two big hands. Her big hair was dark brown and flowing, and her big eyes were framed by a starlet’s arched eyebrows; she was a goddess with a voice like a beast, and she growled as she sang that a hardheaded woman is a thorn in the side of a man.

That was hard to follow. But here came Sonny James of Hackleburg, Alabama, striding out in his Western suit, a thin, dark-haired man who had survived the Korean War, singing a love song of the ages. “Young Love” was the song, and it wasn’t the words that made it lovely but how he did it, like smoke on velvet.

Next came that good-looking Marvin Rainwater, who wore a fringed buckskin shirt and a headband onstage, because he was one-quarter Cherokee. He sang in deep baritone about how he was “gonna find him a bluebird, let it sing all night long.” He was a mellow singer, a balladeer, and smoothed out the crowd before the real headliners came on, the boys from the land of the rising Sun.

First came Carl Perkins, in his too-tight pants and pointy sideburns, and he let it rip:

Well, it’s one for the money

Two for the show . . .

Through force of will, Jerry Lee had climbed up the bill and over and straight through Carl, till now there was only Johnny Cash, in his elegant, somber black, hovering just above him on the marquee. That night, there had been the usual argument over who would close the show. Johnny, with the bigger name and a song on the charts, had the promoters on his side: he got top billing, which meant he had to follow Jerry Lee. But first Jerry Lee had to surrender the stage.

The stage had become a kind of laboratory for Jerry Lee, and he was the mad scientist. Onstage he mixed and matched songs and versions of songs, stitched together some parts and discarded others; because he was Jerry Lee, he did what he felt like in the moment, in a set that was supposed to be four or so songs, but he ignored that, too. He gave them “Crazy Arms” one minute and “Big-Legged Woman” the next, and they clapped to one and stomped and howled to the other. His show got wilder and increasingly wicked on that tour, and the audiences bellowed for encores. He had heard that Canadians were earnest, reserved people, but he must have heard wrong. More and more he was beginning to understand that, while the music was at the core, that was just the start of it. Putting on a show was like flipping the switch on Frankenstein’s monster, then watching it show the first twitching signs of life. “You got to dress right, act right, carry yourself right; it all had to come together.”

The good-looking part, well, God had handled that. But you had to use it. His hair, by now, had become almost like another instrument. Under the lights, it really did shine like burnished gold, and at the beginning of a show it was oiled down and slicked back, and he looked respectable, like a tricked-out frat boy or preacher’s kid. But on the rocking songs, he slung his head around like a wild man, and that hair came unbound; it hung down across his face, and that just did something to the women—and their screams did something to the crowd, and things just got kind of squirrely. As it came unbound, the waves turned into tangled curls and ringlets, and it seemed to have a life of its own, a wicked thing, like Medusa herself. Sometimes he would whip out a comb onstage and try to comb it back under control, but it was too wild to tame. “I was the first one in rock and roll to have long hair,” he says, thinking back to that night, “and I did shake it.”

These were the biggest crowds he had seen or heard, and he can see and hear them still.

He did one encore, then two, and at the end he did “Shakin’,” in pandemonium.

“They wouldn’t let me off the stage.” By the time he finished, the people were out of their seats and the constables were looking antsy. Jerry Lee swaggered off the stage, one arm held stiffly in the air, a salute more than a wave. “And I left ’em wondering who that wild boy was.”

Johnny Cash stood there, sweating and almost white, as the crowd screamed for more. As Jerry Lee remembers it, “he was like a statue. He never said a word.”

In the auditorium, a woman had fainted in the aisle.

Jerry Lee walked right on by Johnny. “Nobody follows the Killer,” he said over his shoulder.

The crowd was still yelling “Jerry Lee! Jerry Lee!” as Johnny came out onstage.

They quieted, respectfully, as he sang “I Walk the Line.”

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.

I keep my eyes wide open all the time.

They loved Johnny in Canada, but it was like a lull after the storm. “Johnny wouldn’t follow me after that, said he wouldn’t never follow me again,” says Jerry Lee. “He said, ‘When he’s through, it’s done.’ Can’t nobody follow me.” That night, after the show, the girls came by not one or two at a time but in a crowd. “It was unavoidable, too,” says Jerry Lee. “The girls come by in the evening, even before the shows sometimes, when the sun went down. And I just told ’em to go on,” and then he smiles at that, at even the possibility of such a thing happening, of his sending away a beautiful girl.

“My gosh, what a time.”

Some legends begin like that, in great drama, and others are purely accidental. Somewhere on the road, in another place he cannot really recall, he got sick and tired of playing sitting down while everybody else in the place was on their feet, so he just rose up to play standing. He loved the piano, but it did anchor a man and give him feet of clay. But as he rose, the piano bench was in the way. “So I decided I would just take the heel of my boot and push the piano bench back just a little bit, to make some room, but my boot got caught and I gave the bench a flip across the stage, and man, it tore that audience up. And I said, ‘Well, so this is what they want.’ ” If they liked it when he just tumped it over, what would they do if he hauled off and kicked it across the stage? So he did, and they howled and hooted and the women screamed, so he had to do it every time now, every blessed time.

“Oh, yeah,” says Jerry Lee, “I was a little bit out of control.”

Performers came and went on the tour, but Jerry Lee spent most of his time with Johnny and Carl despite the tension between him and the other two. It seems almost sweet now, to think of them as a fraternity of young men playing jokes and scuffling in the dirt and acting like spoiled children on the road, as they hammered out their craft. But the road was a good bit darker than that. Everyone was addicted to something. Carl drank hard, most nights and some days, and Johnny was hopelessly hooked on pills, always talking about deep things like man’s inhumanity to man, and prisons, and whether or not pigs could see the wind. And there was Jerry Lee, flying high on all of it and running hot.

“I liked Carl,” says Jerry Lee. “He became my friend. He was a great talent. He could sing, had a real good voice, and he could play that guitar. He could play all over that guitar.” His feelings about Cash are more complicated. “Johnny, well, I just didn’t think he could sing. Wrote some real good songs . . . but let’s just say he wasn’t no troubadour.” He and Cash would be friends off and on and even record together as older men, but in the cold northern spring of ’57, the man in black was one more obstacle in his way.

Oddly enough, when things finally boiled over, it was not Cash he had to fight. One night, in a town he cannot really recall, he and Carl Perkins sat in some lounge chairs outside a small motel, just cooling it in the chill air. Springtime temperatures in the Canadian mountains were about zero some days, but they hated being cooped up in the tiny hotel rooms. At some point in the evening, there had been a quart bottle of brown liquor in their proximity, but no one could remember exactly where it went.

“Carl was pretty well drunk,” recalls Jerry Lee, “and I was just drinking, a little bit.”

That night, Perkins was wearing a fancy shirt from Lansky’s in Memphis, where Elvis got his clothes. “Does this shirt look good?” he asked Jerry Lee.

Jerry Lee did not care if Carl was wearing a burlap sack tied together with fishing line. He only cared what he looked like, and he knew he would be elegant standing in a mudhole.

“Don’t I look good?” Carl asked.

Jerry Lee felt like spitting. He snarled, “You an’ Elvis, always walking around in these fancy clothes, always worried about how you look . . .”

Jerry Lee may have been slightly more drunk than he recalled. “Carl come out of that chair ready to fight, and the next thing I knew we were fighting across the trunk of that Buick.” It was not, he says now, an epic battle. “I wasn’t throwing no good punches, and Carl wasn’t, either.” He does remember getting in one good backhand, and then it was over, and they were friends again, but the jealousy would continue. “It was unavoidable. I would get encores in front of twelve thousand people, two encores, three encores. . . . They knew. They knew, even then, they were seeing the greatest thing.”

He played one stage that was built on a giant turntable that spun slowly around as he played. “I didn’t like that. I liked to stay in one spot, so I could keep my eye on certain people.” He would lose sight of a pretty girl, he said, if he was spinning, spinning. “And then I just had to get my eye on ’em all over again. I could always spot my girl then. Wasn’t no problem, finding a beautiful girl. Look , I’d say to myself, there’s a couple . I’d say, Look, there in the third row. ” In Quebec, he almost fell in love. “They pulled them dresses up, and I hollered, ‘Pull it up a little bit higher, baby,’ and they did. Man, they just laid it on you. And they kept on just layin’ it on you, night after night, city after city.”

He was still married, of course, to the volatile Jane, who was still in Ferriday with his son and his parents’ family, but the truth is that he tried not to think about her that much, anymore. It had been a marriage of necessity, and it seemed less necessary two thousand miles away. “I was living the dream,” he said, even if the reality it was based on was, for the time being, more than a little thin.

They drove on for nearly two months, doubling back for even more shows in more remote places, wide-open during the day, wide-open at night, smelling of sweat and whiskey and gunpowder. He was off his leash completely now and, it seemed to some people, almost a little out of his mind. He had taken to playing the piano sometimes with his feet, his size 9½ loafers, and the crowd roared for that, too. “I played it with my feet, in key. It can be done, if you know what you’re doing. It wasn’t just no stunt. I played it.” He was showing off and showing people up, and the crowd was in love with all of it, and by late spring his lightning was bouncing around the airwaves, just weaker and more distant than he would have preferred.

The musicians who played with him remember any encounter with him as a kind of validation, a kind of certificate of authenticity. Guitarist Buzz Cason would later write how he walked out of a theater in Richmond and saw Jerry Lee, the great Roland Janes, and Russ Smith, his pint-size touring drummer, dancing after a show on the roof of a ’58 Buick, just dancing, because the time onstage was never quite long enough. He remembers traveling with Jerry Lee to Buffalo, and that Jerry Lee wanted to make a side trip to Niagara Falls. He stood on a wall overlooking the great cascade, his blond hair whipping in the wind, and stared down into the abyss for maybe thirty seconds, then jumped to the ground. “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niag-uh Falls. Now let’s go home, boys.”

Once on a swing through Texas, he saw two singular-looking individuals sitting at a table in a big nightclub. One was his onetime piano hero, Moon Mullican. The other was the homely but melodic Roy Orbison, another Sun artist. “It was in Odessa, Roy Orbison’s hometown. Roy, his point was, he wanted to borrow fifty dollars from me, so he could get out of that town. . . . He said he knew he could cut a hit record if he could ever get out of that town. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll be glad to loan you fifty dollars.’ ” Orbison quickly grew jealous of Jerry Lee at Sun, believing that Sam Phillips was devoting too much of the label’s energy to one man. It wouldn’t be the last time that happened. “He got a little upset,” says Jerry Lee, but at least he got out of Odessa.

“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” was finally on the radio, not just in Memphis but nationwide, and according to Billboard , “taking off like wildfire” in country, rhythm and blues, and pop. By the time he got back to the South, it had become a constant on Memphis radio. “They were playin’ it in all the hamburger joints,” he says, and he would ride down the streets of Memphis in his red Cadillac with the top down and hear his own genius wash all around him and into the almost liquid air that is Memphis in summer. Sometimes he’d take his cousin Myra, who made goo-goo eyes at him under her dark-brown bangs.

Excerpt of "Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story" (C) 2014  JLL Ferriday, Inc. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Related articles.

The Jerry Lee Lewis Museum

Top ways to experience nearby attractions

Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as waiting time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

THE JERRY LEE LEWIS MUSEUM: All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (with Photos)

• Memphis Tourism
• Memphis Hotels
• Memphis Bed and Breakfast
• Memphis Vacation Rentals
• Flights to Memphis
• Jerry Lee Lewis' Cafe & Honky Tonk
• Things to Do in Memphis
• Memphis Travel Forum
• Memphis Photos
• Memphis Map
• All Memphis Hotels
• Memphis Hotel Deals
• Last Minute Hotels in Memphis
• Things to Do
• Restaurants
• Vacation Rentals
• Travel Stories
• Rental Cars
• Add a Place
• Travel Forum
• Travelers' Choice
• Help Center

A rockin' good place - Jerry Lee Lewis' Cafe & Honky Tonk

• United States    
• Tennessee (TN)    
• Memphis    
• Memphis Restaurants    

“A rockin' good place” Review of Jerry Lee Lewis' Cafe & Honky Tonk

Strolling down Beale Street, we got to the corner of Rufus Thomas Boulevard and there building on that street corner house the Jerry Lee Lewis Bar & Honky Tonk. It was mid afternoon so we decided to take advantage of the bar and so we went in to check it out. Food, drinks and music were all on offer and so we stayed a while and had a couple of drinks while we enjoyed listening to the band and soaking in the atmosphere of the quite generous size bar where the walls were covered with pictures, posters and memorabilia of that great rock & roll and country star whose name graces the place.

• Excellent 217
• Very good 147
• Terrible 25
• All languages
• English  (433)
• Portuguese  (8)
• French  (6)
• More languages
• English (433)
• Portuguese (8)
• Italian (6)
• Spanish (5)
• Swedish (5)
• Norwegian (2)

2 - 6 of 476 reviews

Visited here in August 2017, we stayed for a few hours to watch the show, a tribute band were on and on their break they all came to speak to us as they knew my dad, was a great experience in here as the atmosphere was booming! We ordered desserts as well, I had the chocolate brownie which was divine!! I would recommend this bar to anyone that’s visiting Beale Street!

Been here three times and love it. Have had ribs there twice and chicken once and have yet to be disappointed. Loved the Sunday band this time around the guys were awesome.

Stopped in here on a Thursday night. Very light crowd. Band was 3 guys who were awesome and best of all an Elvis tribute artist walked in and did lots of songs with the band. We ordered 'drunkken chicken nachos' Soggy and not the best. Hamburger was below average. Will not go again for the food but will for the band

Food was pretty good, bar tender was really great (I believe his name was Blake) the waitress suggested we get a drink called blue balls. It was fantastic. Got 3. Band was pretty good, small crowd so it was a very personal live show. This was nice. They only had hush puppies as a side with one of the entrees but not as a stand alone side, but Blake made it happen. There was no cover fee when we went. It was a Wednesday night so the entire street was pretty dead. But we enjoyed this.

Travelers who viewed Jerry Lee Lewis' Cafe & Honky Tonk also viewed

Been to jerry lee lewis' cafe & honky tonk share your experiences, owners: what's your side of the story.

Own or manage this property? Claim your listing for free to respond to reviews, update your profile and much more.

Browse nearby

Drummer J.M. Van Eaton, the pulse of Sun Records, has died at 86

Good morning, Memphis!

This is Features and Business Editor  Erin Munz , and you're reading the Daily Briefing, our one-stop digital shop for the best Memphis stories from our award-winning  Commercial Appeal  team.

Drummer J.M. "Jimmy" Van Eaton, one of the last surviving figures from the golden age of  Memphis’ Sun Records , has died.

Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.

Van Eaton — who came to Sun as a teenager in the mid-1950s and made his reputation playing behind  Jerry Lee Lewis  and Billy Lee Riley — passed away Friday night at his home in Alabama. He was 86.

The very pulse of Sun Records, Van Eaton’s distinctive bluesy backbeat and frenetic fills helped define the sound and feel of Sam Phillips’ label, and his playing would power numerous all-time classics like Lewis’ "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," Riley’s “Red Hot,” Bill Justis’ "Raunchy” and “Lonely Weekends” by Charlie Rich.

You can find Bob Mehr's full story on Van Eaton's legacy here .

➤ Collierville Schools: A longtime educator was chosen to fill the open Collierville school board seat.

Charles Green was unanimously selected by the Collierville Board of Mayor and Aldermen to fill the unexpired Position 4 term on the Collierville Municipal School Board, Corey Davis reports here . Green’s appointment was made official during a special-called meeting Friday.

➤ A new Buster's Liquors: After 70 years in business,  Buster's Liquors and Wines  has opened a second location in Memphis.

The new store, located at 5851 Poplar Ave. in the Ridgeway Trace Shopping Center, has been dubbed "Buster's Liquors East," while the original location was renamed "Buster's Liquors University."

Jacob Wilt offers a look inside the new location — which includes a massive whiskey wall — in this story .

➤ Real estate news: Home prices in DeSoto County municipalities ticked up 3.32% in 2023, compared to 2022's prices. All five DeSoto municipalities saw an increase in average home price, although prices still remain  lower than in most of the Shelby County suburbs.

In this story , Jacob Wilt looks how much of an increase each municipality saw.

➤ Comedy in Memphis: Comedian Matt Rife's  two shows at the Orpheum in Memphis have been postponed due to "an unforeseen scheduling conflict," according to the  venue's website .

Rife was set to play two sold-out shows at the Orpheum on Feb. 16 (at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.) as part of his “ProbleMATTic” world tour. Those shows have been rescheduled for June 12, Bob Mehr reports here .

➤ ICYMI: Chef Tam's Underground Cafe  at 668 Union Ave. has closed, Jennifer Chandler reports in this story .

"Thank you Memphis. It's been real," chef and owner Tamra Patterson said. "I have learned so much. This is not goodbye, but see you later."

In addition to closing her flagship Memphis restaurant, Patterson also closed her locations in Texas and Rhode Island.

Thanks for reading The Commercial Appeal! Your support powers our ability to do important journalism, including the stories you'll find below. If you are not yet a subscriber, please consider becoming one today. You can find the best deals  here .

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Drummer J.M. Van Eaton, the pulse of Sun Records, has died at 86