{"id":12673,"date":"2022-12-01T08:53:59","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T08:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=12673"},"modified":"2022-12-01T09:27:46","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T09:27:46","slug":"a-defining-hero-of-rock-and-roll-jerry-lee-lewis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2022\/12\/01\/a-defining-hero-of-rock-and-roll-jerry-lee-lewis\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00b4a defining hero of rock and roll:\u00b4 JERRY LEE LEWIS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u00b4a defining hero of rock and roll:\u00b4 <\/strong>JERRY LEE LEWIS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Immediately following the recent death of Jerry Lee Lewis The Guardian featured an excellent obituary Michael Gray and I think many readers of Sidetracks And Detours will enjoy his objective awareness of Jerry Lee\u00b4s talents and peccadilloes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00b4Jerry Lee Lewis (left)<\/strong> , who has died aged 87, achieved dazzling early success as a defining hero of rock\u2019n\u2019roll\u00b4,<\/em> wrote Mr Gray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Lewis muscled in among Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry<\/a><\/em>, creating rock\u2019n\u2019roll piano from honky-tonk and hymn, as if doing so were as natural as breathing, and commandeering rhythm and blues with a casual authority achieved by no other white performer except Presley. With Whole Lotta Shakin\u2019 Goin\u2019 On, Great Balls of Fire<\/a><\/em> and High School Confidential, he made three of the genre\u2019s indispensable classics.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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These hits, plus unbeatable versions of Mean Woman Blues<\/a>, Berry\u2019s Little Queenie and many more, shared an immediately identifiable style, an alchemy of the \u201cSun Studio sound\u201d, (right)<\/strong> fluid vocal brio and a pounding yet lyrical piano. Both hands were crucial in his playing, his striding left hand the foundation of the rhythm, even with a bass guitarist behind him.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whole Lotta Shakin\u2019 Goin\u2019 On was his second single. Widely banned for lewdness, it sold poorly until Lewis shook up Steve Allen\u2019s national TV show<\/a><\/em> in July 1957, after which he was a star, undertaking nationwide tours while the record sold more than a million. The glorious Great Balls of Fire followed, then Breathless and the title song of the film High School Confidential, in which Lewis performed. All stormed the pop, country and R&B charts.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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However, it was all to change in May 1958 when Lewis arrived in Britain. The press discovered that the 13-year-old girl with him was his wife<\/a><\/em> of five months, Myra Gale Brown (left) was also his third cousin. His tour was cancelled, Lewis was deported and his career under threat. Jerry confessed his whole hillbilly history: \u201cI was a bigamist at 16 \u2026 My wife Myra and I are very happy.\u201d The public were not\u00b4.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That paragraph above probably why my parents tut tutted every time I watched Jerry Lee on tv, though it was usually they who turned on the programme, not I.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Born in Ferriday, Louisiana, to Mary Ethel, who spoke in tongues, and Elmo Lewis, a labourer, Jerry had two sisters, Frankie Jean and Linda Gail. His elder brother, Elmo Jr, was killed by a drunk driver when they were boys. His father, imprisoned for bootlegging, was brought to the funeral in chains.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jerry was raised in the Pentecostal church, on family gospel singing and country music by Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry<\/a>, (right) <\/strong>Hank Williams and the state\u2019s singing governor, Jimmie Davis<\/a>. He taught himself the guitar, drums and fiddle as well as the piano, and hung around a local club, Haney\u2019s, where he claimed he heard top black performers from Duke Ellington to Muddy Waters.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 12 he made his first paid appearance, moved on to Radio WNAT in Natchez, Mississippi, and at 13 played clubs there, while his cousin Betty Jo Slamper taught him to \u201csmooch\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hired as a pianist by a travelling preacher, in February 1952 Lewis married the preacher\u2019s 16-year-old daughter, Dorothy Barton. Jerry Lee, too, was 16. The following year he attended the Pentecostal Bible Institute in Waxahatchie, Texas. Expelled for playing gospel music \u201clike coloured people\u201d, he told them, rightly, that they \u201cmight as well accept it, \u2019cause some day that\u2019s how it\u2019s gonna be\u201d. Back home in September 1953, a month before his divorce from Barton was finalised, he bigamously married a pregnant Jane Mitchum after three days\u2019 jail for store-breaking and stealing a gun. Whether or not this second marriage was ever legalised, it ended in 1957.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Shreveport he made two country music demos, and in Nashville sought work from Slim Whitman<\/a><\/em>. But rock\u2019n\u2019roll was erupting across the south, and like others drawn to Sun Studios, Memphis, by Presley\u2019s success, Lewis auditioned there. In December 1956 Sun issued Crazy Arms, which sold well despite Ray Price<\/a><\/em>\u2019s version having long been on the charts and despite Lewis sounding almost diffident (not something that would recur). The B-side, End of the Road, one of Lewis\u2019s few compositions, was an authentic dark howl, a perfect expression of its name and place.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At year\u2019s end Lewis played on the sessions for several other artists\u2019 rockabilly cuts, among them Carl Perkins\u2019s Matchbox and Billy Lee Riley<\/a><\/em>\u2019s Flyin\u2019 Saucers Rock\u2019n\u2019Roll. Days later, Roy Orbison asked him to play. Lewis replied: \u201cI don\u2019t do sessions any more.\u201d Later, pressed by a discographer as to who had played on Jerry Lee\u2019s own records, he would offer one of the all-time great ripostes to the collector mentality: \u201cI played on \u2019em: what the hell else d\u2019you need to know?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Live, he was an explosive performer in the early years, genuinely close to the edge. And uninhibitedly competitive. Resenting lower billing than Berry on a date at the Paramount Theater, Brooklyn, New York, in 1958, the rumour is that Lewis ended his act by setting the piano on fire. As they met in the wings, Lewis challenged Berry (left)<\/strong>: \u201cFollow that!\u201d Whether or not it happened, it is a rumour Lewis himself perpetuated with glee.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two 1964 live recordings show his genius. On a tawdry, humdrum date at the Star Club, Hamburg, playing to what sounds like about 50 people, and using, in the tradition of visiting American stars, an English backing group he met mere minutes before showtime, Lewis suddenly rose to a transcendent Your Cheating Heart<\/a><\/em>, with exquisite vocal phrasing and unsurpassable piano, coursing with understatement and grace. In front of an audience of 50,000 in Birmingham, Alabama, he threw down a Hi-Heel Sneakers of shuddering, majestic excitement, stealing the song from all previous occupants.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following his rise and fall, Lewis remained at Sun, its heaviest star, making rock\u2019n\u2019roll A-sides and wonderful country B-sides of the immaculate Hank Williams kind, years before country became an established new career for ex-rockers. Lewis would be a main player in opening up this route.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>He regained the UK Top 10 once, in 1961, with a superb version of Ray Charles<\/a><\/em>\u2019s What\u2019d I Say, its sumptuous thunder Sun Records\u2019s last golden moment. Lewis left in 1962.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On record he lost direction for a time, but toured with an arrogance burnished into art, wilfully infuriating audiences of Teds by dwelling on slow country songs while provoking country crowds with unabashed rock\u2019n\u2019roll. In mid-song he would order a musician to \u201cPlay it, son!\u201d only to prevent his doing so with a piano solo no one would interrupt.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a while he joined the rock festivals circuit, including appearing at the 1969 Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, but by the 1970s he had cracked the mainstream country market with a succession of hits such as What\u2019s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me) (later recorded by Rod Stewart, of course) and the impeccably wily She Still Comes Around (to Love What\u2019s Left of Me). A rangey, muttering Me and Bobby McGee in 1971 was made \u201cto show that damn woman [Janis Joplin] how it should be done\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten years later, his skin waxy and his gait old, he combed his greased hair for the Wembley Country<\/a><\/em> festival crowd, put on filthy sunglasses and delivered a consummate Over the Rainbow: the mic still placed to show off how stylishly his right hand could steer around it, his vocal control sublime. He continued to switch between the two genres for the rest of his career and, as late as October 2009, Lewis opened the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He proclaimed himself for ever a rock\u2019n\u2019roller, through his remaining decades of turmoil, lurid tragedy and farce. His son with Myra, Steve, drowned in their swimming pool in 1962 aged three; one of his two sons with Jane Mitchum, Jerry Lee Jr, died in a car crash at 19 in 1973; Myra divorced him, citing mental cruelty and physical abuse; in 1983 his fifth wife, Shawn Stevens, took a fatal overdose 10 weeks into their marriage, a year after his fourth wife, Jaren Pate, drowned in another swimming pool. Rolling Stone published The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs Jerry Lee Lewis<\/a><\/em>, accusing him of murdering one wife and abusing and\/or hounding to death several others.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 1975 his plane was seized with cocaine and 11 kinds of amphetamine on board; in 1976 he was arrested outside the gates of Graceland, drunk in possession of a gun; the IRS seized his property in 1979 and 1983, and he filed for bankruptcy even as Dennis Quaid was making the 1989 Hollywood film of his life, Great Balls of Fire! A short, tax-avoiding emigration to Ireland with his sixth wife, Kerrie McCarver, and their young son, Jerry Lee Lewis<\/a><\/em> III, followed in 1992<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The marriage to Kerrie, remarkably, lasted 21 years, from 1984 to 2005; in 2012 he married for the seventh time, to his former \u201ccaregiver\u201d, Judith Brown. There had been decades of medical catastrophe, including a collapsed lung, gall-bladder removal, bleeding stomach ulcers, spinal surgery and car-crash injuries. In 1984 he was twice brought back to life in an ambulance, and had half his stomach removed in 1985, a year his wife said he also spent shooting up methadone, tranquillisers and speed. In old age he also suffered from arthritis, pneumonia and shingles, in Rick Bragg\u2019s 2014 book Jerry Lee Lewis: His Story.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lewis embodied pinched obduracy, brooding, malevolent ignorance, violent unreliability and borderline madness. He abused women, played with guns and shot at men; he drove the highways of the south blind drunk with his loaded pistol on the dashboard. Yet in the vivid contrast between the meanness of the man and the grandeur of the artist, the common denominators were his phenomenal energy and admirable, all-conquering self-belief.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He will be remembered for his lifetime of hillbilly delirium, but he will be renowned for his seizure of the musical moment at the dawn of rock\u2019n\u2019roll, when an incomparable talent was his intoxicant and ours: when he shot up the old order and played out his defiant dramas on the keyboard, in the studio and on the stage.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is survived by Judith, and his children Ronnie, Phoebe, Lori and Jerry Lee III\u00b4.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The prime source for this article was originally published in The Guardian, written Michael Gra.y.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our occasional re-postings Sidetracks And Detours are confident that we are not only sharing with our readers excellent articles written by experts but that we are also pointing to informed and informative sites readers will re-visit time and again. Of course, we feel sure our readers will also return to our daily not-for-profit blog knowing that we seek to provide core original material whilst sometimes spotlighting the best pieces from elsewhere, as we engage with new genres and practitioners along all the sidetracks & detours we take.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em><\/strong>This article was collated by Norman Warwick, a weekly columnist with Lanzarote Information and owner and editor of this daily blog at Sidetracks And Detours.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman has also been a long serving broadcaster, co-presenting the weekly all across the arts programme on Crescent Community Radio for many years with Steve Bewick, and his own show on Sherwood Community Radio. He has been a regular guest on BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC Radio Merseyside and BBC Radio Four.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a published author and poet Norman was a founder member of Lendanear Music, with Colin Lever and Just Poets with Pam McKee, Touchstones Creative Writing Group (for which he was creative writing facilitator for a number of years) with Val Chadwick and all across the arts with Robin Parker.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Monday to Friday,<\/em><\/strong> you will find a daily post here at Sidetracks And Detours and, should you be looking for good reading, over the weekend you can visit our massive but easy to navigate archives of over 500 articles.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The purpose of this daily not-for-profit blog is to deliver news, previews, interviews and reviews from all across the arts to die-hard fans and non- traditional audiences around the world. We are therefore always delighted to receive your own articles here at Sidetracks And Detours. So if you have a favourite artist, event, or venue that you would like to tell us more about just drop a Word document attachment to me at <\/em><\/strong>normanwarwick55@gmail.com<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with a couple of appropriate photographs in a zip folder if you wish. Being a not-for-profit organisation we unfortunately cannot pay you but we will always fully attribute any pieces we publish. You therefore might also. like to include a brief autobiography and photograph of yourself in your submission.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We look forward to hearing from you.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sidetracks And Detours is seeking to join the synergy of organisations that support the arts of whatever genre. We are therefore grateful to all those share information to reach as wide and diverse an audience as possible.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

correspondents                                Alan Lawless<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael Higgins<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Steve Bewick<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Gary Heywood Everett<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Steve Cooke<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Susana Fondon<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Graham Marshall<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Peter Pearson<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Catherine Smith<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Aj The Dj Hendry<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hot Biscuits Jazz Radio                      www.fc-radio.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AllMusic  <\/strong><\/a>                                          <\/strong>https:\/\/www.allmusic.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n

feedspot                                              https:\/\/www.feedspot.com\/?_src=folder<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jazz In Reading                                  https:\/\/www.jazzinreading.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jazziz                                                 https:\/\/www.jazziz.com
<\/a>Ribble Valley Jazz & Blues                https:\/\/rvjazzandblues.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rob Adams                                         Music That\u00b4s Going Places<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lanzarote Information                        https:\/\/lanzaroteinformation.co.uk<\/p>\n\n\n\n

all across the arts                                 www.allacrossthearts.co.uk<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rochdale Music Society                     rochdalemusicsociety.org<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lendanear                                           www.lendanearmusic<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agenda Cultura Lanzarote<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Larry Yaskiel \u2013 writer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Lanzarote Art Gallery                  https:\/\/lanzaroteartgallery.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goodreads                                        https:\/\/www.goodreads<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

groundup music                                  HOME | GroundUP Music<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Joni Mitchell newsletter<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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songfacts                                           en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/SongFacts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lewis embodied pinched obduracy, brooding, malevolent ignorance, violent unreliability and borderline madness. He abused women, played with guns and shot at men; he drove the highways of the south blind drunk with his loaded pistol on the dashboard. Yet in the vivid contrast between the meanness of the man and the grandeur of the artist, the common denominators were his phenomenal energy and admirable, all-conquering self-belief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12673"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12688,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12673\/revisions\/12688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}