The last survivor of a generation of groundbreaking performers that included Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Lewis died at his home in Memphis, Tenn., spokesman Zach Farnum said in a statement. Lewis had suffered a minor stroke in 2019, but had been playing live shows frequently until then. Most recently, he was unable to attend his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame due to illness. Lewis’ legacy was largely cemented in the extreme sides cut over a three-year period at Sun Records in Memphis: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, Great Balls of Fire, Breathless and High School Confidential. A serendipitous session there by future music legends on December 4, 1956 would also be big – with songs recorded by the so-called Million Dollar Quartet of Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins being sold and repackaged for decades to come. Lewis’ appeal to kids who grew up excited by the new genre called rock ‘n’ roll was enhanced by frenetic appearances on The Steve Allen Show and the motion picture High School Confidential. Lewis’s hair bounced and flew as he pounded the keys, shouted and ionized, kicked the piano bench aside and played standing or even with his feet. Lewis plays the piano with his feet in Bourges, France, on April 23, 1987. (Frank Perry/AFP/Getty Images) “The Killer”—Lewis’ nickname derived from a colloquial childhood greeting—was inducted into the 1986 inaugural class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Not a prolific songwriter, Lewis was credited with putting his definitive stamp on songs that came from a variety of genres — R&B, country, gospel, he loved it all.
Scandalous marriage
Lewis’s life unfolded like a Southern Gothic novel manuscript rejected for being too exaggerated. There were seven marriages, a near-fatal shooting, perpetual IRS trouble due to tax delinquency and regular traffic accidents, including an infamous 1976 arrest in which a pistol-wielding Lewis crashed his Lincoln into the gates of Presley’s old friend’s Graceland mansion. “I’m just who I am — Jerry Lee ‘F–k Up’ Lewis,” he told the BBC in a documentary in 1990. “If you don’t like that, you can kiss my ass.” Chuck Berry, left, and Lewis embrace at a reception at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on January 23, 1986, when both were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. (G. Paul Burnett/The Associated Press) While Lewis enjoyed a recording career that spanned more than six decades, radio play largely ceased when it was reported in 1958 that he had married the 13-year-old daughter of his bandmate and cousin, JW Brown, on December 12, 1957. Myra Gale Brown’s account of their tumultuous 13-year marriage was told in 1982’s Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis, the inspiration for a feature film seven years later starring Dennis Quaid as Lewis and Winona Ryder as Brown.
Mysterious death
The couple’s three-year-old son, Steve Allen Lewis, drowned in 1963, while a decade later Jerry Lee Lewis, Jr., the oldest of Lewis’ six children, was killed in a car accident at age 19. Journalist Richard Ben Cramer, in one of his most famous Rolling Stone pieces in 1984, questioned whether Lewis had incorporated his nickname into fatal consequence after his fifth wife, Shawn Stephens, had died the previous year at Nesbit’s ranch. Ms. aged 26 and only 77 days since their marriage. RIP JLL the KILLER-What a man🙏⚡️☀️ XX🎶🎶🎶☀️❤️ pic.twitter.com/GrF9f5RC0E —@ronniewood When first responders arrived, Cramer reported, Lewis greeted them with slurred speech, a bathrobe stained with dried blood and scratches on his arm. Stevens’ death was ruled a methadone overdose and the jury declined to indict Lewis, but the investigation was called substandard by both Kramer and Geraldo Rivera of the 20/20 television news magazine. “I loved her with all my heart and soul. There is no way Jerry Lee Lewis could ever, and would ever consider taking another person’s life,” Lewis told 20/20, explaining that the blood and scratches were from a punch. a wall with agony of her death.
Hardscrabble farm upbringing
Jerry Lee Lewis was born at the height of the Great Depression in Ferriday, La., on September 29, 1935, one of four children. When he wasn’t traveling, he spent most of his life in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.
Lewis’s father picked cotton and did a brief stint in prison for illegally selling liquor. The family residence had no electricity or indoor plumbing, and when Lewis was a toddler, his older brother was killed by a drunk driver.
Respite from the hard life came largely from extended family gatherings where music was played.
“There’s a lot of piano players in my family and a lot of singers. You’re either a preacher or a rock ‘n’ roll singer,” Lewis told CBC’s Good Rockin’ Tonite in 1989. “I chose rock ‘n’ roll.”
Lifetime Achievement Award winner Lewis poses for photographers at the 47th Annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 13, 2005. (Reed Saxon/The Associated Press)
Despite the difficult circumstances, four members of his extended family achieved some degree of fame. Linda Gail Lewis, his sister, and his cousin Mickey Gilley were also recording artists, and another cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, became one of America’s most famous televangelists.
Pentecostal church services that Lewis attended as a child left the imprint of life. All his life and all the hell that would follow, he was preoccupied with whether “salvation” would come at the end of his mortal life.
At age eight, he showed a knack for music, inspiring his dad, Elmo, and mom, Mamie, to spend more than they should to buy him a Starck standup piano. He was largely self-taught, but a wide range of artists fueled his passion, with Hank Williams and BB King being his favourites.
“This boy can go”
Lewis played community events starting in his teens and snuck in and out of clubs, with no lasting interest in either academia or a stint in Bible school. His wide-legged style on the piano bench is said to be due to a hip injury while playing football. He heard of Presley’s exploits at Sun Records and made a pilgrimage in the waning months of 1956. By this time he had worked his way through a series of menial jobs and night gigs, as well as being rejected by RCA Records, whose staff who was reportedly worried that he didn’t play the guitar. Lewis and his wife, Myra, then 15, are shown in London on 23 May 1958. The marriage caused controversy and he later claimed it was marked by abuse. (Getty Images) “Nothing could stop me. I was going to be heard and recorded,” he told Vintage Rock magazine. “I knew if I got to Sun, it would happen.” A reporter was on hand for the studio session of future legends Cash, Perkins, Presley and Lewis. “This boy can go,” Presley told the secretary. “I think he has a big future ahead of him. He has a different style, and the way he plays the piano just gets to me.” In less than two years, Great Balls of Fire, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and Breathless were all top-10 hits on Billboard’s main chart. At the age of 22 and in his third marriage, Lewis’ union with a 13-year-old girl was, unfortunately, not without precedent in the rural communities of the Deep South at the time. His own sisters married at 14 and 12, while he was 16 when he married for the first time. In a 1959 court appearance over back child support payments to his second wife, Lewis explained to a judge that the gigs had dried up because of their “cradle grabbing” brand. He played in clubs and taverns for much of the 1960s, including Montreal’s Café Pagoda and Toronto’s Le Coq d’or Tavern, appearing on a bill with younger musicians such as John Lennon and Eric Clapton at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in 1969. Jerry Lee Lewis has passed… REST EASY KILLER you were one of a kind… pic.twitter.com/n5ZDI1VhIh —@oakridgeboys During the 1970s, he found the charts again as a country singer, with songs like What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out of Me) and To Make Love Sweeter for You. Being Lewis, trouble was never far away. With the drinks flowing in 1976, he nearly killed his bassist, Butch Owens, with a .357 — he said he aimed the gun at a Coke bottle. Lewis was ordered to pay restitution to Owens and was given a suspended sentence. “I know it took him a few days to talk properly,” Lewis told biographer Rick Bragg decades later. After Presley’s death in 1977, a subsequent trial revealed that both he and Lewis were avid customers of pill-popping Dr. George Nichopoulos. Dr. Nick, as it became known, testified that amphetamines were Lewis’ particular weakness and that Lewis once discharged himself from the hospital by climbing out of a window. Around the same time—and not for the last time—Lewis was forced to buy a number of luxury items to satisfy tax debts owed to Uncle Sam. In 1981, the ravages of alcohol and drug use led to stomach surgery and then pneumonia, leaving him in serious condition for a time. He was at a show the following year at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Dearborn, Mich., where he met Stephens, a waitress. Richard Ben Kramer’s 1984 Rolling Stone article, The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis,…
