Jerry Lee Lewis, rock ‘n’ roll icon, dies at 87 at Memphis home

Jerry Lee Lewis, who said rock ’n’ roll would send him to hell and kept playing it anyway, may know now whether his fears were justified.

Lewis died Friday at his home in Desoto County, Miss., his publicist confirmed to the Daily News. He was 87 and had been in frail health.

“He is ready to leave,” wife Judith, who was with Lewis when he died, said shortly before his death.

Nicknamed “The Killer,” Lewis in his early years was a piano-pounding maniac with a shock of blond hair that had a life of its own. He scored hits with “Crazy Arms” and “Breathless,” but his signatures were the propulsive “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” and the kinetic “Great Balls of Fire,” which began with Lewis hollering, “You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain/Too much-a love drive a man insane.”

The 1958 movie “High School Confidential” opened with Lewis singing the title song on the back of a flatbed truck. The late Roy Orbison, one of Lewis’ colleagues at Sun Records in the 1950s, called Lewis “the most exciting live performer I ever saw, including Elvis.” “Little Richard was fun and Elvis was cool,” Producer Don Dixon told NPR. “But Jerry Lee Lewis was frightening.” Lewis admitted in a 1986 interview that he sometimes frightened himself.

Lewis struggled with alcohol and cocaine addiction and was known for a violent temper as well as impulsive behavior — and an ego the size of his native Louisiana. In late 1958, two years after he conquered the rock ’n’ roll world, he got kicked out of it for marrying his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Gale. It took him almost a decade to reinvent himself as a country star, specializing in the whiskey-soaked laments of lonely men at closing time. He became as big in country as he had been in rock ’n’ roll, though he said he was still plagued by the question of what any of this “worldly music” would mean for his soul. “I don’t know whether my sinful indulgence in the music of the devil will condemn me to eternal hell,” he said in 1986. “I fear it will. Yet I’ve never been able to stop myself.”

The appeal of the “devil’s music” wasn’t hard to see. It lifted a poor backwoods Louisiana farmer’s son to international fame. Perhaps ironically, Lewis didn’t only play the music of the devil. His concerts were a brilliant synthesis of country, blues, rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, popular and gospel music. He was that good and he knew it.

His ego was legendary and fully in evidence from his earliest days at Sun. Assessing his colleagues there, including Elvis, Orbison, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, he said, “none of them could do what I could. Elvis could sing, but I could do it all.”

At the famed “Million Dollar Quartet” session in 1956, when Elvis, Cash and Perkins were informally playing together, Lewis repeatedly tried to cut in and take the lead role — even though he was there as a session pianist for Perkins and Elvis was the biggest pop star in the world. That session was colorfully recounted, with some dramatic license, in the Broadway show “Million Dollar Quartet.”

In 1986, soon after the real-life Lewis had joined Presley and eight others as the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he staked his claim again.

“What I had over most of the others was musicianship,” he said. “Who played the piano better than I did? Little Richard? He just banged on it.”

While Lewis’ rock ’n’ roll songs exuded full-throttle bravado, his country songs ran more to melancholy classics like “What Made Milwaukee Famous,” “Another Place, Another Time” and “She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye.”

Their themes included hard living, drinking and womanizing, reflecting the same restlessness that characterized Lewis’ real life.“Here’s another song about drinking and losing,” he deadpanned during a 1971 concert. “I don’t know why my friends keep writing these songs for Jerry Lee. Some friends.”

Lewis eventually blew through seven wives, two of whom died mysteriously and one of whom was that 13-year-old cousin, Myra Gale. She was his third wife and when that marriage was revealed in late 1958, almost a year after they took the vows, the backlash effectively killed his rock ’n’ roll career. It cost him almost all his radio play, despite his protests that a marriage like this was no big deal where he came from.

Lewis was born in Ferriday, La., to a farm family he said mortgaged its property to buy him a piano. He shared his early interest in music with two cousins: Mickey Gilley, who would become a country star, and Jimmy Swaggart, who would become a disgraced televangelist.

Lewis’ parents enrolled him in the Southwest Bible Institute of Waxahachie, Texas, hoping he would play the music of the Lord. When he played “My God Is Real” in a style that sounded a little too much like boogie-woogie, he later said, he was asked to leave.

He returned home, still a teenager, to pursue a secular music career in the exploding and rapidly changing popular music world of the early 1950s. He later said his main influence was country pianist Moon Mullican and the Saturday night party music he heard at exotic black clubs like Haney’s Big House.

After being turned down by the Grand Ol’ Opry and the Louisiana Hayride, he was hired by Sam Phillips of Sun Records as an artist and session player. He stayed at Sun through 1963, when he moved to Smash Records and started recording for the country market. He stayed on the charts through 1981, when his last major radio hit was “Thirty Nine and Holding.”

Starting in the 1970s, he also began reaching back to his rock ’n’ roll roots, recording songs like “Save the Last Dance For Me,” “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Drinking Wine Spo-Dee O-Dee,” which legend says was the first song he ever performed for a public audience — in 1949 at a local car dealership. He continued performing and recording all his life, and his 2006 duets album “Last Man Standing” was the biggest seller of his career. His last release was “Mean Old Man” in 2009.

In 2013 he opened a club on Beale Street in Memphis, where he made occasional appearances. Off-stage, over the course of his lifetime, he racked up a DUI arrest, filed for a $3.75 million bankruptcy, and had several run-ins with the IRS, which confiscated many of his possessions in 1979, but couldn’t convict him of tax evasion in 1984. He had at least one known drug overdose and spent time in the Betty Ford Center for addictions that included alcohol, cocaine and painkillers.

His most famous legal incident came on Nov. 23, 1976, when he drove up to Elvis’ Graceland mansion with a gun on the dashboard. Tabloid reports had him waving the gun and threatening to kill Elvis if he couldn’t get in. Lewis said he was there at Elvis’ invitation and that he never picked up his gun. He was not charged with any gun violations, though there was some evidence he had been drinking.

In addition to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Lewis received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy in 2005. In 1989 he was the subject of an unauthorized and often unflattering movie biography, “Great Balls of Fire,” based on a book by Myra Gale. It starred Dennis Quaid and was generally trashed by critics.

Lewis is survived by Judith and four children.