On Jerry Lee Lewis

So happens Sam Philips had skipped town that day in 1956 when Jerry Lee Lewis chanced by Sun Studio and cut his first demo sides. If Philips hadn’t been visiting Florida, he could have been in Memphis to see the Great Ball of Fire’s coming-out conflagration, thereby putting Lewis on a list of personal discoveries that would come to include Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Ike Turner, B.B. King, Carl Perkins, Howlin’ Wolf, and Roy Orbison. He could have been the guy who’d found the guy who introduced the piano to rockabilly, or introduced rockabilly to the piano—it’s hard to say which—and made the two conversant with each other. The Great Ball of Fire flamed onward, and then, famously, it flamed out.

Having sex with a first cousin is never advisable, but it looks especially bad when the cousin is only 13. That number never looked so unlucky as it did for Lewis then. (Lewis came to his own defense by earnestly claiming that she was in fact 15.) Sometimes there really is such a thing as bad publicity, or at least there used to be. The stations wouldn’t play him; the labels wouldn’t record him. Not even Sam Philips would come to Lewis’s rescue. Lewis kept on rolling: Philips hadn’t made him, and he damn sure wouldn’t break him, neither. Only Jerry Lee Lewis could do that, and he would go on to do both, the making and the breaking, more times than anyone could count. In the meantime, though, he would try to record under a different name. It didn’t fly. Once the DJs heard that rocked-out piano, they knew it couldn’t be anybody else but Jerry.