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Jerry Lee Lewis has passed

3 years ago

JERRY LEE LEWIS, THE LAST ORIGINATOR OF ROCK, DIES AT 87


Somewhere in the world, in a mean little honky-tonk or big music hall or church basement rec room, someone is playing a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Wherever there is a piano, someone is shouting…

You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain
Too much love drives a man insane…

“But they won’t play it like the Killer,” Lewis liked to say, as if he needed to make sure the whole world was hearing him right, hearing the pounding genius of it, in songs like “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Breathless” and “Great Balls of Fire.”


“’Cause,” he liked to say, “ain’t but one of me.”

You broke my will
But what a thrill…


Lewis, perhaps the last true, great icon of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, whose marriage of blues, gospel, country, honky-tonk and raw, pounding stage performances so threatened a young Elvis Presley that it made him cry, has died.

He was there at the beginning, with Elvis, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, and the rest, and watched them fade away one by one till it was him alone to bear witness, and sing of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.


There is more on his Facebook Page.


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