Jerry Lee Lewis

The bride was thirteen years and five months old and she was the bass player's daughter. Jerry Lee Lewis married Myra Gale Brown on the twelfth of December 1957, in secret, in Hernando, Mississippi: she had been born on the eleventh of July 1944 and he was twenty-two. Myra was the daughter of J.W. Brown, Lewis's first cousin and the man who played electric bass in his band; she was not his "first cousin" and not his "second cousin" either, which are the two versions the press has been repeating ever since and both are false. And there is a second thing the popular account gets wrong: the scandal did not break there. It took five months to break, and in that interval Lewis released three hits and climbed as high as he would ever climb.

Ferriday, the gospel and the expulsion

He was born on the twenty-ninth of September 1935 in Ferriday, Concordia Parish, Louisiana, the son of Elmo Kidd Lewis Sr. and Mary "Mamie" Herron Lewis, into a Pentecostal family that also produced two well-known names: the country pianist Mickey Gilley and the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart were his cousins and the three of them grew up in the same town. His mother enrolled him at the Southwest Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, and he was expelled the same night he played "My God Is Real" boogie-woogie style at a school assembly. That explains his music better than any founding mythology: he invented nothing out of nothing, he put together what he had at hand —Pentecostal gospel, hillbilly boogie, black boogie-woogie and the rhythm and blues of the Southern jukeboxes— and played it faster and louder than anybody else.

He arrived at Sun Records, in Memphis, in November 1956, and the detail matters: the man who auditioned him and recorded him was Jack Clement, because Sam Phillips was in Florida. That first session produced "Crazy Arms", which sold three hundred thousand copies in the South. On the fourth of December that year Lewis was in the studio with Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, and Phillips left the tapes running: it is the session the world knows as the "Million Dollar Quartet", and it was not a quartet. On the tapes that have been released what can mostly be heard is Elvis singing with Lewis at the piano, and Cash's voice cannot be clearly identified; Cash maintained in his 1997 autobiography that he is there, far from the microphone and singing higher than usual. The name did not come from the group: it came from the headline of the story the Memphis Press-Scimitar published the following day, by Bob Johnson, the entertainment editor Phillips had called in to come and see him. In the photograph there is a fifth person, Marilyn Evans, Elvis's girlfriend, sitting at the piano, whom nobody named for decades.

Two songs that were not his

"Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" was not written by him and he did not introduce it either. It is credited to Dave "Curlee" Williams and James Faye "Roy" Hall, credited under the pseudonym "Sunny David", and the first recording in history is Big Maybelle's, on the twenty-first of March 1955, for Okeh, in a session arranged by Quincy Jones. Lewis came third. He recorded it in February 1957, it came out as Sun 267 on the fifteenth of April produced by Jack Clement and it was number three on Billboard's sales chart, number one on the country chart, number one in rhythm and blues and number eight in the United Kingdom. What turned the record into a national hit was television: his debut on The Steve Allen Show, on the twenty-eighth of July 1957. That same night, J.W. Brown became the first person to play an electric bass on television, a Fender Precision.

"Great Balls of Fire" is not his either, and how it was made says more about the business than any legend about the piano. It is credited to Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer —real name, Earl Solomon Burroughs— and it was a commission: Hammer wrote a first version that the publisher Paul Case rejected while keeping the title, and Case asked Blackwell for a new song with that same title for the film Jamboree, from 1957; Hammer kept half of the songwriting rights. It came out as Sun 281 in November 1957 and it was number two on Billboard's sales chart, number one country, number three in rhythm and blues and number one in the United Kingdom. Which is to say: the wildest man of rock's first generation became famous with two songs by other people, and one of them had been introduced by a blues singer.

The session for "Great Balls of Fire", on the eighth of October 1957, also left behind something almost no other episode from that studio left: proof. Lewis refused to sing it because he considered it a sin and he argued with Sam Phillips about whether souls could be saved by playing rock. The tape was running and the quarrel is preserved; it has been released on Sun compilations. Lewis asked how the devil was going to save souls and said that he had the devil in him; J.M. Van Eaton, the house drummer, summed it up by saying that Phillips was as serious as he could possibly be and Lewis as fired up as he could possibly be. And in case the contrast of authorship is needed, what he did write are "High School Confidential", co-written with Ron Hargrave and with a copyright dated the twenty-eighth of January 1958, and "Lewis Boogie". The first was the title song of an MGM film, reached number twenty-one in sales and is the only RIAA gold certification he has from those years.

Hernando, and then Heathrow

The Hernando wedding is missing the fact that changes everything: it was invalid. Lewis was still legally married to his second wife, Sally Jane Mitcham, on the day he married Myra, and the documentary proof is that there was a second ceremony, on the fourth of June 1958, held precisely once the divorce had been settled. It was his third marriage at twenty-two and the second bigamous one: he had also married Mitcham twenty-three days before his divorce from Dorothy Barton was final. J.W. Brown found out three days after the wedding, took his pistol and drove to Sun Studio intending to kill Lewis; his wife, Lois, called Sam Phillips to warn him and Phillips took Lewis off to the airport. The two men saw each other again on the twenty-sixth of December 1957, at a concert in Brooklyn, where Lewis hit him on the head with a badly thrown shoe.

The scandal broke on the twenty-second of May 1958, at the London airport. Lewis was arriving with Myra for a British tour of several weeks; a reporter on watch in the terminal asked the girl who she was and she told the truth. On the twenty-third there was a press conference in London. He managed to play three concerts —the twenty-fourth at the Regal in Edmonton, the twenty-fifth at the Gaumont State in Kilburn and the twenty-sixth at the Granada in Tooting— before the tour was cancelled; on the twenty-seventh he left the Westbury hotel by a side door on his way to the airport and on the twenty-eighth he was in New York. The British press called him a "cradle robber" and a "baby snatcher", and there were calls for a boycott. By the time he got back to the United States concerts and television appearances had already been cancelled, and the radio stations had stopped playing him.

The fall has figures that are worth attributing before repeating them: according to the accounts of the time and the biography his own wife co-wrote in 1982, he went from charging ten thousand dollars a concert to two hundred and fifty in bars and clubs. There is no contract or statement of account to certify it. What is verifiable is the time: he did not have another number one until the first of March 1969, eleven years later. The marriage lasted thirteen years and the divorce became final on the ninth of December 1970, on her petition, in which she alleged adultery and mistreatment and stated that she had suffered every type of physical and mental abuse imaginable. Myra Gale Brown, today Myra Lewis Williams, has returned to all that and has said things that do not fit together: that in the 1970 petition and, in October 2022, when Lewis died, that people called her the child bride but that she was the adult and Jerry was the child. Both are statements of her own and neither cancels out the other. It is not for this article to decide which one weighs more.

The piano that never burned

The most repeated episode of his life is not documented. The story says that he set fire to his piano so that Chuck Berry could not close the show after him. There are no photographs, there is no press report and there are no witnesses from the audience. J.W. Brown, his bass player and supposed witness, flatly denies it: he says that Lewis never set fire to any piano, although he smashed plenty of them. And Lewis contradicted himself twice: in 2006 he called it a load of nonsense and in 2009 he confirmed it with details, Coca-Cola bottle and petrol included. What is a matter of record is that the film Great Balls of Fire!, from 1989, put the burning piano on the screen, and that from then on the legend stopped needing proof.

Something similar happens with the nickname. "The Killer" has nothing to do with the way he played and it predates his career: it is a childhood nickname from Ferriday. The most repeated version is that he tried to strangle an adult with the man's own tie; Lewis's version is that he was thrown out of the principal's office for fighting with a teacher and his friend Cecil Harrison said to him as they crossed the gate that they would see each other later, Killer; and there is a third explanation, less showy and probably the best one, which is that in post-war northern Louisiana calling people "killer" was a verbal tic and he used it with everybody. Nor is the absolute primacy that usually comes with him necessary, because in those same years Little Richard, Esquerita, Ike Turner and Moon Mullican were playing. What does hold up is something else: he was the most violent and influential pianist of rock's first generation, and the only one who put the piano at the centre of the show instead of in the accompaniment.

Six number ones, and not one more

The comeback has a date: 1968, with "Another Place, Another Time", written by Jerry Chesnut, on the Smash label. And the count of his number ones on Billboard's country chart is exactly six, not the endless succession that usually gets told. Two are the Sun ones: "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" in 1957 and "Great Balls of Fire" between 1957 and 1958. The other four came between 1969 and 1972: "To Make Love Sweeter for You" —credited to Jerry Kennedy and Glenn Sutton, not his either— on the first of March 1969, which broke eleven years of exile; "There Must Be More to Love Than This", on the twenty-sixth of September 1970; "Would You Take Another Chance on Me", with Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster's "Me and Bobby McGee" on the other side, on the eighth of January 1972; and "Chantilly Lace", by J.P. Richardson, which reached the top on the twenty-second of April 1972 and stayed there three weeks. After that date he was never number one on any chart again. And one correction in passing: "What's Made Milwaukee Famous", which many compilations put down as a number one, reached number two.

The years that came afterwards are in wire-service dispatches and in court files. On the night of the twenty-eighth of September 1976, at his house in Collierville, Tennessee, he fired a .357 Magnum at a Coca-Cola bottle and hit his bass player, Norman "Butch" Owens, in the chest; Owens survived and spent a month in hospital; Lewis was arrested, charged with shooting a firearm within the city limits and acquitted at the trial of the third of May 1977. On the twenty-third of November 1976 he was arrested drunk at the gates of Graceland, with a bottle of champagne and a loaded pistol on the dashboard, demanding to see Elvis; he got out on a two hundred and fifty dollar bail and his mugshot was published all over the world. On the thirtieth of June 1981 he was admitted as an emergency to the Methodist Hospital South in Memphis vomiting blood, with a five-centimetre perforation in his stomach; he was operated on twice, his doctors gave him a fifty per cent chance of surviving and he came out sixty-one days later announcing that the Killer was back. In December 1986 he was admitted for detox and afterwards to the Betty Ford Center, for painkiller addiction. The ruin was just as literal: in 1979 the tax authorities seized more than sixty of his possessions over a debt of some two hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars, the auction raised ninety-one thousand three hundred and eighty-two, in October 1984 a jury acquitted him of tax evasion and in 1988 he filed for bankruptcy with more than three million dollars of debt, two of them owed to the taxman.

His biography also brings four deaths in the family circle, and there the honest thing is to stick to what the papers ruled. Steve Allen Lewis, his son with Myra —named after the presenter who had given him his television debut—, drowned on the twenty-second of April 1962, at the age of three, in a swimming pool under construction at the family house near Coro Lake, Tennessee. Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., drummer in his father's band, died alone on the thirteenth of November 1973, at nineteen, when his Jeep overturned on a country road near Hernando, a week after turning nineteen and a few days after having played with him on television. Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate, his fourth wife, drowned on the eighth of June 1982 in the swimming pool at a friend's house in Collierville, and the Shelby County medical examiner ruled accidental death. Shawn Michelle Stephens, his fifth wife, was found dead on the twenty-fourth of August 1983 at the house in Nesbit, seventy-seven days into the marriage; the cause ruled was a methadone overdose and a grand jury refused to indict Lewis. There were later magazine investigations that questioned the inquiries, and it is worth saying what they are: magazine investigations. In neither case was there any charge.

The ending is almost symmetrical. On the twenty-third of January 1986 he entered the inaugural class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2006 he released Last Man Standing, an album of duets recorded in part at Sun Studio whose title alluded to his being the last survivor of the label's artists, and which according to his label and the press was the best-selling of his career. On the sixteenth of October 2022 the Country Music Hall of Fame elected him and he could not go: his doctor forbade him to travel that same morning, and the medal was collected by Kris Kristofferson —the same man whose song had given him a number one fifty years earlier— and Hank Williams Jr., who took it to Memphis by hand days later. On the twenty-sixth, TMZ announced his death with alerts on people's phones, on the basis of an anonymous tip from somebody passing himself off as his representative, and withdrew the story within minutes. He died two days later, on the twenty-eighth of October 2022, at his house in Nesbit, DeSoto County, Mississippi, at the age of eighty-seven. His representative, Zach Farnum, reported natural causes; he had developed pneumonia. His seventh wife, Judith, was with him.

What to remember

Jerry Lee Lewis married a thirteen-year-old girl on the twelfth of December 1957 who was the daughter of his first cousin and bass player, and he did it while legally married to another woman, which is why he had to repeat the ceremony on the fourth of June 1958. That is not to be dressed up, and that is why the praise goes where it belongs: to the records. The scandal took five months to break and it broke at a London airport, on the twenty-second of May 1958. What sank him was not the wedding, but the day it became known.

And in the records there is an irony that no legend tells: the two songs that made him immortal are not his. "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" is credited to Dave Williams and Roy Hall and was recorded first by Big Maybelle, with arrangements by Quincy Jones, in 1955; "Great Balls of Fire" is credited to Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer and was a commission for a film. The burning piano was put there by the cinema in 1989. What was his own was the attack: the way of playing that turned an accompanying instrument into the centre of the stage, and six country number ones spread over fifteen years, the last of them on the twenty-second of April 1972. When that hammered piano and that voice on the edge of a scream come on, there is what there really was: a devouring performer who made his own what other people had written. If you or someone you know is living through problem drug or alcohol use, in Chile you can call SENDA's Drugs and Alcohol helpline free of charge, 1412. And if you know of a boy or a girl at risk, in Chile the Fono Niños, 147, and Línea Libre, 1515, answer free of charge and confidentially.

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Sources

Jerry Lee Lewis was born on 29 September 1935 in Ferriday, Concordia Parish, Louisiana, the son of Elmo Kidd Lewis Sr. and Mary "Mamie" Herron Lewis; the country pianist Mickey Gilley and the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart were his cousins. "The Killer" is a childhood nickname, not a stage name. He was expelled from the Southwest Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, the same night he played "My God Is Real" boogie-woogie style. He arrived at Sun Records (Memphis) in November 1956: he was auditioned and recorded by Jack Clement, with Sam Phillips in Florida; "Crazy Arms" sold 300,000 copies in the south of the United States. The "Million Dollar Quartet" session was recorded on 4 December 1956 at Sun Studio with Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Lewis, plus Clayton and Jay Perkins, the drummer W.S. Holland, Marilyn Evans and the engineer Jack Clement; the name comes from the headline of the Memphis Press-Scimitar of 5 December 1956, by Bob Johnson, with a photograph by George Pierce. Johnny Cash's voice cannot be clearly identified on the released tapes; Cash maintained the opposite in his 1997 autobiography. The tapes were first issued in Europe in 1981 (17 tracks), as a double LP in 1987, on CD by RCA in 1990 and in a 50th anniversary edition in 2006. The Sun trio was Lewis (piano and vocals), Roland Janes (electric guitar) and J.M. Van Eaton (drums), with J.W. Brown on electric bass live and on television. "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" is credited to Dave "Curlee" Williams and James Faye "Roy" Hall (credited as "Sunny David"); the first recording is Big Maybelle's, from 21 March 1955, for Okeh, in a session arranged by Quincy Jones. Lewis's version was recorded in February 1957 and released on 15 April 1957 (Sun 267, produced by Jack Clement): no. 3 on Billboard's sales chart, no. 1 country, no. 1 R&B and no. 8 in the United Kingdom. The Hot 100 did not exist until 4 August 1958, so pop positions before that date correspond to the sales charts Billboard used at the time. Television debut on The Steve Allen Show on 28 July 1957, a broadcast on which J.W. Brown was the first person to play an electric bass (a Fender Precision) on television. "Great Balls of Fire" is credited to Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer (real name, Earl Solomon Burroughs, 1925-2016): Hammer wrote a first version that the publisher Paul Case rejected while keeping the title, and Case commissioned a new song from Blackwell for the film "Jamboree" (1957, Warner Bros.); Hammer kept half of the rights. It was recorded on 8 October 1957 at Sun Studio produced by Sam Phillips —on that take, Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums— and released in November 1957 (Sun 281): no. 2 in sales, no. 1 country, no. 3 R&B and no. 1 in the United Kingdom. The argument between Lewis and Sam Phillips about whether rock was a sin was captured on the tape of that session and has been released on Sun compilations. "Breathless" (Otis Blackwell, Sun 288, 1958): no. 7 pop, no. 4 country, no. 3 R&B, no. 8 in the United Kingdom. "High School Confidential", co-written by Lewis with Ron Hargrave (copyright of 28 January 1958), with takes from 14 February and 24 April 1958, was released on 20 May 1958 (Sun 296) as the title song of the MGM film directed by Jack Arnold: no. 21 pop, no. 9 country, no. 5 R&B, no. 12 in the United Kingdom, no. 13 in Canada, certified gold by the RIAA. "Lewis Boogie", written by Lewis in 1956 and recorded in 1957 with Roland Janes and Jimmy Van Eaton, came out in June 1958 (Sun 301) with "The Return of Jerry Lee" on the B-side. Wedding to Myra Gale Brown on 12 December 1957 in Hernando, Mississippi, in secret: she, born on 11 July 1944 in Vicksburg, was 13 years and 5 months old; he was 22. Myra was the daughter of J.W. Brown, Lewis's first cousin and his band's bass player. Lewis was still legally married to Sally Jane Mitcham, and there was a second ceremony on 4 June 1958, once the divorce was final; before that he had married Mitcham 23 days before his divorce from Dorothy Barton was final (married in February 1952, divorced in October 1953). The date on which the divorce from Mitcham became final is not settled among the sources and is not recorded here. J.W. Brown found out about the wedding three days later and drove to Sun Studio armed; his wife, Lois, warned Sam Phillips. The scandal became public on 22 May 1958, on arrival at Heathrow, when a British reporter on watch at the airport asked Myra who she was; press conference in London on 23 May; three concerts: 24 May at the Regal in Edmonton, 25 at the Gaumont State in Kilburn and 26 at the Granada in Tooting (one source gives 27 for Tooting). The tour, of several weeks, was cancelled; on 27 May they left the Westbury hotel and on 28 they arrived in New York. The British press used "cradle robber" and "baby snatcher". The number of dates on the tour is not verifiable: the sources give 14, 37 and 71 performances and "six weeks". The figures of 10,000 dollars a concert before the scandal and 250 afterwards come from the biographical literature —including "Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis" (1982), co-written by Myra— and not from a contract or a statement of account. Myra's divorce became final on 9 December 1970, on her petition for adultery and mistreatment, after 13 years of marriage and two children; in the petition she stated that she had been subjected to "every type of physical and mental abuse imaginable". In 2022, after Lewis's death, she told the Los Angeles Times (29 October) and Fox News Digital (31 October) that she rejected the "child bride" label and that she was the adult; her statements of 1970 and of 2022 contradict each other and both are her own. She published her memoir, "The Spark That Survived", in 2016, and has been a real estate agent in Atlanta since 1980. The burning piano episode is not documented: there are no photographs, no press report and no witnesses; J.W. Brown denies it; Lewis denied it in 2006 and confirmed it in 2009. The film "Great Balls of Fire!" (1989), based on Myra's book, put it on screen. The country comeback came in 1968 with "Another Place, Another Time" (Jerry Chesnut, Smash). Number ones on Billboard's country chart, six in total: "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" (1957), "Great Balls of Fire" (1957-1958), "To Make Love Sweeter for You" (Jerry Kennedy and Glenn Sutton, Smash, 1 March 1969, 1 week), "There Must Be More to Love Than This" (Bill Taylor and Thomas LaVerne, Mercury, 26 September 1970), "Would You Take Another Chance on Me" / "Me and Bobby McGee" (Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster, Mercury, 8 January 1972) and "Chantilly Lace" / "Think About It Darlin'" (J.P. Richardson, Mercury, 22 April 1972, 3 weeks, until 6 May). "What's Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)" (Smash, May 1968) reached no. 2 country, not no. 1. After 22 April 1972 he was never no. 1 on any chart again. On 28 September 1976, in Collierville, Tennessee, he wounded his bass player Norman "Butch" Owens in the chest with a .357 Magnum; Owens survived after a month in hospital; charged with shooting a firearm within the city limits, Lewis was acquitted on 3 May 1977; Owens filed a 400,000 dollar civil suit in 1977, with an unverified outcome. On 23 November 1976 he was arrested at the gates of Graceland for carrying a weapon and public drunkenness, with bail of 250 dollars. He was admitted as an emergency on 30 June 1981 to the Methodist Hospital South in Memphis with a 5 centimetre perforation in his stomach; second operation on 10 July, with a 50% chance of surviving according to his doctors; he was discharged on 31 August 1981 after 61 days. Hospitalised on 26 March 1984 for a reaction to medication; ulcers in May 1985; a four-hour operation on 12 November 1985; detox in Nashville on 2 December 1986 and afterwards admission to the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, for painkiller addiction. In 1979 the IRS seized more than 60 of his possessions over a debt of some 274,000 dollars; the 1980 auction raised 91,382; on 18 October 1984 a jury acquitted him of tax evasion; in 1988 he filed for bankruptcy with more than 3 million dollars of debt, 2 of them owed to the IRS. Deaths in the family circle, with their rulings: Steve Allen Lewis (1959 - 22 April 1962, 3 years old), accidental drowning in a swimming pool under construction at the family house near Coro Lake, Tennessee, with no criminal investigation; Jerry Lee Lewis Jr. (November 1954 - 13 November 1973, 19 years old), traffic accident when his Jeep overturned on a country road near Hernando, Mississippi; Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate, fourth wife, drowned on 8 June 1982 in Collierville, Tennessee, with a ruling of accidental death by the Shelby County medical examiner and Lewis absent from the property (funeral on 10 June 1982); Shawn Michelle Stephens, fifth wife (wedding in June 1983), found dead on 24 August 1983 at the house in Nesbit, DeSoto County, Mississippi, 77 days into the marriage, with a ruled cause of methadone overdose and an express refusal by the grand jury to indict Lewis. The article "The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis", by Richard Ben Cramer (Rolling Stone, March 1984), questioned the investigation; in neither case was there a charge, an indictment or a verdict. Mild stroke on 28 February 2019. Inaugural class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 23 January 1986; "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, took 61st place in Rolling Stone's 500 greatest songs in 2004 and was selected for the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2005. "Last Man Standing" (Artists First / Shangri-La, 26 September 2006), an album of duets produced by Steve Bing and Jimmy Ripp and recorded in part at Sun Studio, is, according to his label and the press, the best-selling of his career, with more than a million copies worldwide, with no certification cited. He entered the Country Music Hall of Fame at the ceremony of 16 October 2022, which he did not attend on medical orders; the honour was collected by Kris Kristofferson and Hank Williams Jr. TMZ falsely reported his death on 26 October 2022, on the basis of an anonymous tip, and retracted within minutes. He died on 28 October 2022 at his house in Nesbit, DeSoto County, Mississippi, aged 87; his representative, Zach Farnum, stated natural causes and several obituaries record a prior pneumonia; his seventh wife, Judith, was at his side. There is no public coroner's report: it was a death at home from illness. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, the UPI archives, CNN, TMZ, NME, NBC Washington, Forbes, Fox News Digital, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Ultimate Classic Rock, LiveAbout, BellaOnline, MOJO, Irish Examiner, Far Out Magazine, Grunge, Songfacts, American Songwriter, Find a Grave, the Country Music Hall of Fame, DeSoto County News and The Conversation.