Lewis had only a handful of other pop hits, including “High School Confidential” and “Breathless,” but they were enough to ensure his place as a rock ‘n’ roll architect. “Great Balls of Fire,” a sexualized take on Biblical imagery that Lewis initially refused to record, and “Whole Lotta Shakin’” were his most enduring songs and performance pieces. Lewis briefly attended Southwestern Assemblies of God University in Waxahachie, Texas, a fundamentalist Bible college, but was expelled, reportedly, for playing the “wrong” kind of music. Conflicted early on between secular and sacred music, he quit school at 16, with plans of becoming a piano-playing preacher. He took to the piano immediately, and began sneaking off to Black juke joints and absorbing everything from gospel to boogie-woogie. “My eyes almost fell out of my head,” Lewis recalled in “Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story,” written by Rick Bragg and published in 2014. His life changed when his father pulled up in his truck one day and presented him a dark-wood, upright piano. As a boy, he first learned to play guitar, but found the instrument too confining and longed for an instrument that only the rich people in his town could afford - a piano. The son of one-time bootlegger Elmo Lewis and the cousin of TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and country star Mickey Gilley, Lewis was born in Ferriday, Louisiana (Swaggart and Lewis released “The Boys From Ferriday,” a gospel album, earlier this year). When he began welcoming tourists in 1994 to his longtime residence near Nesbit, Mississippi - complete with a piano-shaped swimming pool - he set up a 900 phone number fans could call for a recorded message at $2.75 a minute. Lewis made millions, but he liked his money in cash and ended up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Internal Revenue Service. Lewis also had two daughters, Phoebe and Lori Leigh, and is survived by his wife Judith. died in a traffic accident at 19 in 1973. The couple had one child, Jerry Lee III.Īnother son by a previous marriage, Steve Allen Lewis, 3, drowned in a swimming pool in 1962, and son Jerry Lee Jr. They finally divorced in 2005 after several years of separation. He countersued, but both petitions eventually were dropped. She filed for divorce in 1986, accusing him of physical abuse and infidelity. Within a year, Lewis had married Kerrie McCarver, then 21. His fifth wife, Shawn Stephens, 23 years his junior, died of an apparent drug overdose in 1983. His fourth wife, Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate, drowned in a swimming pool in 1982 while suing for divorce. Lewis married seven times, and was rarely far from trouble or death. “I am a rock and rollin’, country-and-western, rhythm and blues-singin’ motherf-,” he told the audience. He performed drinking songs such as “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)”, the roving eye confessions of “She Still Comes Around” and a dry-eyed cover of a classic ballad of abandonment, “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye.” He had remained popular in Europe and a 1964 album, “Live at the Star Club, Hamburg,” is widely regarded as one of the greatest concert records.Ī 1973 performance proved more troublesome: Lewis sang for the Grand Ole Opry and broke two longstanding rules - no swearing and no non-country songs. Lewis had a run of top 10 country hits between 1967-70, and hardly mellowed at all. Lewis would still play the old hits on stage, but on the radio he would sing country. “This time I said, ‘Look, man, let’s get together and draw a line on this stuff - a peace treaty you know,’” he explained. In “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll,” first published in 1975, he recalled how he convinced disc jockeys to give him a second chance. In 2010, Lewis brought in Jagger, Keith Richards, Sheryl Crow, Tim McGraw and others for the album “Mean Old Man.” In 2006, Lewis came out with “Last Man Standing,” featuring Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. He won three Grammys, and recorded with some of the industry’s greatest stars. Lewis reinvented himself as a country performer in the 1960s, and the music industry eventually forgave him, long after he stopped having hits. “If I was still married to Jerry, I’d probably be dead by now,” she told People magazine in 1989. Brown herself divorced him in the early 1970s and would later allege physical and mental cruelty that nearly drove her to suicide. Two of his many marriages ended in his wife’s early death. Over the following decades, Lewis struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, legal disputes and physical illness.
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