sure yet wild
Jerry Lee Lewis was born on September 29, 1935, in Ferede, Los Angeles, to carpenter Elmo Lewis and Mamie (Heron) Lewis. As a child, he and two of his cousins, future missionary Jimmy Swaggart and future country singer Mickey Jelly (who passed away this year), I love sneaking into a local dance floor, Haney’s Big House, to hear performances of the best blues.
Showing his willingness to piano, his father borrowed money to buy him one. “The more he exercises, the more confident the left hand becomes, and the more steady the right hand,” Mr. Tosches wrote in “Hellfire.”
At the age of 14, he was invited to sit with a band performing at a local Ford dealership, which was celebrating the arrival of the 1950’s models. He played “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee”—the melody, which was a hit for Sticks McGhee in 1949, it would be a minor success for Mr. Lewis in 1973 – and he earned nearly $15 when someone crossed the hat.
He soon became a regular member of clubs in Natchez, just across the Mississippi River, and at KWKH radio station in Shreveport, Los Angeles. His deeply concerned mother, a Pentecostal Christian, enrolled him at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas.
He said “I didn’t graduate” The New York Times in 2006. “I was kind of independent. I was asked to leave to play ‘My God Is Real’ choreography in rock ‘n’ roll style. I thought that was the way it should be played.”
After selling door-to-door sewing machines, Mr. Lewis tried his luck in Nashville, to no avail. “I remember it very well,” he told Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins, authors of The Sun Records: The Brief History of Legendary Record Naming (1980). “Every label in town has rejected me.”
