One of the last great rock’n’roll pioneers, American musician Jerry Lee Lewis, has died at the age of 87, his agent told AFP on Friday.
Associated for eternity with the song Great Balls of Firerenowned for his strong stage presence and dynamic piano style, rock legend from Louisiana (south), Jerry Lee Lewis died of natural causes, said the same source.
Both friend and rival of King Elvis Presley himself, Jerry Lee Lewis had influenced a whole generation of musicians, like Bruce Springsteen who said about him in 1995: “He doesn’t play rock’n roll, he’s the rock ‘n roll. »
He was as famous for his hits as for the dramas and scandals that marked his existence.
mortgaged farm
Born September 29, 1935 into a poor family in Ferriday, Louisiana, he discovered the piano at age 9 and his parents mortgaged the family farm to pay for his instrument.
In 1956, he left for Memphis (Tennessee), the mecca of new American music, and was one of the first to sign with the famous label Sun Records.
His meeting, that same year, with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins gave birth to a legendary recording session known as the “Million Dollar Quartet”.
In 1957, his first title, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ Onalready bears the mark of his disheveled style.
While rock is still in its infancy, crowds flock to see him pounding the keyboard fiercely with his fingers, elbows or feet, his hair swinging furiously to the frantic rhythm as he sends his stool waltzing in a wild dance step .
Some months later, Great Balls of Firewhich will also be the title of a docudrama on his life in 1989, propels him into the top of sales and makes him one of the most adored stars of the moment.
Scandal and boycott
A scandal erupts when the press discovers that his third wife, Myra Gale Brown, is his 13-year-old first cousin. American radio stations decided to boycott the singer, who fell out of favor for half a dozen years before resurfacing by abandoning rock for country music.
Fanciful and sometimes violent, alcohol and drugs have earned him serious health problems and as many problems with the police. But the legend does not weaken, on the contrary, and he is one of the first musicians inducted into the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” (museum and pantheon of rock, in Cleveland, Ohio), when it was created in 1986.
He spent part of his last years on his ranch in Nesbit, Mississippi, with his seventh wife, and was still performing in early 2019. But, following a minor stroke in May of that year, he canceled concerts.