born September 29, 1935
An American rock and roll and country music singer-songwriter and pianist. An early pioneer of rock and roll music, Lewis's career faltered after he married his young cousin, and he afterwards made a career extension to country and western music. He is known by the nickname 'The Killer'.
Genres:
Biography:
By now, the Southern Gothic tragicomedy of Lewis' life is well-known: the hillbilly thrown out of church for mixing boogie-woogie with sacred music, the wildman who routinely set his own piano on fire and played it until it burned to the ground, the reckless loudmouth bastard who married his fourteen-year-old cousin, setting off a scandal that badly damaged (but did not ultimately ruin) his career.
And yet, such stories tend to miss the essential point of Lewis' appeal. Here was a man, in his most potent form on his classic Sun Studios sides from the Fifties, who could easily synthesize country, R&B, hillbilly music, gospel, and blues into a style all his own, not just vocally but musically, and set it against the backdrop of works which had (much more often than not) already been recorded by others.
This is where the "stylist" part comes in: of his contemporaries, only Elvis' vision of America was bigger. The King got his crown by playing nice, however; The Killer simply asserted his right to remake gods in his image, as if pop culture were a party he'd noisily crashed. (All this as he struggled, arguably more than any other rock artist, with the dichotomy of the sacred and the secular.) Jerry Lee Lewis accomplished his greatest feats out of naked arrogance more than love of his audience or even music itself. But results are what count.
