Rock 'n' roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis dies at 87
He was hailed as rock 'n' roll’s first great wild man and lived long enough to be its last.
Sun Records star, Million Dollar Quartet member and American music icon Jerry Lee Lewis died on Friday. The 87-year-old Lewis passed away at his home in DeSoto County. Lewis had been in failing health over the last few weeks, and was forced to miss his induction in the Country Music Hall of Fame on Oct. 16.
One of the foundational rock 'n' roll artists of the 1950s, Lewis also enjoyed a successful second career as a country artist from the late-'60s through the early '80s. A profound musical and spiritual influence on several generations — on the entire zeitgeist of rock 'n' roll culture — Lewis authoritatively essayed everything from Tin Pan Alley to boogie-woogie to blues over the course of a 60-plus-year career.
Yet his work, his supreme artistry, was often overshadowed by a life that could be described as Southern gothic. His turbulent personal life included seven marriages and numerous well-documented controversies and tragedies, including the deaths of two wives and two sons.
Despite these many twists and turns of fortune, Lewis remained active on stage and on record into his 80s, long after most of his peers had either retired or died.
As a wild-eyed, wild-haired, piano-pumping 22-year-old nicknamed “The Killer,” Lewis burst onto the American cultural landscape in 1957. His career would be defined by his early work for Sam Phillips and the Sun label. Epochal tracks like "Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On," were veritable riot acts of rhythm, musical passion plays that revealed a battle between Lewis’ deep religious roots and his love for boogie-woogie.
Brash, bold and braggadocious, from the very beginning Lewis considered himself among the pantheon of greats. “There’s only ever been four stylists in popular music,” Lewis noted famously and frequently, “Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams… and Jerry Lee Lewis.”
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What was once said as a youthful boast eventually became a statement of fact.
“After all is said and done, I think I’ve joined them, I’ve joined the quartet,” Lewis told The Commercial Appeal in a 2015 interview. “I created my own style.”
Musical journey
Lewis solidified a signature sound and did so without a guitar in hand. While other ’50s rockabillies were plugging into amplifiers, Lewis ripped the ivory off his piano keys in blazing glissandos that became his trademark.
“I play guitar pretty good too,'' Lewis would recall in a 2005 interview. “But I always figured that an 88-string instrument was better than a six-string instrument ... Whatever it is I do, if it's rock 'n' roll or country or rhythm and blues, it's just Jerry Lee Lewis.''
Lewis was born Sept. 29, 1935, in Ferriday, Louisiana, and raised in the bosom of Assemblies of God Church, a Pentecostal denomination. He learned to play piano on a Starck upright that his bootlegger-turned-farmer father Elmo and mother Mamie mortgaged their house to pay for. Along with a pair of cousins — future televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and future country star Mickey Gilley — Lewis spent his youth at the instrument, playing with preternatural power and ease.
Lewis would discover blues and boogie-woogie sneaking into Haney’s Big House, a Black-catered nightclub owned by his uncle Lee Calhoun. Although Lewis married young — taking his first wife as a teenager — and briefly attended a bible college in Texas with thoughts of becoming a preacher, his ultimate future lay in music.
Following a rejection in Nashville ("I told them I'm a piano player, I'm not a hillbilly guitar player!"), Lewis got to Memphis and Sun Records in a manner typical of his hard-boiled persistence. He and his father sold 39 dozen eggs from their farm, enough to fund Lewis’ trip from Louisiana to Sam Phillips' studio door at 706 Union in Memphis.
“I read a magazine on where Sam Phillips discovered Elvis and Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins,” Lewis recalled. “I figured maybe he could do the same for me. So being as we were only 328 miles from out here, I figured I better drive up and try it.''
Though Lewis missed Phillips on that initial visit, he met Sun engineer Jack Clement there and a demo was cut. It didn't take long before the charismatic rocker was a Sun priority. He quickly joined the label’s illustrious roll call, which included Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. The four men’s off-the-cuff December 1956 recording session — a local newspaper headline dubbed them “The Million Dollar Quartet” — would be released years later and become the basis for a hit Broadway musical.
But Lewis' career — fueled by white-hot succession of chart hits that also included “Breathless” and “High School Confidential” — spiraled out of control in 1958 during a tour of the U.K., when the British press discovered he had married his 13-year-old cousin Myra (while technically still married to his second wife). The furor would upend his commercial fortunes, as American DJs began boycotting his records and big time promoters refused to book him.
As rock 'n' roll’s first wave gave way to the era of teen pop stars, girl groups and, eventually, the British Invasion, Lewis persevered undaunted. He spent the next few years making mostly unsuccessful records for the Phillips label, while touring the night club circuit relentlessly. His unmatched power as a performer would be documented on the classic 1964 concert LP “Live at the Star Club, Hamburg.”
Ultimately, Lewis found a second, longer career as a respected country artist starting in the late-'60s for the Mercury label and its Smash subsidiary. A peerless interpreter, Lewis would cut songs by Nashville writers like Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury and Jerry Chesnut, scoring more than 40 country hits between 1969 and 1981.
As he barreled his way through his career, trouble and tragedy seemed to follow Lewis. He lost two sons under tragic circumstances: His oldest boy, Steve Allen Lewis, drowned in the family’s backyard pool in 1962 at age 3. Another son, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., died in a 1971 auto accident at the age of 19.
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A pair of marriages also ended in death. In 1982, his fourth wife, Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate Lewis, drowned in a friend’s swimming pool. In 1984, his fifth wife, Shawn Michelle Stephens Lewis, died of an accidental drug overdose. Lewis had a few close brushes of his own as years of alcohol, amphetamine and barbiturate abuse caused major ulcer problems that nearly killed him in 1981 and 1985.
Always a showman
Lewis’ commercial career would slow in the early '80s. The chart hits dried up just as the first generation of rock 'n' rollers like Lewis began to be recognized and honored for their pioneering role.
Hollywood made an effort to bring Lewis’ legend to the screen. Released in 1989, director Jim McBride's "Great Balls of Fire!" was a hugely hyped biopic. The film found then red-hot actors Dennis Quaid starring as Lewis and Winona Ryder as his child bride Myra Gale, in what seemed would be a surefire smash, but proved to be a box office bomb (largely owing to Quaid's rather cartoonish interpretation of the singer as a kinfolk-courtin' country bumpkin).
The remarkable, often-knotted journey of Lewis’ life would also become the subject of numerous books and biographies, most notably Nick Tosches’ 1982 effort “Hellfire,” a brilliant, biblical tone-poem that got closest to capturing the incendiary essence of the man. (In 2014, an authorized biography, "Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story," penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern author Rick Bragg, was released to mark Lewis' 80th birthday year.)
Following a period in the '90s spent living in Ireland as a tax exile, Lewis eventually returned to his longtime home in Nesbit, Mississippi. The final decade-plus his life saw Lewis enjoy a recording renaissance of sorts. He returned to the studio after an 11-year absence, releasing 2006’s “Last Man Standing.” The record would be the first of three star-studded LPs, featuring famous friends and fans including Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.
After battling a variety of health issues — including a degenerative back condition, which required spinal surgery — Lewis began to scale back his performing schedule after he turned 80 in 2015. Still, he continued to play, making high-profile appearances at the Stagecoach country music festival in California in 2017 and at Chicago's punk-rock concert event, Riot Fest, in 2018.
In fall 2018, Lewis made headlines as he returned to his former haunt, Memphis' Sun Studio, with Jagger and millionaire producer/investor Steve Bing in tow. The trip was in connection with a planned movie adaptation of Peter Guralnick's biography of Sun founder Sam Phillips, set to star Leonardo DiCaprio, produced by Jagger’s film company.
In late 2018, Lewis made a brief, surprise appearance at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame ceremonies, playing "Great Balls of Fire." That December, he rang in the New Year performing at his Beale Street nightclub, Jerry Lee Lewis' Cafe & Honky-Tonk. In March 2019, Lewis’ representatives confirmed he’d suffered a minor stroke, but expected him to “make a full recovery.”
During his long career Lewis was feted with numerous honors. He won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and was a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and Memphis Music Hall of Fame. He was also among the inaugural class, in 1986, of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And, this year, he earned his long overdue induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.
In 2008, he was the subject of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame "American Music Master" tribute, a week-long celebration in Cleveland titled "Whole Lot of Shakin': The Life and Music of Jerry Lee Lewis." Previous honorees included Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Lead Belly and Sam Cooke — but Lewis was the first-ever living recipient of the honor.
At the end of a star-studded concert finale, Lewis brought the house down with a stirring, soulful rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” As he exited the stage to a standing ovation, a big screen flashed a film clip of the singer sitting in Sun studios in the late '80s. Reminiscing about his music, Lewis delivered his familiar, oft-repeated proclamation about how there are only four original stylists in the history of American music: "Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Jerry Lee Lewis."
This time, though, he did not punctuate his boast with a laugh or a leer, but something of a shrug. Reflecting on his enormous natural gifts and talents, he paused for a long while, and then added: "That's just how it is … I didn't make it that way. God did."
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Jerry Lee Lewis dies at 87, rock 'n' roll pioneer and legend
