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There have been, Jerry
Lee Lewis has always insisted, four great stylists in
American music history: that is, four performers who
have
set the
tone for all who followed. They
are Jimmie Rodgers, Al Jolson, Hank Williams -- and, of
course, Jerry Lee Lewis. To these, on any given day
Jerry Lee, who has unquestionably, and unmistakably,
stylized every song he has ever sung, might admit one or
two more, or even as many as half a dozen, to the
pantheon. On this particular day, as we speak at the
Lewis Ranch in a small Mississippi town that announces
itself as “Home of Jerry Lee Lewis ‘The Killer’,” the
legendary bad boy of rock tips his hat to B.B. King, Ray
Charles, Frank Sinatra (“I think Frank Sinatra is one of
the greatest singers I ever heard”), Elvis Presley, and
gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. “I tell you, man,
that woman could sing some
rock ‘n’ roll!
First time I ever heard her, in Natchez, Mississippi, I
was eight or nine, and she was singing religious music,
but she was hitting that guitar, man, she’s shakin’, and
she is singing rock ‘n’
roll.
I said, ‘Whoo-ooo!’”
Which could pretty well
express the reaction any first-time listener might have
to this album. Comprised in equal parts of blues,
country, a uniquely rhythm and blues-ized gospel feel,
and, of course, rock ‘n’ roll, it comes across as
nothing but pure Jerry Lee Lewis, just as every one of
the artists he admires, each a synthesist of the first
order, comes across in the end as nothing but him or
herself. What makes the album so extraordinary is the
same thing that immediately made legendary Sun Records
founder Sam Phillips sit up and take notice when Jerry
Lee Lewis, barely twenty-one, first arrived with his
father at the door of Phillips’ fabled Memphis recording
studio nearly fifty years ago. They had sold all the
eggs from the family farm to make the journey from
Ferriday, Louisiana (just across the river from
Natchez), and Jerry Lee Lewis, then as now, simply
demanded to be heard. Whether it was the gale of an
undeniable life force, his irrepressible belief in
himself (“I am the great ‘I AM,’” he announced as a
teenager to his understandably resentful younger
sisters, as if that should explain why they had to.
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