Artist: Jerry Lee Lewis
Genre(s):
Retro
Rock & Roll
Discography:
Jerry Lee Lewis - 18 Original Sun Greatest Hits
Year: 2007
Tracks: 18
Rock and Roll Hero
Year: 2001
Tracks: 20
Great Balls Of Fire
Year: 1989
Tracks: 12
Complete Sun Years (1956-1963) (Cd8)
Year: 1983
Tracks: 30
Complete Sun Years (1956-1963) (Cd7)
Year: 1983
Tracks: 27
Complete Sun Years (1956-1963) (Cd6)
Year: 1983
Tracks: 32
Complete Sun Years (1956-1963) (Cd5)
Year: 1983
Tracks: 31
Complete Sun Years (1956-1963) (Cd4)
Year: 1983
Tracks: 29
Complete Sun Years (1956-1963) (Cd3)
Year: 1983
Tracks: 26
Complete Sun Years (1956-1963) (Cd2)
Year: 1983
Tracks: 30
Complete Sun Years (1956-1963) (Cd1)
Year: 1983
Tracks: 31
Rockin' Up A Strom
Year: 1974
Tracks: 30
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.9
Year: 1973
Tracks: 20
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.8
Year: 1973
Tracks: 20
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.7
Year: 1973
Tracks: 20
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.6
Year: 1973
Tracks: 20
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.5
Year: 1973
Tracks: 20
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.4
Year: 1973
Tracks: 20
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.3
Year: 1973
Tracks: 20
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.2
Year: 1973
Tracks: 13
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.11
Year: 1973
Tracks: 20
Jerry Lee Lewis - Sessions and Rare Vol.10
Year: 1973
Tracks: 10
Jerry Lee Lewis CD1
Year:
Tracks: 18
Is there an early rock & tumbler world Health Organization has a crazier reputation than the Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis? His exploits as a piano-thumping egocentric wild man with an unquenchable hunger for living have become the fodder for legion biographies, photographic film documentaries, and a full-length Hollywood moving-picture show. Certainly few other artists came to the party with more self-importance and gift than he and lived to state the taradiddle. And certainly tied fewer could successfully duct that vigor into their music and fly high doing it as well as Jerry Lee. When he stony-broke on the national scene in 1957 with his classical "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," he was every parents' worst nightmare perfectly accomplished: a long, blonde-haired Southerner world Health Organization played the piano and sang with uncontrolled violence and give up, spell at the same time reveling in his possess sex. He was rock & roll's low gear great risky valet and also stone & roll's first great eclecticist. Ignoring all manner of musical boundaries is something that has non merely allowed his music to have blanket variety, only to survive the fads and fashions as well. Whether singing a black bile country lay, a lowdown blues, or a fulgent rocker, Lewis' wholesale loyalty to the second brings forth performances that are altogether grounded in his personality and all singularly of one slice. Like the recordings of Hank Williams, Louis Armstrong, and few others, Jerry Lee's early recorded make is unrivaled of the most astonishing collections of American music in universe.
He was born to Elmo and Mamie Lewis on September 29, 1935. Though the family was grease pathetic, thither was enough money to be had to purchase a thirdhand just pianissimo for the family's nation shack in Ferriday, LA. Sharing piano lessons with his deuce cousins, Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Lee Swaggart, a ten-year old Jerry Lee Lewis showed noteworthy aptitude toward the instrument. A chaffer from piano-playing old cousin-german Carl McVoy unsecured the secrets to the boogie styles he was hearing on the wireless and crossways the tracks at Haney's Big House, owned by his uncle, Lee Calhoun, and catering to blacks entirely. Lewis interracial that up with gospel and country and started coming up with his possess style. He even interracial genres in the way he syncopated his rhythms on the piano; his left manus generally played a rock-solid boogie-woogie traffic pattern piece his correct played the high keys with much flamboyant filigree and showiness, be parts gospels ardour and Liberace showmanship. By the time he was 14, by all mob accounts, he was as good as he was ever leaving to get. Lewis was already ready for prime time.
Just his mother Mamie had other plans for the brigham Young mob prodigy. Not wanting to blow Jerry Lee's gifts on the sordid reality of usher byplay, she enrolled him in a holy Writ college in Waxahatchie, TX, secure in the knowledge that her son would today be solely singing his songs to the Lord. But fable has it that the Killer tore into a boogie-woogie rendition of "My God Is Real" at a christian church assembly that sent him packing the same night. The split personality of Lewis, torn betwixt the sacred and the profane (rock & pluck music), is something that has eaten off at him about of his adult living, causing untold aberrant personality changes over the days with no clear-cut answers to the job. What is certain is that by the time a 21-year-old Jerry Lee showed up in Memphis on the threshold of the Sun studios, he had been thrown proscribed of book college; been a complete failure as a sewing machine salesman; been turned down by most Nashville-based book companies and the Louisiana Hayride; been married twice; in poky formerly; and burned with the warmth that he truly was the next big thing.
Surface-to-air missile Phillips was on holiday when he arrived, simply his help Jack Clement assign Roland Janes on guitar and J.M. Van Eaton on drums behind Lewis, whose runny left mitt made a bass player surplus. This small building block would become the gist of Lewis' recording band for most the intact septet old age he recorded at Sun. The number one single, a hopped-up rendition of Ralph Mooney's "Softheaded Arms," sold in good enough quantities that Phillips kept bringing Lewis punt in for more than roger Huntington Sessions, astonied by his olympian computer memory for sure-enough songs and his predilection for rocking them up. A few years afterwards his low gear single was released, Jerry Lee was in the Sun studios earning some Christmas money, playing backup man piano on a Carl Perkins session that yielded the classics "Matchbox" and "Your True Love." At the shadower end of the recording, Elvis Presley showed up, Clement turned on the mag tape machine, and the impromptu One thousand thousand Dollar Quartet crush session ensued, with Perkins, Presley, and Lewis all having the time of their lives.
With the discharge of his low gear single, the road beckoned and it was here that Lewis' lasting stage character was developed. Discouraged because he couldn't dance about the stage strumming a guitar like Carl Perkins, he stood up in mid-song, kicked punt the pianoforte stool and, as Perkins has so saliently pointed proscribed, "a new Jerry Lee Lewis was born." This newfound stage confidence was not lost on Sam Phillips. While he loved the medicine of Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, he byword neither artist as a reliable competitor to Elvis' throne; with Lewis he thought he had a real shot. For the number one time in his very parsimonious spirit, Sam Phillips threw every dime of promotional capital he had into Lewis' next single, and the gamble paying turned a billion times all over. "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" went to number one on the area and the R&B charts, and was only held kO'd of the cover touch on the pop charts by Debbie Reynolds' "Tam." Suddenly Lewis was the hottest, newest, most exciting rock & roller tabu there. His television appearances and stage shows were fabled for their manic energy, and his competitive nature to best anyone else on the notice lED to the story about how he once set his pianoforte on fire at set's end to make it impossible for Chuck Berry to be his move. Nobody messed with the Killer.
Boche Lee's follow-up to "Shakin'" was some other shaping moment for his vocation, as well as for rock'n'roll & revolve. "Enceinte Balls of Fire" featured only piano and drums, just sounded huge with Phillips' production behind it. It got him into a rock & undulate picture (Gala affair) and his renown was spread to such a level that Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins left field Sun to go to Columbia Records. His adjacent single, "Breathless," had a promotional tie in with Dick Clark's Saturday night Bandstand establish, making it tercet hits in a row for the fledgling.
Only Lewis was sowing the seeds of his own end in disc time. He sneaked off and married his 13-year-old cousin-german, Myra Gale Brown, the daughter of his bass-playing uncle, J.W. Brown. With the Killer insistence that she go with him on a debut tour of duty of England, the British press got confidential information of the married couple and proceeded to crucify him in the press. The go was canceled and Lewis arrived back in the U.S. to determine his career in infrangible disorderliness. His records were banned nationwide by tuner stations of the Cross and his engagement monetary value went from $10,000 a night to $250 in any honky tonk that would soundless have him. Undeterred, he unbroken right on doing what he had been doing, head unbowed and driven to make it back up to the bigs, Jerry Lee Lewis stylus. It took him about a dozen age to pull in it off, merely lastly, with a sympathetic producer and a unexampled record company willing to exact a cease-fire with country disc jockeys, the Killer plant a unexampled rut, cutting one score later some other for Smash Records passim the recent '60s into the '70s. Still playing john Rock & roll onstage whenever the temper smitten him (which was often) piece retention all his releases virtuous land smitten a originative deal that suited Lewis well into the mid-'70s.
But spell his life history was soaring again, his personal living was falling aside. The adjacent decade and a half power saw several marriages fall apart (starting with his 13-year-long spousal relationship with Myra), the deaths of his parents and oldest son, battles with the I.R.S., and bouts with alcohol and pills that ofttimes left him hospitalized. Suddenly the Ferriday Fireball was nearing middle age and the raging fervency seemed to be burned out.
Simply the mid-'80s saw some other leap bulge to his career. A picture entitled Great Balls of Fire was about to be made of his life and Lewis was called in to sing the songs for the soundtrack. Showing everyone wHO was the material Killer, Lewis sounded energetic sufficiency to make you believe it was 1957 all over over again with the pilot light idle of stirring still burning bright. He too got a boost indorse to major-label edwin Herbert Land with a one-song appearance on the soundtrack for Shaft Tracy.
With box sets and compilations, documentaries, a bio flick, and his induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame all celebrating his legacy, Lewis quiet continued to book and turn, delivering work that vacillated from tepid to absolutely elysian. While his influence will carry on to bulk large large until there's no nonpareil left field to play rock & undulate pianoforte anymore, the plain verity is that there's only one Jerry Lee Lewis and American music will ne'er see another like him.
