BREAKING NEWS: Great Balls of Fire singer Jerry Lee Lewis dies aged 87: Outrageous rock star almost became the new Elvis – until his bigamist marriage to cousin aged THIRTEEN was uncovered
- Lewis died at his home in Memphis on Friday morning aged 87
- He was the last survivor of the rock n roll generation that included Elvis
- Once tipped as a successor to Elvis, after ‘the King’ was drafted into the Army
- But career derailed after bigamist marriage to his 13 year-old cousin emerged
Rock star Jerry Lee Lewis has died at his Memphis home aged 87. The Great Balls of Fire singer passed away Friday – two days after TMZ first reported he’d died, only to subsequently issue a correction saying he was still alive.
A rep for Lewis confirmed his death Friday, after it was reported the ailing singer had been battling a severe case of flu.
That left Lewis unable to attend a County Music Hall of Fame induction on October 16, with seventh wife Judith accepting the award on Lewis’ behalf.
She said at the time that Lewis, a dad-of-seven, was alive and well – but less than a fortnight later he’d be dead.
Lewis was a father-of-six, and lost two of his children in tragic circumstances. His son Steve drowned in a swimming pool aged just three in 1962.
Another son, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr, died aged 19 in 1973 after overturning a Jeep he was driving.
Singer Jerry Lee Lewis has died aged 87 in Memphis. He is pictured in the final photo taken before his death
Lewis is pictured with his 13 year-old cousin-wife Myra Gale Brown during the 1950s. News of his bigamist marriage to an underage girl derailed the singer’s career
Lewis was the last survivor of a generation of rock stars including Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
He was touted as a potential successor to Elvis after ‘the King’ was drafted to serve in the Korean War.
But Lewis’ career and image were badly-damaged after it emerged he was in a bigamous marriage to a 13 year-old cousin, who some insist was just 12 when they wed.
Of all the rock rebels to emerge in the 1950s, few captured the new genre’s attraction and danger as unforgettably as the Louisiana-born piano player who called himself ‘The Killer.’
Tender ballads were best left to the old folks. Lewis was all about lust and gratification, with his leering tenor and demanding asides, violent tempos and brash glissandi, cocky sneer and crazy blond hair.
Lewis is pictured, furthest left, recording with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl PErkins and others at Sun Studios, Memphis, during the 1950s. The mic they sang into, pictured in the foreground, was auctioned in 2004
He was a one-man stampede who made the fans scream and the keyboards swear, his live act so combustible that during a 1957 performance of ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin´ On’ on ‘The Steve Allen Show,’ chairs were thrown at him like buckets of water on an inferno.
‘There was rockabilly. There was Elvis. But there was no pure rock ´n ´roll before Jerry Lee Lewis kicked in the door,’ a Lewis admirer once observed.
That admirer was Jerry Lee Lewis.
But in his private life, he raged in ways that might have ended his career today – and nearly did back then.
For a brief time, in 1958, he was a contender to replace Presley as rock´s prime hit maker after Elvis was drafted into the Army.
But while Lewis toured in England, the press learned three damaging things: He was married to 13-year-old (possibly even 12-year-old) Myra Gale Brown, she was his cousin, and he was still married to his previous wife.
His tour was canceled, he was blacklisted from the radio and his earnings dropped overnight to virtually nothing.
‘I probably would have rearranged my life a little bit different, but I never did hide anything from people,’ Lewis told the Wall Street Journal in 2014 when asked about the marriage. ‘I just went on with my life as usual.’
Over the following decades, Lewis struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, legal disputes and physical illness.
Brown is pictured with her former husband when she was 15. Lewis died while married to his seventh wife Judith, who collected an award in his honor earlier this month
Two of his many marriages ended in his wife´s early death. Brown herself divorced him in the early 1970s and would later allege physical and mental cruelty that nearly drove her to suicide.
‘If I was still married to Jerry, I´d probably be dead by now,’ she told People magazine in 1989.
Lewis reinvented himself as a country performer in the 1960s, and the music industry eventually forgave him, long after he stopped having hits. He won three Grammys, and recorded with some of the industry’s greatest stars. In 2006, Lewis came out with ‘Last Man Standing,’ featuring Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King and George Jones. In 2010, Lewis brought in Jagger, Keith Richards, Sheryl Crow, Tim McGraw and others for the album ‘Mean Old Man.’
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.
‘This time I said, `Look, man, let´s get together and draw a line on this stuff – a peace treaty you know,´’ he explained. Lewis would still play the old hits on stage, but on the radio he would sing country.
Lewis had a run of top 10 country hits between 1967-70, and hardly mellowed at all. 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.
Lewis is pictured at a Rock N’Roll revival concert in New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1975
A 1973 performance proved more troublesome: Lewis sang for the Grand Ole Opry and broke two longstanding rules – no swearing and no non-country songs.
‘I am a rock and rollin´, country-and-western, rhythm and blues-singin´ motherf—–,’ he told the audience.
Lewis married seven times, and was rarely far from trouble or death. His fourth wife, Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate, drowned in a swimming pool in 1982 while suing for divorce.
His fifth wife, Shawn Stephens, 23 years his junior, died of an apparent drug overdose in 1983. Within a year, Lewis had married Kerrie McCarver, then 21.
She filed for divorce in 1986, accusing him of physical abuse and infidelity. He countersued, but both petitions eventually were dropped.
They finally divorced in 2005 after several years of separation. The couple had one child, Jerry Lee III.
Another son by a previous marriage, Steve Allen Lewis, 3, drowned in a swimming pool in 1962, and son Jerry Lee Jr. died in a traffic accident at 19 in 1973.
Lewis also had two daughters, Phoebe and Lori Leigh, and his survived by his wife Judith.
Lewis is pictured at a Massachusetts Farm Aid concert in 2008. He was once tipped as a potential successor to Elvis, only to see his career derailed by a pedophilia scandal
His finances were also chaotic. Lewis made millions, but he liked his money in cash and ended up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Internal Revenue Service.
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.
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.
As a boy, he first learned to play guitar, but found the instrument too confining and longed for an instrument that the only the rich people in his town could afford – a piano.
His life changed when his father pulled up in his truck one day and presented him a dark-wood, upright set of keyboards.
‘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.
He took to the piano immediately, and began sneaking off to Black juke joints and absorbing everything from gospel to boogie-woogie.
Conflicted early on between secular and scared music, he quit school at 16, with plans of becoming a piano-playing preacher. 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.
‘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 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.
‘No group, be it (the) Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on `Whole Lotta Shakin´´ for my money,’ John Lennon would tell Rolling Stone in 1970.
A roadhouse veteran by his early 20s, Lewis took off for Memphis in 1956 and showed up at the studios of Sun Records, the musical home of Elvis, Perkins and Cash. Told by company founder Sam Phillips to go learn some rock `n roll, Lewis returned and soon hurried off ‘Whole Lotta Shakin´’ in a single take.
Lewis was indicted in Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame earlier this month. He was too sick to attend the ceremony
‘I knew it was a hit when I cut it,’ he later said. ‘Sam Phillips thought it was gonna be too risque, it couldn´t make it. If that´s risque, well, I´m sorry.’
In 1986, along with Elvis, Chuck Berry and others, he made the inaugural class of inductees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The Killer not only outlasted his contemporaries but saw his life and music periodically reintroduced to younger fans, including the the 1989 biopic ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ starring Dennis Quaid, and Ethan Coen´s 2022 documentary ‘Trouble in Mind.’
A 2010 Broadway music, ‘Million Dollar Quartet,’ was inspired by a recording session that featured Lewis, Elvis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash.
He won a Grammy in 1987 as part of an interview album that was cited for best spoken word recording, and he received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2005.
The following year, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin´’ was selected for the Library of Congress´ National Recording Registry, whose board praised the ‘propulsive boogie piano that was perfectly complemented by the drive of J.M. Van Eaton´s energetic drumming.
The listeners to the recording, like Lewis himself, had a hard time remaining seated during the performance.’
Lewis is pictured after being arrested for public drunkenness and gun possession in his native Memphis in 1976
A classmate at Bible school, Pearry Green, remembered meeting Lewis years later and asking if he was still playing the devil´s music.
‘Yes, I am,’ Lewis answered. ‘But you know it´s strange, the same music that they kicked me out of school for is the same kind of music they play in their churches today. The difference is, I know I am playing for the devil and they don´t.’
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