Remembering Jerry Lee Lewis, 1935–2022 – The American Spectator

Jerry Lee Lewis died on Oct. 28, 2022. He had not charted a hit song for many years. His trademark furious movements were distant memories. His voice had grown scratchier. His visibility had receded to an audience comprised of loyal fans and an admiring number of fellow musicians. When he died, some people were a little surprised that he was still alive.

That situation is not a gross anomaly, nor is it particularly unjust, evidenced by changing tastes in music, contemporary follow-the-leader trends in the music industry, and, indeed, the spotlight-hungry accommodations of many singers.

Ironically and significantly, Jerry Lee Lewis virtually had died and been resuscitated, if not rejuvenated — or he managed his own resurrections — for years. Musically, professionally, personally, he became a walking revival show.

He almost literally burst onto the scene as a 21-year-old: His second hit record sold more than a million copies in a matter of weeks. When he famously married his 13-year-old second cousin (while a divorce from his second wife was not yet final) his falling star attracted as much attention as had his rising star. He subsequently ignited headlines throughout the decades, if not exactly reinventing himself, then requiring the public to reinvent its perception of him.

Jerry Lee Lewis was, not unnaturally, responsible for the ambivalence with which the general public always held him. Other scandals, seven marriages, lurid headlines were always as close as shadows. Polite in interviews, often singing suggestive lyrics, he predictably was unpredictable. The music industry chose to have difficulty in assigning him to one distinctive category — it was only a little over a week before his death that he was installed as a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame — which illustrated the absurdity of trying to lasso a rare peripatetic talent with labels.

He burst onto another scene in the 1950s — TV variety programs, such as Steve Allen’s — but a review of old kinescopes suggests that hosts (even more the case with Milton Berle and his guest Elvis Presley) beheld the bad boys of rock ’n’ roll and their hyperactive gyrations as virtual novelty acts.

Many of Jerry Lee’s activities tempted death, to the point of seeming to go beyond self-destructive behavior, almost suicidal. His nickname, “The Killer,” survived many virtual attempts to kill himself. Yet he persisted, outlasting other stars of his generation and earning another nickname: “The Last Man Standing.”

He surely will transcend the debates about musical categorizations. But just as his musical relevance will attract even greater respect, so does his celebrity threaten to eclipse the story behind his story. The headlines obscure the subtext of his life. For he was a Type.

He was a type of American (beyond musical contexts) that is fading from the scene, as it perforce must, given the changing tides of cultural and social forces. But those factors had seismic manifestation in culture, politics, and religion in America.

Jerry Lee Lewis (Rick Marschall)

Jerry Lee Lewis was born in Louisiana — in 1935 in little Ferriday, Concordia Parish, across the Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi — and so was Huey Long. It is not recorded that any of Jerry Lee’s family ever met Long or were even invested in his political campaigns or “Every Man a King” crusades. But the politician who called himself “The Kingfish” was also a Type. He both represented and inspired a class of Southern men during the Great Depression.

Southerners for three generations after losing the Civil War were continuously conscious of that defeat and, moreover, inheritors of seemingly congenital and crushing poverty. The South, during the Great Depression, was the last region of the country to be electrified. Its rising spokesman Long asserted his rural and unsophisticated roots and cleared out the weeds of social inferiority when he addressed Southern men.

“My earliest and more or less inchoate recollections,” he wrote, “are that, in the time of my childhood, any person of brawn had some place or opportunity to hew out what was required of him in life.” That was to say that traditional and “polite” norms of success were different in his new world. Long’s followers could forge their own different paths of acceptance. And they began to do so, self-confidently, in the 1930s, even after their leader Long was assassinated.

A Southern culture — far different from the aristocratic pretensions of the antebellum cotton kingdoms — emerged. Southern literature and poetry found their counterparts in the “common” musical forms that arose from delta soil and former plantations: blues, jazz, country, gospel. It has been claimed that electrification’s late appearance in the American South was prompted by the popularity of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family — people wanting to operate record players and buying radios in order to listen to the Grand Ole Opry.

Almost on cue, a crop of singers arose throughout the region. They all were unique, with utterly distinct styles, yet their common roots and similar stories were an astonishing coincidence. These singers had common musical, religious, and social roots; their influence, collectively and individually, was to be consequential. Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Charlie Rich, Roy Orbison, and others: All were born in the mid-1930s; all dirt-poor boys born in the Southern swath from Arkansas to Texas and down to Mississippi and Louisiana. They all shared Pentecostal or fundamentalist faiths, and they all were attracted to, and incorporated in their music, those traditions of white and black blues, country music, gospel, and even folk, pop, and — in Jerry Lee’s case — boogie-woogie, as it suited.

Significantly, rural folk singers were performing similar songs and styles at the time. Shunned as politically oriented, few of them influenced the rising crop of Jerry Lee’s contemporaries. Oklahoma’s Woody Guthrie, for instance, was one of many enthusiastic communists.

Remarkably, Elvis, Perkins, Cash, Jerry Lee, and the others — even a young Harold Jenkins, who became Conway Twitty — separately showed up on the doorstep of a small recording studio in Memphis in the early to mid-1950s, hoping to find someone who would listen to them. Sam Phillips had started Sun Records with the idea of introducing the new sound of black rhythm and blues to white audiences. This concept was successful, as a first step. As he sowed the wind, Sam reaped the whirlwind. The new sounds that emanated from the little studio would be known as rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, and, appropriately, white soul.

The strongest of musical wellsprings for these singers were the Southern gospel songs of camp meetings and revivals, and, not insignificantly, the gospel behind the music. Not all of the singers would perform or record much gospel music, but during the career arcs — musical evolutions — of Elvis and Cash, gospel was an ingredient.

Jerry Lee Lewis performing “Great Balls of Fire” in his Sun Records period, circa 1958 (Image courtesy Rick Marschall)

In the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, however, gospel music and the gospel itself were constant companions. The baddest of the bad boys of rock ’n’ roll would sing and even share, in his distinctive way, the gospel message with his audiences. It variously inspired and blessed him or haunted and condemned him. It was, alternately, a ministering muse and a dark daemon. The conflict between sin and salvation was a motive force throughout his career.

That conflict — essentially unresolved until the last months of his life — says much about the basic tenets of Pentecostalism. That Jerry Lee had lurid episodes of sex and drugs, violence, and encounters with the law was well known to the public. In fact, he never attempted to conceal these elements of a troubled life. What he confessed to his fans was not said to seek absolution, nor to boast. He frankly discussed what everyone knew or wondered about. In the words of one of his hits, his life “would make a damn good country song.”

It is often the case that sinners, and certainly reformed sinners, “live out” their conflicts and resolutions in public and, in so doing, ultimately present the strongest gospel messages to a watching world. During the heady months of his astonishing success at Sun Records, Jerry Lee nevertheless was convinced that rock ’n’ roll was the Devil’s music: that he was consigning himself to Hell. He did not quit playing such fare, as he briefly was to do, claiming spiritual conversion, several times during his career. But in a revealing tape, carelessly recorded between songs at Sun Records, Jerry Lee forcefully maintained that rock ’n’ roll was the Devil’s music.

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