NewsUSAJerry Lee Lewis, the last legend of the golden age of 'rock and roll', dies

Jerry Lee Lewis, the last legend of the golden age of ‘rock and roll’, dies

Jerry Lee Lewis, the last legend of the golden age of Rock And Roll, He died this Friday at the age of 87 at his home in Memphis (Tennessee). Some digital media had been rumoring about his death for a couple of days, but the sad news has come to an end this Friday. Eloquently nicknamed The Killer (El Asesino) due to his choleric temperament and interpretive fierceness, became a pioneer and icon of the genre, rivaled in the fifties with all that glorious advance party of the new music of the devil ―Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, outlived them all and continued to teach rage lessons well into his octogenarian status. But his already battered health has definitely turned his back on him. He leaves a movie life (in every way, also the literal: Great Balls of Fire triumphed on the big screen in 1989), tragic and truculent episodes and, above all, two of the most important songs of the fifties: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going on and, above all, his famous Great Balls of Fire.

He was born in Ferriday (Louisiana) in 1935, into a very poor family that knew how to sense his enormous artistic talent and insisted on buying him a third-hand wall piano that two of his cousins ​​​​taught him to play from the age of 10. He embodied the most fearsome and sharp profile of that new exciting music that was able to channel the desire for youthful liberation after the trauma of the war. Elvis could also be a sweet and lovable boy, but Lewis – long blond hair, strong southern accent, defiant and libidinous attitude – was the son-in-law that no father would want to find in his house. And all this despite having been educated in an evangelical church, an aspect that would always produce internal contradictions, because it sharpened the contrast with his crazy temperament, psychotic and prone to addictions.

He boasted of having made his public debut at the age of 14 with a concert at a car dealership, developed a bombastic and highly theatrical style (always on his feet, always sliding his fingers in virulent glissandos on the keys) and it ended up being inevitable that Sam Phillips, the founding plenipotentiary of Sun Records, knew of his adventures and signed him up for his studios in Memphis, first as a sideman and then as leader. There he met Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash in 1956, with whom he would join the so-called Million Dollar Quartet. It was just the prelude to his two superlative songs, which he would premiere on television The Steve Allen Show and that catapulted him to uncontrollable fame from coast to coast in the United States.

Jerry Lee Lewis, at a performance in Florida in 2019. Paul Hennessy (NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Success seemed to know no zenith, but the world would not take long to discover the darkest and most controversial side of the character. In May 1958, immersed in a tour of the United Kingdom that was to establish him as an idol also on the other side of the Atlantic, a reporter discovered that his third wife, his cousin Myra Gale Brown, was only 13 years old when they contracted. marriage. The scandal was huge, Lewis was accused of pederasty and had to suspend the entire schedule of performances when he had only had three concerts on English soil. He would never fully recover from that episode: American radio immediately banned him, and none of the hundreds of subsequent compositions by him would reach the charts. top 20 in the lists.

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