Jerry Lee Lewis : his own story

The greatest Southern storyteller of our time, New York Times bestselling author Rick Bragg, tracks down the greatest rock and roller of all time, Jerry Lee Lewis--and gets his own story, from the source, for the very first time.

A monumental figure on the American landscape, Jerry Lee Lewis spent his childhood raising hell in Ferriday, Louisiana, and Natchez, MississipΠ galvanized the world with hit records like "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls of Fire," that gave rock and roll its devil's ed≥ caused riots and boycotts with his incendiary performances; nearly scuttled his career by marrying his thirteen-year-old second cousin--his third wife of seven; ran a decades-long marathon of drugs, drinking, and women; nearly met his maker, twice; suffered the deaths of two sons and two wives, and the indignity of an IRS raid that left him with nothing but the broken-down piano he started with; performed with everyone from Elvis Presley to Keith Richards to Bruce Springsteen to Kid Rock--and survived it all to be hailed as "one of the most creative and important figures in American popular culture and a paradigm of the Southern experience."

Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story is the Killer's life as he lived it, and as he shared it over two years with our greatest bard of Southern life: Rick Bragg. Rich with Lewis's own words, framed by Bragg's richly atmospheric narrative, , this is the last great untold rock-and-roll story, come to life on the page.

Author Notes

Rick Bragg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. A national correspondent for the "New York Times", he lives in Miami, Florida.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Bragg, writing closely with Lewis, offers this rollicking, incendiary tale of the man who kick-started rock and roll and blazed a fiery trail strewn with heartache, happiness, regret, and memorable music. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bragg (All Over but the Shouting) sat down with Lewis over a period of two years and simply let Lewis tell his own story. From his childhood in Ferriday, La., and Natchez, Miss., Lewis chased music, discovering at age five his reason for being born when he sees the piano in his aunt's house. He couldn't sit still-"I come out jumpin', an' I been jumpin' ever since"-and he conducts us on a journey through his short-lived career at a Bible college, his discovery by Cowboy Jack Clement, his years at Sun Studio-including that now-famous, brief session with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis-his seven marriages, his children's deaths, his descent into drugs and alcohol, and his burning desire to play music above all else. "For Jerry Lee," writes Bragg, "fame was a thing that sometimes flogged him and sometimes let him be; he was capable, in the dark times, of losing all sight of the good in his music, of believing it was evil, until suddenly things would be just clear and he'd see it all so much better. The thing about rock and roll, he said, was that it made people crazy bad, but it more often made them happy, made them forget life for a while." As his song "Thirty-Nine and Holding"illustrates, Lewis hypnotizes with his tale, and Bragg stands back and lets him fly. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

An iconic rocker receives a warm, admiring biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. Lewis, born in 1935 (delivered by his father) and among the few remaining stars from the early days of rock 'n' roll, cooperated eagerlyif not always accuratelywith Bragg (The Most They Ever Had, 2011, etc.), now a professor (Writing/Univ. of Alabama). The author begins with Lewis' earliest memory about the piano, the instrument he would ride into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and throughout this account of a most raucous life, the author returns to remind us of Lewis' enormous gifts as a pianist and showman. He began playing at an early age and has not quit, arthritis and decay notwithstanding. Among his fans and friends were Elvis Presley (who coaxed Lewis into playing for hours on end) and other luminaries of the era, from Buddy Holly to Johnny Cash. Bragg gives us lots of family history (Mickey Gilley and evangelist Jimmy Swaggart are cousins) and offers a gripping account of Lewis' early struggles in the music world, when he would sneak into bars to watch and listen, playing nameless places for endless hours, then finally getting a break at Sun Records and his two biggest hits, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls of Fire." Bragg admirably charts Lewis' yo-yo life: seven marriages (including one to a teenage first cousin), wealth and penury and wealth again, run-ins with the law (drunk and armed, he rammed his car into the gate at Elvis' Graceland), and battles with substance abuse (Lewis claims not to have been as big a drinker as rumor insists). Throughout, Bragg displays his characteristic frisky prose. When Lewis played, he writes, "the girls bit their lips and went against their raisin'." From a skilled storyteller comes this entertaining, sympathetic story of a life flaring with fire, shuddering with shakin'. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Award-winning author Bragg could probably write about nearly anything, in his gorgeous and evocative prose, and readers would swoon. Here he writes about musician Jerry Lee Lewis, who made women swoon but also storm the stage and rip off his clothes, and who made men riot and swear and drink. Rocker Lewis was (with Elvis and a few notable others) the naughtily provocative face of rock 'n' roll from the 1950s onward, and, in a literary almost-conversation with Bragg, Lewis reflects on his life, performances, and choices. He probably wouldn't change a thing not even his bigamously marrying his 13-year-old cousin, causing a rise and fall unequaled in American music because he was lucky enough to not only do what he loved, make music, but also make a riotous living at it. The book is a toothsome read: Lewis' reminiscences of the wild times, stories backed by others and headlines of the day, and Bragg's refusal to cosset what Lewis tells him. Fans of Lewis' music will snap this up, but those seeking an unstinting exploration of a true phenomenon of American culture will find it a fine read as well.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2014 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

DESPITE THE TITLE of Jerry Lee Lewis's 2006 album "Last Man Standing," a few other survivors from rock's early days still remain. Chuck Berry, an old nemesis, is still around. So are Little Richard, Fats Domino and Wanda Jackson, the let's-have-a-party girl who briefly dated Elvis Presley and shouted her own version of the Lewis anthem "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." Still, Lewis is the summation of that early period, before cleaner-cut teen idols like Frankie Avalon and Fabian came on the scene. In Tolkien parlance, he's the one ring that binds them, and as such, he deserves a rich and textured biography. There's plenty of richness in Rick Bragg's retelling of the Killer's life, but the texture is problematic. The reader is advised to approach this prolix history with several grains of salt, because Bragg, clearly entranced by his willing and cooperative subject, provides little. As one of Lewis's own songs proudly proclaims, it's the Lewis boogie in the Lewis way, and few are left to contradict him. Some who might-Buddy Holly, Sam Phillips of Sun Records, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Elvis himself-are long dead. Jerry Lee (so he refers to himself, as in "Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niaguh Falls. Now let's go home, boys") was a hell-raiser from the start, a breech baby who came into the world feet first The doctor showed up in time to do the delivery, but not exactly sober. Jerry Lee's father, Elmo Lewis, gave him some corn whiskey, and Dr. Sebastian promptly passed out. Elmo delivered the baby himself as his wife, Mamie, deep in labor, exhorted him to be careful of the arms and head. In 1940, at the age of 4, Jerry Lee discovered the piano in his Aunt Stella's house. "I saw it, and I just stopped, cold," he tells Bragg. "I just had to get at it." In 1943, Elmo Lewis mortgaged his farm to buy his talented son his own piano. By the age of 10, Jerry Lee was sneaking into a local blues emporium called Haney's Big House (he urged his cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, to come with him, but Jimmy, fearing damnation, refused). He played his first professional gig at the local Ford dealership, blasting out Stick McGhee's "Drinkin' Wine Spo-dee-o-dee." His aunt and his mother (whose favorite axiom was "Money makes the mare trot") passed the hat, and Jerry Lee took home $14, one dollar for each year of his young life. He tried the ministry, enrolling in the Southwestern Bible Institute, but was expelled for playing "My God Is Real" boogie-woogie style. The piney woods come-to-Jesus religion he was raised in never left him (early in his recording career, he shared his belief-recorded in the Sun studios, and at top volume-that he was going to hell for singing "Great Balls of Fire"), but the call of secular music was too strong. Put simply, he was born to rock, and rock he did, through seven marriages, the deaths of two children, hundreds of honky-tonk hookups and more than a few wrecked cars, addiction to painkillers, surgical removal of a third of his stomach, constant (and undoubtedly justified) harassment by the I.R.S., bankruptcy, and a Rolling Stone article by Richard Ben Cramer suggesting he may have murdered Shawn Stephens, his fifth wife. (Stephens died, apparently of a methadone overdose, just 77 days after marrying the man whose lifelong nickname, bestowed after he tried to strangle a teacher with the teacher's own necktie, was the Killer.) Bragg, a former reporter for The New York Times, hits all the legendary moments, both high and low. There was the rock revue where Lewis, infuriated that Chuck Berry had been chosen to close the show, set the piano on fire after his own set and swaggered offstage. "First time I ever saw a colored guy turn white," he tells Bragg. There was the night Janis Joplin slapped his face and Lewis slapped hers right back. The night he crashed into the gates at Graceland, drunk on champagne and with a loaded derringer floating around somewhere in his Lincoln Continental. His reaction to Elvis's death not long after is chilling in its offhandedness: "Just another one out of the way." And, of course, there was the marriage to his 13-year-old third cousin, Myra Brown, who left home with her clothes stuffed into her dollhouse because she didn't own a suitcase. Protests that his own sister, Frankie Jean, had married at the age of 12 only made matters worse. The news got out-of course it did-and torpedoed what should have been a triumphal tour of England in the spring of 1958. BABY SNATCHER! the British tabloids thundered. The story also ended his short period as a teen idol in America. Yet he rose from the ashes again and again, first as a country artist, later as a miraculous rock 'n' roll dinosaur who could still tear the place up and play the piano with his feet. Mick Jagger once waited to get his Jerry Lee albums signed; John Lennon dropped to his knees and kissed the Killer's feet. The man who once invited Paul Anka to jump off a rooftop in Sydney and played lago in a big-beat version of "Othello" called "Catch My Soul" (arguably the world's first rock opera) was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. Bragg tells all this and more. Too much more. He seems to see his subject as a rock 'n' roll version of Willie Stark, but his prose all too often falls short of Robert Penn Warren and bogs down in the pulsing and over-curlicued style of Charles Frazier on a bad day. "Now, on silver wings," Bragg rhapsodizes, "he floated above the mean little beer joints and honky-tonks and jukes where he had been forced to make his living." Of Highway 61, Bragg writes that "dreams and failed ambition piled like old bones in the ditches on either side." "Pretty slow, son," Lewis might say. "You best pick up the tempo. Shake it but don't break it." Bragg, who grew up in Possum Trot, Ala., seems a little too eager to prove his good-ol'-boy credentials. Lewis himself is more succinct and colorful almost every time. Bragg speaks of "that mysterious thing he has always had cloaked around him, something beyond science." That thing is not mysterious at all to Lewis, who is direct and to the point on the subject of his sex appeal: "If I's 51," he tells Bragg with that age some 25 years behind him, "they'd have to hide the women." There are diamonds in the rough, though. Most show up when Bragg isn't trying to achieve poetic resonance. "Whole Lotta Shakin'," he writes, "was a song without a speck of nice in it." Or when describing Hank Williams after he went Nashville, dressed in "rhinestones and glitter and whatnot, like a dime store blew up all over him." Bragg's assessment of Lewis as "a tar baby for temptation" pretty well sums the man up, and if that doesn't, there's his observation that "the only person who could stop Jerry Lee...was Jerry Lee." Even so, it's the Killer himself who nails it dead center, looking back from old age across the shattered sparkle of his life: "It was brutal, I tell you. It was killin'." And then, in the next breath: "It was beautiful." My mother first clapped eyes on Jerry Lee Lewis in 1958, when he performed "Great Balls of Fire" on one of Dick Clark's shows. There he was in all his leopard skin glory, with his long blond hair flying and flash-pots going off in the background. Most acts lip-synced, but that was never Lewis's way. My mother-no slouch at the keyboard herself, and more than willing to play barrelhouse boogie on the Methodist church piano after she'd had a drink or two-was transfixed. When the performance was over, after less than two minutes of high-tension rock 'n' roll, she said softly, wonderingly, "I think that young man is crazy." Then she added, almost to herself, "But he can play the piano like the Devil lit his behind on fire." Yes. Just like that. And although Rick Bragg belabors the point, it makes this overlong biography worth reading. STEPHEN KING plays rhythm guitar for the Rock Bottom Remainders. He is the author, most recently, of the novel "Revival."

Library Journal Review

An epic life deserves an epic narrative, and Pulitzer Prize winner Bragg (All Over but the Shoutin') delivers such with this major work on rock and roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis. Bragg conducted multiple long interviews with the musician, providing the framework for the book, which uses novelistic style and detail while richly describing Lewis's early life in Louisiana and Mississippi, his youthful musical forays, and his meteoric rise to fame in the late 1950s, by way of his own memories and recollections. Bragg chronicles recordings with Sun Records, whirlwind tours, and interactions with music legends as well as a chaotic personal life, problems with drugs and drink, and reckless behavior that early on derailed Lewis's career until a comeback and his eventual ascension to elder rock statesman who here ruminates on the blazing trail that he created. Verdict With Lewis's reminiscences and thoughts filtered and examined through Bragg's evocative writing, readers get an original look at an innovator of rock music as well as an examination of a specific time and place during a thrilling and tumultuous period in the cultural history of the late 20th century. [See Prepub Alert, 6/2/14.]-James Collins, Morristown-Morris Twp. P.L., NJ (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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