You are on the Desktop website, Click here to go back to our mobile website
ARTICLE
The date is 22 May 1958 and a few months earlier saw two now-legendary rock’n’roll singles top the UK charts: ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’, both released on Sun Records. The first is by Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll. But on this day, the singer of the latter, Jerry Lee Lewis, is on a flight to England, where he’ll bring his raucous boogie-woogie to the masses and maybe even steal the crown from the King. Down on the ground, in Blighty, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is up and running. Britain’s first full-length motorway, the M1, is underway. And the country has just witnessed its first ever protest march for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Stepping off the plane at London Heathrow, the exceptionally talented Lewis knows that, with world domination already in his sights, a long, successful career lies ahead.
But in a few short minutes, and with two simple questions, that’s all about to change.
In the airport, a reporter called Paul Tanfield asks a young woman in Lewis’s entourage who she is.
“I’m Myra,” she replies. “Jerry’s wife.”
Tanfield directs his second question to Jerry Lee: “And how old is Myra?”
She’s 13 years old. Myra Gale Brown is also Lewis’s cousin once-removed.
The British people respond to this revelation by boycotting the tour. Audiences are slim. Many who attend simply do so in order to boo and catcall the disgraced star. And although Lewis tries to ride out the controversy, it doesn’t go away. Amidst these revelations of child marriage, he leaves the UK just a week after he arrived, chased out by an inquisitive press and an angry public. His career would never fully recover.
-
With his wild stage persona and furious piano playing, Jerry Lee Lewis is credited as a pioneer of rock and roll and rockabilly music. Some even consider him to be the greatest rock and roller ever – over Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry. But to explore his story, you need to separate the man from the legend and be up front about his personal life, including the claims of abuse levelled against him.
Whilst marrying a 13-year-old may have been legal in 1950s Louisiana, the UK public knew it was wrong in 1958 – and in 2022 we would only ever view this situation as child sexual abuse.
By the time of Jerry Lee’s death in late 2022, his reputation was still tarnished and the obituaries focussed largely on his seven controversy-filled marriages, the allegations of abuse and adultery, and the tragedy that seemed to follow him wherever he went. The last of the great rock and rollers, finally following his contemporaries to the grave.
Raised in Eastern Louisiana in a poor farming family, Lewis started playing piano with his cousins as a kid. Realising their son’s evident talent, his parents decided to mortgage their farm to buy him a piano of his own. Aged 14, he made his first public performance as part of a country band, playing at a car dealership in his hometown of Ferriday.
Although Lewis’s mother was keen for him to perform evangelical music exclusively, enrolling him at a local bible institute, it wasn’t long before his rebellious antics had got him excluded. So, he began playing the local clubs, becoming part of the emerging rock and roll scene.
We forget that in the 1950s, rock and roll music was cutting edge and dangerous. There was a reason its denouncers called it "the devil's music"; it was the playground of bad, crazy, sometimes despicable people. The scene was a scary place to work and you had to be tough to survive. (Jerry Lee Lewis fit right in thanks to his nickname ‘The Killer’, allegedly given to him by his schoolmates after he attempted to strangle a teacher using their tie.)
The pioneers of the genre were like fallen angels; Christian kids tempted by the dark side. Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash – all were raised on religion, often Baptist or evangelical, but in search of something more, something wilder. Jerry Lee was allegedly thrown out of evangelical school, angering his schoolmasters by performing an outrageous boogie-woogie version of ‘My God is Real’. That was the thing about this generation of musicians: they were often deeply religious and most certainly influenced by gospel, but they didn’t want to be bound by it, choosing to infuse their music with religious fervour whilst challenging social taboos around sex.
In 1952, down in New Orleans, Lewis cut his first demo with the legendary studio owner and engineer Cosimo Matassa, the man credited with recording what many hail as the first rock and roll record, Fats Domino’s ‘The Fat Man’ [1949], as well as classics like ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard [1955]. Along with production collaborators Dave Bartholomew and Allen Toussaint, Matassa’s work was crucial to the development of rock and soul music in the 1950s and 60s.
Then, in 1956, the cock-sure musician walked into Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, confident he was ready for the big time. Studio owner Sam Phillips, the man responsible for discovering Elvis, was impressed with what he heard and gave Lewis his big break as a session pianist on songs by Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Billy Lee Riley.
“He was the most talented man I ever worked with, Black or white,” Phillips would later say. “One of the most talented human beings to walk on God’s earth.”
It was during one of these Sun sessions, for Perkins, that Elvis and Johnny Cash happened to...
To read the full article, you’ll need to have a physical copy of the magazine which you can sign up for here for 6 issues delivered to your door from just £16!
https://store.promobile.online/products/pro-mobile-magazine-6-issue-1-year-subscription
You’ll also get full interactive access to this and the last year of magazines via the Pro Mobile Magazine App which is available from both the Apple App Store and Android PlayStore
Stepping off the plane at London Heathrow, the exceptionally talented Lewis knows that, with world domination already in his sights, a long, successful career lies ahead.
But in a few short minutes, and with two simple questions, that’s all about to change.
In the airport, a reporter called Paul Tanfield asks a young woman in Lewis’s entourage who she is.
“I’m Myra,” she replies. “Jerry’s wife.”
Tanfield directs his second question to Jerry Lee: “And how old is Myra?”
She’s 13 years old. Myra Gale Brown is also Lewis’s cousin once-removed.
The British people respond to this revelation by boycotting the tour. Audiences are slim. Many who attend simply do so in order to boo and catcall the disgraced star. And although Lewis tries to ride out the controversy, it doesn’t go away. Amidst these revelations of child marriage, he leaves the UK just a week after he arrived, chased out by an inquisitive press and an angry public. His career would never fully recover.
-
With his wild stage persona and furious piano playing, Jerry Lee Lewis is credited as a pioneer of rock and roll and rockabilly music. Some even consider him to be the greatest rock and roller ever – over Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry. But to explore his story, you need to separate the man from the legend and be up front about his personal life, including the claims of abuse levelled against him.
Whilst marrying a 13-year-old may have been legal in 1950s Louisiana, the UK public knew it was wrong in 1958 – and in 2022 we would only ever view this situation as child sexual abuse.
By the time of Jerry Lee’s death in late 2022, his reputation was still tarnished and the obituaries focussed largely on his seven controversy-filled marriages, the allegations of abuse and adultery, and the tragedy that seemed to follow him wherever he went. The last of the great rock and rollers, finally following his contemporaries to the grave.
Raised in Eastern Louisiana in a poor farming family, Lewis started playing piano with his cousins as a kid. Realising their son’s evident talent, his parents decided to mortgage their farm to buy him a piano of his own. Aged 14, he made his first public performance as part of a country band, playing at a car dealership in his hometown of Ferriday.
Although Lewis’s mother was keen for him to perform evangelical music exclusively, enrolling him at a local bible institute, it wasn’t long before his rebellious antics had got him excluded. So, he began playing the local clubs, becoming part of the emerging rock and roll scene.
We forget that in the 1950s, rock and roll music was cutting edge and dangerous. There was a reason its denouncers called it "the devil's music"; it was the playground of bad, crazy, sometimes despicable people. The scene was a scary place to work and you had to be tough to survive. (Jerry Lee Lewis fit right in thanks to his nickname ‘The Killer’, allegedly given to him by his schoolmates after he attempted to strangle a teacher using their tie.)
The pioneers of the genre were like fallen angels; Christian kids tempted by the dark side. Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash – all were raised on religion, often Baptist or evangelical, but in search of something more, something wilder. Jerry Lee was allegedly thrown out of evangelical school, angering his schoolmasters by performing an outrageous boogie-woogie version of ‘My God is Real’. That was the thing about this generation of musicians: they were often deeply religious and most certainly influenced by gospel, but they didn’t want to be bound by it, choosing to infuse their music with religious fervour whilst challenging social taboos around sex.
In 1952, down in New Orleans, Lewis cut his first demo with the legendary studio owner and engineer Cosimo Matassa, the man credited with recording what many hail as the first rock and roll record, Fats Domino’s ‘The Fat Man’ [1949], as well as classics like ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard [1955]. Along with production collaborators Dave Bartholomew and Allen Toussaint, Matassa’s work was crucial to the development of rock and soul music in the 1950s and 60s.
Then, in 1956, the cock-sure musician walked into Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, confident he was ready for the big time. Studio owner Sam Phillips, the man responsible for discovering Elvis, was impressed with what he heard and gave Lewis his big break as a session pianist on songs by Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Billy Lee Riley.
“He was the most talented man I ever worked with, Black or white,” Phillips would later say. “One of the most talented human beings to walk on God’s earth.”
It was during one of these Sun sessions, for Perkins, that Elvis and Johnny Cash happened to...
To read the full article, you’ll need to have a physical copy of the magazine which you can sign up for here for 6 issues delivered to your door from just £16!
https://store.promobile.online/products/pro-mobile-magazine-6-issue-1-year-subscription
You’ll also get full interactive access to this and the last year of magazines via the Pro Mobile Magazine App which is available from both the Apple App Store and Android PlayStore
The full review can be found in Pro Mobile Issue 117, Pages 58-64.
