It's possible that Jerry Lee Lewis – of the Ferriday, Louisiana Lewis clan – is pound for pound the greatest rocker ever to stomp a stage in any generation since that subversive music commenced. It is likely – and God bless Hank Williams – that The Killer is the best country singer ever to moan the blues, sing of done-wrong love, wives waving good bye, or forlorn saloons. Such a personage as Leonard Bernstein, a keyboard man of some repute, considered Jerry Lee one of the finest piano players this country ever produced. In fact, perch a parrot on his '88' and you've got the single greatest whore house professor the world has ever known. Not houses like Madame Claude's, the pride of Paris, but the scarlet houses of Natchez, Baton Rouge, and Memphis attended by men in ruffled cuff shirts and women with color on their eyes and cheeks. These rough-edged lives would have been his concert halls had The Killer gone that route. Jerry Lee Lewis is indeed a son of the South, the deepest South where life moves at the speed of the Big River as it sings its love song to the Gulf of Mexico.
Jerry Lee's first cousin is The Reverend Swaggert, a preacher known to pound both the Bible and the ladies of those sultry, mysterious southern evenings with equal fervor. Another cousin, Mickey Gilley, a fair country singer himself, described his outrageous relative this way: "Killer? You're talking about a man who puts away a fifth of tequila in the morning just to straighten out."....
When he is done with the road, Jerry Lee Lewis will go home and put his boots up at his Mississippi farm. He lives there with his daughter Phoebe and the many dogs roaming the place. It's a quiet life. The house is less than an hour from Memphis, which keeps him close to his business and not too far from the casinos. Even closer is the Mississippi River. In their own way both Jerry Lee and the Mississippi are emblematic of the south, eternal and undefeated. The wind is like a hymn through the juniper trees along the banks, providing accompaniment to the green and brown rolling river of history, as it pours into the Gulf which merges with the Atlantic which turns The Cape of Good Hope to join with all the oceans of time in their embrace of the world. And the Earth turns. And the sun rises and sets and rises again. And The Killer rocks on. (read the full story here)
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