Great Balls of Fire singer Jerry Lee Lewis dies aged 87
Jerry Lee Lewis's career was once set to rival Elvis's, but his scandalous private life followed him everywhere, Mark Mcquillan reports
Jerry Lee Lewis, the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer known for hits like Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, has died aged 87. Lewis died at his Mississippi home, representative Zach Farnum said in a release.
The musician was one of the last of a generation of groundbreaking American performers that included Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
The news came two days after the publication of an erroneous TMZ report of his death, which was later retracted. 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”. 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. 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. 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 total, Lewis married seven times. 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.
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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. 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.
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.
“Great Balls of Fire,” a sexualised 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.