Podcast appearances and mentions of Rick Bragg

Folks say that the best stories of the South are written in recipes; you hear it so much it begins to sound like just something to say. But I have seldom listened to my people speak of the past without talking, sooner or later, about chicken. We honor people with it. — Rick Bragg, humorist and storytellerAlmost every great culture tells incredible numbers of stories through the foods that they serve, the foods that they eat, the foods that they cook, and the recipes they create.Think about that in terms of how you go about marketing your books, your services, your other products. Learn to tell a story. Create a great recipe.And the recipe doesn't have to be about food. It can be about how to get something done. Just start to share some of the best stories you can possibly share.Comment on this video post and receive a free copy of my new book, Write a Bestseller in 30 Days or Less 111 Books You Can Write Fast — With Examples!Website: https://www.bookauthorauthority.comWebsite: https://www.bookmarketingbestsellers.comBook Marketing Success is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bookmarketing.substack.com/subscribe

GEORGIA RADIO - This Thursday, February 1st at 12 pm (noon), Dr. Elyse Wheeler, a prominent member of the Carrollton Writer's Guild, will take to the airwaves on GeorgiaRadio.com for an exclusive conversation with host Matt Jolley. The focus of the discussion will be the highly anticipated Carrollton Bookfest and Writer's Conference, set to captivate literary enthusiasts on April 5th and 6th, 2024. The Carrollton Bookfest promises to be an enriching experience for writers and book lovers alike. Listeners can expect insights into the event's highlights, including a Master Class by celebrated Southern Author, Bren McClain. McClain's expertise is sure to provide aspiring writers with a unique opportunity to refine their skills and gain valuable insights into the craft.A major draw for attendees will be the keynote address by Pulitzer Prize recipient and Best Selling author Rick Bragg. Bragg's presence is expected to elevate the event, offering attendees a chance to learn from one of the most accomplished figures in the literary world. The event's official website, CarrolltonBookfest.com, serves as a comprehensive resource for those seeking more information about the conference. Notably, the Bookfest will extend its Writers Conference to two days, providing even more opportunities for participants to engage with the literary community.Friday's schedule includes workshops and a Master Class by Bren McClain. In the evening, the Carrollton Writers Guild will collaborate with the Carroll County Community Theater for a performance showcasing local literary talent. The excitement continues on Saturday morning with a featured author interview, this year featuring the renowned Rick Bragg.The theme of mystery and crime will be explored in presentations by best-selling authors Hank Phillippi Ryan and Deborah Goodrich Royce. The lineup also includes Robert Gwaltney, winner of the Georgia Author of the Year for best first novel, and Kim Conrey, named Georgia Author of the Year for Romance. The Carrollton Bookfest and Writer's Conference will host an array of national and local accomplished authors, providing attendees with a unique opportunity to learn, network, and celebrate the world of literature. Whether you're passionate about fiction, poetry, memoirs, or non-fiction, this event promises to be a valuable resource for writers at all stages of their journey. Fans of books are also warmly invited to immerse themselves in the literary atmosphere of this dynamic two-day event.QUICK LINK: https://www.carrolltonbookfest.com#georgiawriters #georgiaradio #carrolltonbookfest #carrolltonwritersguild #carrolltongaAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This week, we welcome Shane Gottwals, owner of Gottwals Books, a shop that began as a used and new bookstore in 2007 and has developed into a chain of stores carrying a wide range of genres for all age groups and interests. Go deeper into the story of Gottwals Books with Chapter By Chapter: The Gottwals Books Story, available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znsfw_2G_Fk. Books We Talk About: The works of C.S. Lewis, Wendell Berry, Andrew Peterson, Rick Bragg, Rabbit Room Press and Wolfbane Books.

Author Rick Bragg joins Don to talk about his memoir All Over But The Shoutin.

Join Nashville Public Television's A Word on Words for an engaging episode featuring acclaimed author Rick Bragg as he discusses his latest book, The Speckled Beauty, with host Jeremy Finley. In this captivating memoir, Bragg masterfully weaves together the Southern landscape and the deep bond between humans and their animal companions, particularly his beloved dog. Prepare for an enchanting conversation that explores the transformative power of literature, the wonders of the natural world, and the profound connections forged with our four-legged friends.

“I never start a book out with ideas. I always start a book out with people in places, and what could happen here.” Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, brings readers to the Great Depression-era American West with impeccably researched history in his new novel, The Trackers, featuring a vivid cast holding secrets and ambitions that transcend the past. Frazier talks about the photograph that inspired the characters, the excitement and drama of book tours, taking his time to get the language right and more with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Jamie. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.   Featured Books (Episode): The Trackers by Charles Frazier Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton   Featured Books (TBR Topoff): The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles Ava's Man by Rick Bragg

This Easter Weekend, In Focus brings you two stories of looking back. First, Catherine Allard looks back over two decades plus of hosting "Opus 3" a weekly program of classical music and conversation heard on Troy Public Radio. Then author Rick Bragg remembers his "Speckled Beauty" a stray dog that he thought he saved. As it turns out, the dog ended up saving his family by becoming a healing presence for Bragg's brother and mother.

Rick Bragg talks Jerry Lee Lewis...with TRE's Giles Brown

"The Killer" Jerry Lee Lewis died on Friday at 87. His biographer Rick Bragg joined us this morning to talk about Jerry's incredible life in rock & roll!

Bentornati su Bookatini - il podcast per chi è ghiotto di libri. Nella puntata 39, la prima della terza stagione, parliamo dei libri che abbiamo letto di recente. Come al solito trovate tutti i riferimenti ai libri citati anche nella carrellata delle copertine della pagina Instagram bookatini_podcast.Nell'episodio di oggi abbiamo chiacchierato di questi libri: -Randagi, di Marco Amerighi, Bollati Boringhieri editore-Il randagio che mi ha preso il cuore. Storia di Speck, il pastore australiano combinaguai che mi ha salvato la vita, di Rick Bragg, Aboca editore-Lo stretto necessario, di Alessandro Forestieri, LFA Publisher-L'ultimo scodinzolio. La morte degli animali, di Raffaele Mantegazza, Ortica editriceAltri libri citati-Spatriati, di Nario Desiati, Einaudi editore-Matrix, di Lauren Groff, BompianiPotete contattarci, scrivere commenti, suggerimenti, domande e condividete con noi le vostre letture su questo tema contattandoci nella pagina Instagram Bookatini_podcast, dove potete trovare anche le nostre live, in onda a mercoledì alterni Se volete sostenerci e godere di contenuti aggiuntivi, potete unirvi a 4 possibili livelli di Patreon che trovate al link:https://www.patreon.com/bookatiniEcco i dettagli:-Con un contributo di 1 € al mese potete diventare BOOKATINI IN BIANCO. A che cosa hai diritto?o alla nostra eterna gratitudine-Con un contributo di 1,5 € al mese potete diventare BOOKATINI AL SUGO. A che cosa hai diritto?o alla nostra eterna gratitudineoA news e aggiornamenti sulle nostre letture, con anticipazioni, scoop e confronti diretti-Con un contributo di 3 € al mese potete diventare BOOKATINI AL PESTO. A che cosa hai diritto?o alla nostra eterna gratitudineoA news e aggiornamenti sulle nostre letture, con anticipazioni, scoop e confronti direttiouna puntata bonus! Abbiamo deciso di trasferire su questa piattaforma la rubrica "Ce l'ho e l'ho anche letto": sarai quindi tra i pochi eletti a poter usufruire di questo contenuto inedito-Con un contributo di 5 € al mese potete diventare i pregiati BOOKATINI AL TARTUFO. A che cosa hai diritto?o alla nostra eterna gratitudineoA news e aggiornamenti sulle nostre letture, con anticipazioni, scoop e confronti direttiouna puntata bonus! Abbiamo deciso di trasferire su questa piattaforma la rubrica "Ce l'ho e l'ho anche letto": sarai quindi tra i pochi eletti a poter usufruire di questo contenuto ineditooGruppo di Lettura su TelegramLa sigla di Bookatini è scritta e suonata da Andrea Cerea

Rick Bragg's Speckled Beauty

Shawn and Simon show some love for the humble cabbage. Plus, what makes a good coleslaw and why something as stupid as edible gold has a place on your plate.  Questions, comments or corrections? Hit us up at email@eatdrinkcheap.ca eatdrinkcheap.ca eadrinkbreathe.com/podcast Music by John Palmer Show notes and Shout Outs: Pattison Farms: http://www.pattisonfarms.ca/ Goldschlager: https://www.sazerac.com/our-brands/sazerac-brands/goldschlager.html The Abomination That is Bad Coleslaw by Rick Bragg: https://time.com/4060038/bad-slaw-my-southern-journey/ Organ Freeman: https://liveforlivemusic.com/features/getting-to-know-organ-freeman-funky-la-trio-with-the-best-band-name/ Taste Tibet by Julie Kleeman and Yeshi Jampa: https://www.kaveyeats.com/taste-tibet-by-julie-kleeman-and-yeshi-jampa The Soups of France by Lois Ann Rothert: https://www.amazon.com/Soups-France-Lois-Anne-Rothert/dp/0811833429#:~:text=The%20Soups%20of%20France%20feels,the%20author%2C%20Lois%20Anne%20Rothert.

You no doubt know that Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin, both of the New York Times, recently released their new book THIS WILL NOT PASS…chronicling the last few years of our politics…including Trump's time in office, the 2020 election and aftermath, the January 6 insurrection, and the first phase of the Biden Administration. In this conversation, they go deep on many of the stories in their book – including some background and asides not fleshed out in the book and stories you won't have heard from them amidst their recent media blitz. IN THIS EPISODE…Does Donald Trump really think he won the 2020 election or is this all subterfuge to refuse to acknowledge he lost?Which US Senator was prescient in anticipating exactly how Trump would cast doubt on the results post election?Why hasn't President George W. Bush been more vocal against Trump?One Republican Senator who typifies the GOP establishment's difficulty managing Trump?How many Republicans would've impeached and removed Trump were it a secret ballot?Inside Mitch McConnell's decision to back Trump on impeachment…Whose hold on his caucus is more tenuous…Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy…The conventional wisdom of what a post-Pelosi Democratic caucus looks like…Inside the Biden VP process…Inside GOP attempts to woo Senator Manchin to switch parties…Weighing in on rumors Trump flirted with dumping Mike Pence from the 2020 ticket…The backbench Republican Congressman who captured the House GOP sentiment to give Trump a pass for January 6…The Democratic Governor who was one of their favorite interviews…The failed GOP Senate recruit who shows the changing of the guard in the Republican Party…The interview with the House Republican that demonstrates “the beauty of reporting…”…The two colleagues they specifically mention in the acknowledgements…The Southern influence on the New York Times…Off-the-beaten-path political book recommendations from both Alex and Jonathan…AND Air Force One, Lamar Alexander, Don Bacon, Howard Baker, Dean Baquet, Beau Biden, John Boehner, Josh Bolton, Rick Bragg, Mo Brooks, Jeb Bush, Robert Caro, Turner Catledge, Liz Cheney, Chris Christie, Katherine Clark, Hillary Clinton, colonoscopies, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, convenient self-justification, Bob Corker, defied admonitions, difficult truths, Dixiecrats, Duck Run, Tammy Duckworth, Dwight Eisenhower, Facebook, Fox News, Jeffrey Frank, Maggie Haberman, Kamala Harris, Bill Haslam, the House Steering Committee, Sasha Issenberg, Pramila Jayapal, Hakeem Jeffries, Bill Johnson, Jim Jordan, John F Kennedy, Michelle Lujan Grisham, Patrick McHenry, Mt Rushmore, musical chairs, Richard Nixon, Kristi Noem, normie Republicans, Robert Novak, the Progressive Caucus, Howell Raines, real damn Democrats, red carpets, Reservoir Dogs, Campbell Robertson, Karl Rove, Steve Scalise, Brian Schatz, Adam Schiff, Ted Strickland, Gay Talese, Harry Truman, useful fig leaves, JD Vance, Gretchen Whitmer, Roger Wicker, Steve Womack, worry-mongering, Jeff Zients…& more!

Hank Lazer has published nineteen books of poetry, including N24 (2014) and N18 (2012), Portions (2009), The New Spirit (2005), Elegies & Vacations (2004), and Days (2002). Pages from Lazer's shape-writing handwritten notebooks have been performed with soprano saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar, most recently at the University of Georgia and in two concerts in Havana, Cuba. Lazer's Selected Poems in translation will be appearing in books in the coming year in China, Cuba, and Italy. Over the past fifteen years, Lazer has collaborated with various jazz musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, and visual artists in seeking new ways to present poetry. In 2015, Lazer was selected to receive Alabama's most prestigious literary prize, the Harper Lee Award, for lifetime achievement in literature, joining past recipients of the award such as Winston Groom, Fanny Flagg, and Rick Bragg. Lazer retired in January 2014 from his positions as Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, Executive Director of Creative Campus, and Professor of English. He is now able to teach more frequently, and to spend more time reading, writing, taking his dogs for walks, playing golf, and traveling on his poetry passport. He continues to serve as a Senior Fellow with the Blount Undergraduate Initiative.

Don sits with Rick Bragg to discuss his new book, "The Best Cook In The World: Tales From My Momma's Table" at the Digital Media Center at the University of Alabama. 

Pulitzer prize winner Rick Bragg talks with In Focus host Carolyn Hutcheson about his new book, "The Speckled Beauty, A Dog and His People, Lost and Found."  Speck, a stray Australian Shepherd mix adopted by Rick, seemed to know how to help heal Rick, his mother, and brother, as they faced  emotional challenges later in life.  Rick Bragg recently received the Fitzgerald Museum Award for Excellence in Writing.

Jacek Świąder pisze o muzyce od lat, prowadzi podcast Ktoś Ruszał Moje Płyty i dużo o muzyce czyta.  Anna Karczewska nie umie zdecydować, czy bardziej kocha muzykę, czy książki. Wspólnie rozmawiają o książkach o muzyce i o muzykach, sporo o punk rocku, o tym, czego słuchają czytając i co czytają słuchając. Książki do czytania: 1.       „Please Kill Me. Punkowa historia punka” Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain, Wydawnictwo Czarne 2.        „Polski Punk 1978-1984” Ania Dąbrowska Lyons, Manufaktura Legenda 3.       „Cash. Autobiografia” Johnny Cash, Wydawnictwo Czarne 4.       „Ja. Pierwsza i jedyna autobiografia Eltona Johna” Elton John, Wydawnictwo Otwarte 5.       „Przenikliwe światło, słońce i cała reszta. Joy Division w ustnych relacjach” Jon Savage, Kosmos Kosmos 6.       „Jerry'ego Lee Lewisa opowieść o własnym życiu” Rick Bragg, Wydawnictwo Czarne 7.       „Załatw publikę i spadaj. W poszukiwaniu Jamesa Browna, amerykańskiej duszy i muzyki soul” James McBride 8.       „Tom Waits. Życie na poboczu” Barney Hoskyns, Kosmos Kosmos 9.       „Buszujący w barszczu” Konstanty Usenko, Wydawnictwo Czarne 10.   „Oczami radzieckiej zabawki” Konstanty Usenko, Wydawnictwo Czarne 11.   „Dzika rzecz. Polska muzyka i transformacja 1989-1993” Rafał Księżyk, Wydawnictwo Czarne

S6 E66: In this episode, meet actress Elisa Donovan, columnist and writing teacher Rick Bragg, and writer, director, and producer Nick Davis. Step into the studio and hear Elisa Donovan on how dreams can lead us out of despair, Rick Bragg on how his life was transformed by a poorly behaved stray dog, and Nick Davis on writing a dual biography of the most famous brothers from Hollywood's Golden Age—who happen to be his grandfather and great uncle. Plus, insights fresh from the recording booth. Wake Me When You Leave by Elisa Donovan: https://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/706465/wake-me-when-you-leave/ The Speckled Beauty by Rick Bragg: https://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/624886/the-speckled-beauty/ Competing with Idiots by Nick Davis: https://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/37845/competing-with-idiots/

What happens when you meet Brooklyn's voodoo queen in New Orleans? Author Mandy Haynes will answer that question as we explore New Orleans voodoo traditions. https://threedogswritepress.com/ Mandy Haynes has spent hours on barstools, at backstage venues, and riding in vans listening to tales from some of the best songwriters and storytellers in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in Fernandina Beach, Florida with her three dogs, a turtle, and a grateful liver. Walking the Wrong Way Home was a finalist for the 2017 Tartt Fiction Award and chosen as a bonus book for The 2019 Pulpwood Queen Book Club Reading List. Sharp as a Serpent's Tooth Eva and Other Stories was chosen as a bonus book for The 2020 Pulpwood Queen Book Club Reading List. Mandy worked for twenty-six years for Vanderbilt University Medical Center before deciding to run away to Amelia Island. She started as a clerk, working in the mailroom and making thousand of copies of patients medical records - but worked her way up to finish the last sixteen years as a pediatric cardiac sonographer at Monroe Carroll Jr. Children's Hospital. Some of her favorite memories include her time as a receptionist/administrative assistant in Addiction Psychiatry, break-room antics with her fellow refund clerks, and of course all of the families and children she met in cardiology. Fans of Fannie Flagg, Flannery O'Conner, Wiley Cash, Rick Bragg, Harper Lee, and Harry Crews might enjoy her writing style. These stories are for readers who like to chase their stories with a shot of whiskey while burrowed under a hand stitched quilt. Host: author Nola Nash https://nolanash.com Thanks to Pam Stack - Executive Producer - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.blogtalkradio.com/authorsontheair Thanks to Roman Sirotin - Video/Audio Producer / Media Coordinator - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.romansirotin.com @Copyrighted by Authors on the Air

What happens when you meet Brooklyn's voodoo queen in New Orleans? Author Mandy Haynes will answer that question as we explore New Orleans voodoo traditions. https://threedogswritepress.com/ Mandy Haynes has spent hours on barstools, at backstage venues, and riding in vans listening to tales from some of the best songwriters and storytellers in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in Fernandina Beach, Florida with her three dogs, a turtle, and a grateful liver. Walking the Wrong Way Home was a finalist for the 2017 Tartt Fiction Award and chosen as a bonus book for The 2019 Pulpwood Queen Book Club Reading List. Sharp as a Serpent's Tooth Eva and Other Stories was chosen as a bonus book for The 2020 Pulpwood Queen Book Club Reading List. Mandy worked for twenty-six years for Vanderbilt University Medical Center before deciding to run away to Amelia Island. She started as a clerk, working in the mailroom and making thousand of copies of patients medical records - but worked her way up to finish the last sixteen years as a pediatric cardiac sonographer at Monroe Carroll Jr. Children's Hospital. Some of her favorite memories include her time as a receptionist/administrative assistant in Addiction Psychiatry, break-room antics with her fellow refund clerks, and of course all of the families and children she met in cardiology. Fans of Fannie Flagg, Flannery O'Conner, Wiley Cash, Rick Bragg, Harper Lee, and Harry Crews might enjoy her writing style. These stories are for readers who like to chase their stories with a shot of whiskey while burrowed under a hand stitched quilt. Host: author Nola Nash https://nolanash.com Thanks to Pam Stack - Executive Producer - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.blogtalkradio.com/authorsontheair Thanks to Roman Sirotin - Video/Audio Producer / Media Coordinator - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.romansirotin.com @Copyrighted by Authors on the Air

COVID and schools; the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commision; Rick Bragg. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when you meet Brooklyn's voodoo queen in New Orleans? Author Mandy Haynes will answer that question as we explore New Orleans voodoo traditions. *Correction to the information in the show: according to online sources, Mama Lola is still alive and kickin'! We wish her many more years of health and happiness! Like Mark Twain, Mama Lola can say "The rumors of my death have been largely exaggerated." https://threedogswritepress.com/ Mandy Haynes has spent hours on barstools, at backstage venues, and riding in vans listening to tales from some of the best songwriters and storytellers in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in Fernandina Beach, Florida with her three dogs, a turtle, and a grateful liver. Walking the Wrong Way Home was a finalist for the 2017 Tartt Fiction Award and chosen as a bonus book for The 2019 Pulpwood Queen Book Club Reading List. Sharp as a Serpent's Tooth Eva and Other Stories was chosen as a bonus book for The 2020 Pulpwood Queen Book Club Reading List. Mandy worked for twenty-six years for Vanderbilt University Medical Center before deciding to run away to Amelia Island. She started as a clerk, working in the mailroom and making thousand of copies of patients medical records - but worked her way up to finish the last sixteen years as a pediatric cardiac sonographer at Monroe Carroll Jr. Children's Hospital. Some of her favorite memories include her time as a receptionist/administrative assistant in Addiction Psychiatry, break-room antics with her fellow refund clerks, and of course all of the families and children she met in cardiology. Fans of Fannie Flagg, Flannery O'Conner, Wiley Cash, Rick Bragg, Harper Lee, and Harry Crews might enjoy her writing style. These stories are for readers who like to chase their stories with a shot of whiskey while burrowed under a hand stitched quilt. Host: author Nola Nash https://nolanash.com Thanks to Pam Stack - Executive Producer - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.blogtalkradio.com/authorsontheair Thanks to Roman Sirotin - Video/Audio Producer / Media Coordinator - Authors on the Air Global Radio Network www.romansirotin.com @Copyrighted by Authors on the Air See less

In Episode 89, Elizabeth Barnhill (book buyer for Fabled Bookshop) goes behind-the-scenes about what it's like to buy books for an independent bookstore. This post contains affiliate links, through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!). Highlights How Elizabeth got her job as book buyer at Fabled Bookshop with no “official” previous experience (and if the owner was nervous to hire someone with no experience). The most surprising thing Elizabeth discovered about being a book buyer. What Elizabeth's relationship with publishing sales reps looks like (including how far in advance they meet). What happens when Elizabeth ends up not liking a book she's ordered for the store. How far in advance of publication date Elizabeth reads and orders books. How Elizabeth factors in other readers' opinions of a book into her orders (traditional media reviews, early readers on #bookstagram, etc). How Elizabeth handles ordering in relation to trends (and her take on the trends of 2021). How Elizabeth decides how many of a particular book to order. How COVID impacted her ordering. The biggest book buy she's ever done for a single book. How Elizabeth decides how much of each order should comprise a specific genre. What the initial book buy for Fabled looked like when it first opened. How Elizabeth decides which books to feature most prominently around the store. If she hand sells books she doesn't personally like. Elizabeth's Book Recommendations [30:19] Two OLD Books She Loves The Iron House by John Hart | Buy from Amazon | Buy from Bookshop.org [30:51] All Over But the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg | Buy from Amazon | Buy from Bookshop.org [34:35] Two NEW Books She Loves We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker | Buy from Amazon | Buy from Bookshop.org [37:38] The Ride of Her Lifeby Elizabeth Letts | Buy from Amazon | Buy from Bookshop.org [40:45] One Book She DIDN'T LOVE Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau | Buy from Amazon | Buy from Bookshop.org [43:17] One NEW RELEASE She's Excited About The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (October 5, 2021) | Buy from Amazon | Buy from Bookshop.org [46:24] Last 5 Star Book(s) Elizabeth Read [49:18] When the Stars Go Darkby Paula McLain | Buy from Amazon | Buy from Bookshop.org [49:26] Other Books Mentioned The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles [11:17] The Push by Ashley Audrain [15:34] American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins [16:14] Falling by T.J. Newman [20:04] Hostage by Clare Mackintosh [20:04] How the Penguins Saved Veronica by Hazel Prior [23:02] Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez [23:41] God Spare the Girls by Kelsey McKinney [24:24] Circe by Madeline Miller [29:14] The Unwilling by John Hart [30:55] The Hush by John Hart [33:17] The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg [35:16] Ava's Man by Rick Bragg [35:16] The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg [35:16] The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls [36:06] The Speckled Beauty by Rick Bragg [37:20] Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts [41:08] A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles [46:42] About Elizabeth Instagram Elizabeth Barnhill is the book buyer for Fabled Bookshop and Cafe located in Waco, TX. Originally from Alabama, she has lived in Texas for most of her life. Elizabeth graduated from Baylor University and worked as a speech pathologist before landing her dream job reading books for a living when Fabled opened in 2019. Elizabeth has been married for 25 years and has three kids in high school and college.

Laura Gaddy and Kyle Foshee visit the Waffle House in Frogtown to discuss a prince. The New York Times best selling author, Rick Bragg, drew us back to our academic roots with this beautifully written masterpiece, The Prince of Frogtown.

With the initiative process dead, organizers of a recent citizen-fueled effort to expand Medicaid suspend their campaign. And, we look at how one study estimates how expansion could boost Mississippi's economy with nearly 22,000 new jobs.Then, one week following the approval of the Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15 year-olds, we check in with the state's leading pediatrician on how families are responding.Plus, in today's Book Club, we revisit a Pulitzer Prize winner's stories from the deep south.Segment 1:Less than a month since Healthcare for Mississippi officially launched it's campaign to put Medicaid expansion on the ballot in Mississippi, the campaign is coming to a grinding halt. Yesterday, the group announced that it is "reluctantly" suspending its campaign "until there is once again a functional ballot measure process in Mississippi." The citizen initiative process - ratified in 1992 - was deemed unconstitutional by the Mississippi Supreme Court last week. We hear from MS NAACP Executive Director Corey Wiggins. And, a study from the Commonwealth Fund and George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health estimates expansion could bring nearly 22,000 new jobs to the state. Leighton Ku is the Director of the Center for Health Policy at the university. He explains the economic growth potential with MPB's Rob Lane.Segment 2:Teens in Mississippi are starting to get the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine. Children ages 12 to 15 became eligible to receive the shot last week, and since then, more than 1000 Mississippi teens and pre-teens have received their first dose. Dr. Anita Henderson, President of the Mississippi Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, tells our Kobee Vance she and other pediatricians are talking with teens and parents who are interested in getting vaccinated.Segment 3:Rick Bragg is a journalist, a novelist and a college professor but is probably best known for his reflective non-fiction about life itself. The Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author has gathered a collection of his columns from Southern Living and Garden and Gun to put together “Where I Come From: Stories From the Deep South.” His conversation with our Karen Brown starts with his musings on what's unique about the south. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’m not a regular reader of “Southern Living” magazine—save the occasional recipe for shrimp and grits if I’m feeling homesick—and I don’t believe I’ve ever picked up an issue of “Garden & Gun.” But the magazine pieces that make up Rick Bragg’s latest book make me want to buy a subscription. Where I Come From: Stories from the Deep South is a collection of personal columns by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, who is probably best known for his memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’ . Bragg grew up dirt poor among the ridgelines of northeastern Alabama, and his love for the place shines through in this collection, which sparkles with the wit and tenderness of a Pat Conroy novel. Topics range from Harper Lee to hot chicken, fire ants to Fat Tuesday, and “grandmothers with their arms full of fat babies and their giant purses stuffed with butterscotch candies and Juicy Fruit.” He recalls the perils of trying to travel in winter—“You do not really fly out of Birmingham,”

I’m not a regular reader of “Southern Living” magazine—save the occasional recipe for shrimp and grits if I’m feeling homesick—and I don’t believe I’ve ever picked up an issue of “Garden & Gun.” But the magazine pieces that make up Rick Bragg’s latest book make me want to buy a subscription. Where I Come From: Stories from the Deep South is a collection of personal columns by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, who is probably best known for his memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’ . Bragg grew up dirt poor among the ridgelines of northeastern Alabama, and his love for the place shines through in this collection, which sparkles with the wit and tenderness of a Pat Conroy novel. Topics range from Harper Lee to hot chicken, fire ants to Fat Tuesday, and “grandmothers with their arms full of fat babies and their giant purses stuffed with butterscotch candies and Juicy Fruit.” He recalls the perils of trying to travel in winter—“You do not really fly out of Birmingham,”

Ms. Shelia, Ms. Amanda, and Ms. Chelsea discuss books and our favorite Christmas traditions. Books mentioned include: Where I Come From by Rick Bragg, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Christmas on the Island by Jenny Colgan, All is Bright by Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer, Shepherds Abiding by Jan Karon, and The End of the Magi by Patrick Carr. Ms. Amanda recommends these Christmas books for children: The Queen and the First Christmas by Nancy Churnin and pictures by Luisa Uribe, The Little Fir Tree by Christopher Corr, How to Hide a Lion at Christmas, and An Otis Christmas by Loren Long.

What does it mean to be 'home'? And what do we long for when we are homesick? For some its the saltwater. For others the mountains. A place we have known and loved all our lives. For others it is the people that make it feel like home. This week we explore the word home and what it means to different people and how we find our true homes the same way we might discover our true north. A reading from The Messenger of Magnolia Street and West With the Night by Beryl Markham and references about Rick Bragg's Ava's Man and Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk.

About WHERE I COME FROM: From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin' and The Best Cook in the World, a collection of his irresistible columns from Southern Living and Garden & Gun A collection of wide-ranging and endearingly personal columns by the celebrated author, newspaper columnist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg, culled from his best-loved pieces in Southern Living and Garden & Gun. From his love of Tupperware ("My Affair with Tupperware") to the decline of country music, from the legacy of Harper Lee to the metamorphosis of the pickup truck, the best way to kill fire ants, the unbridled excess of Fat Tuesday, and why any self-respecting southern man worth his salt should carry a good knife, Where I Come From is an ode to the stories and the history of the Deep South, written with tenderness, wit, and deep affection--a book that will be treasured by fans old and new. About Rick Bragg: RICK BRAGG is the author of eight books, including the best-selling Ava's Man and All Over but the Shoutin'. He is also a regular contributor to Garden & Gun magazine. He lives in Alabama. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/steve-richards/support

Rick Bragg has a Pulitzer Prize, a slew of bestselling books, and a lifetime of Southern stories spilling out of his head.

The Election Day experience will be different this year. We look at what voters can expect as they head to the polls next week.Then, a summer of protest and national discourse over systemic racism brought forth the end of the controversial 1894 flag. We re-visit the historic decision ahead of the vote for a new state banner. Plus, in today's Book Club, a best-selling author tells us what's so special about growing up and living in the south.Segment 1:Voters across Mississippi may experience long lines at polling places next week when they cast their ballots. There are more than 113,000 new registered voters in Mississippi and election officials are predicting record turnout at the polls on Tuesday. But for those who have voted before, the coronavirus pandemic is going to make the Election Day experience different. MPB's Ashley Norwood speaks to Election Commissioners Tina Hill of DeSoto County and Jacqueline Thompson of Washington County.Segment 2:In five days, Mississippians will vote on the adoption of a new state flag. During this summer of unrest over racial injustice -- legislators passed a bill removing the old state flag containing a confederate emblem that many deem as racist. MPB's Kobee Vance reports on the historic decision.Segment 3:Rick Bragg is a journalist, a novelist and a college professor but is probably best known for his reflective non-fiction about life itself. The Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author has gathered a collection of his columns from Southern Living and Garden and Gun to put together his latest book, “Where I Come From: Stories From the Deep South.” He begins our conversation talking about what's unique about the south. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

BONUS: Here is an episode of the Shelf Wear Podcast, in which Scott and guests talk more books. Julie was a guest, and we talked about The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Kitchen by Rick Bragg. Enjoy!Download or listen via this link: |Shelf Wear, Book 2| Subscribe to the podcast via this link: Feedburner Or subscribe via iTunes by clicking: |HERE|

In this all new episode of Read Astray, host Laura Young will give her review of Rick Bragg's 2001 biographical tribute to his grandfather - "Ava's Man."

News Talk 94.1 — In this all new episode of Read Astray, host Laura Young will give her review of Rick Bragg's 2001 biographical tribute to his grandfather - "Ava's Man."

If you're looking for something to read or a Netflix series to binge, we're talking about our recommendations for books, shows, and podcasts in this episode. What better way to spend some time as you're social distancing or quarantining, than to curl up with books by Lee Smith, Ron Rash, Silas House, Wiley Cash, Amy Greene, Rick Bragg, Anne Lamott, Katherine Howe, Francene Rivers and more? (We also talk about that bestselling "hillbilly" book and what you need to know if you're considering reading it.) Hear why Peaky Blinders is Amy's favorite Netflix series, and what Brittany thought after watching Tiger King.Bonus: we begin with a little bit of mountain lore as we discuss Lee Smith. Have you heard the one about a bird in the house?Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/southernsalonpodcast)

Andrew and Caitlin discuss the crimes of Paul Ruiz and Earl Van Denton, fugitives who murdered their way across multiple states. Andrew then tells Caitlin about the bizarre Kacie Woody-based episode of Investigation Discovery's Man with a Van series. An Evening of Death: 3 Murderers Are Executed by Rick Bragg of the New York Times:https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/10/us/an-evening-of-death-3-murderers-are-executed.htmlArkansas Town Has Waited 20 Years for Killers’ Executions by Jerry Fink of Tulsa World:https://www.tulsaworld.com/archive/arkansas-town-has-waited-years-for-killers-executions/article_36d26597-5fae-5650-8459-3497ce2081c6.htmlClosure By Death by Jerry Fink of Tulsa World: https://www.tulsaworld.com/archive/closure-by-death/article_796eb80e-a00a-505c-aff6-aa8dcbe98b2c.htmlThe Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas:https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/paul-ruiz-and-earl-van-denton-crime-spree-8502/https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/triple-execution-of-1997-12466/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Calls plus Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize Winner.

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rumble” by Link Wray. —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra’s autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband’s side. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with “Whole Lotta Shakin'” and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis’ work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript   We’ve looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we’re going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I’m not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn’t see them that way, and I don’t want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you’re affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on “Johnny B. Goode”, and coming back on February the second for “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. We’re hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We’ll see from this point on that every few years there’s a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions — and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally… [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis’ mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn’t quite work out that way. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs — this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who’d appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis’ films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn’t the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single “Wait and See”. There were also a few performances by musicians who weren’t strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, “I Don’t Like You No More”] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Glad All Over”] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn’t written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips’ publishing partners as well as being Elvis’. It was to be Carl Perkins’ last record for Sun — Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him — Jerry Lee’s records were credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano”. Why did Carl’s records never say anything about Carl’s guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as “the rocking guitar man”, but it was too late — Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they’d start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins — Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash’s records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like “Big River” that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”] It’s quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn’t. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to “Blue Suede Shoes” at Sun, and he’d passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but “I thought both of them was junk!” and he’d chosen the one that was slightly less awful — that’s not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips’ main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song’s writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We’ve met Otis Blackwell briefly before — he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written “Fever” for Little Willie John, “You’re the Apple of My Eye” for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis — “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up”. We don’t have access to his demo of “Great Balls of Fire”, but in the seventies he recorded an album called “These are My Songs”, featuring many of the hits he’d written for other people, and it’s possible that the version of “Great Balls of Fire” on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Great Balls of Fire”] “Great Balls of Fire” seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It’s a refinement of the “Whole Lotta Shakin'” formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where “Whole Lotta Shakin'” starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] “Great Balls of Fire” has a much more dynamic opening — one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins — it’s very reminiscent of the intro to “Blue Suede Shoes”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the “Blue Suede Shoes” manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can’t imagine Lewis turning “Glad All Over”, fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of “Great Balls of Fire” that was suitable for the film, but it wasn’t right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut — paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren’t the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis’ band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums — according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. “Great Balls of Fire”? Didn’t that sound a bit… Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil’s music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was — he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When “Great Balls of Fire” came out, with a cover of Hank Williams’ ballad “You Win Again” on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It’s one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come — everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number “Big Legged Woman”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Big Legged Woman”] But they decided that they didn’t want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, “Breathless”. This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar — Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis’ career at the expense of everyone else’s, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips — and Jerry Lee’s cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name — it didn’t stand for anything — and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis’ band. “Breathless” was very much in the same style as “Great Balls of Fire”, if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Breathless”] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he’d been a hit — Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary — in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music — though that was great — but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry’s father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting “You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake.” Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry’s belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of “Great Balls of Fire”, and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that’s because of Lewis’ admiration for Berry’s songwriting — he’s called Berry “the Hank Williams of rock and roll” before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that’s about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world — Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck’s side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential — a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “High School Confidential”] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I’ve been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn’t erase Brown’s experience, doesn’t excuse Lewis’ behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn’t minimise child abuse — which, and let’s be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl — let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure — then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It’s important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we’ll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is “and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life”. That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn’t see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen — Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her — and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one’s cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee’s extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don’t believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn’t mean we can’t judge them harshly. And it’s not as if everyone in Jerry Lee’s own culture was completely accepting of this. They’d married in secret, and when Myra’s father — Jerry Lee’s cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown — found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn’t. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called “The Flying Saucer”: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called “The Return of Jerry Lee”, having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee “answer” them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, “The Return of Jerry Lee”] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota — especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra’s physical attractiveness — the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis’ career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips’ brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun’s back catalogue — in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun’s vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun’s vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun’s rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and “Another Place, Another Time” went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Another Place, Another Time”] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances — his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It’s not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies — he insists that was an accident — and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra’s brother’s ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He’s eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.  

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rumble” by Link Wray. —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra’s autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband’s side. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with “Whole Lotta Shakin'” and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis’ work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript   We’ve looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we’re going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I’m not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn’t see them that way, and I don’t want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you’re affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on “Johnny B. Goode”, and coming back on February the second for “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. We’re hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We’ll see from this point on that every few years there’s a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions — and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally… [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis’ mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn’t quite work out that way. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs — this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who’d appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis’ films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn’t the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single “Wait and See”. There were also a few performances by musicians who weren’t strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, “I Don’t Like You No More”] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Glad All Over”] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn’t written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips’ publishing partners as well as being Elvis’. It was to be Carl Perkins’ last record for Sun — Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him — Jerry Lee’s records were credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano”. Why did Carl’s records never say anything about Carl’s guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as “the rocking guitar man”, but it was too late — Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they’d start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins — Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash’s records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like “Big River” that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”] It’s quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn’t. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to “Blue Suede Shoes” at Sun, and he’d passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but “I thought both of them was junk!” and he’d chosen the one that was slightly less awful — that’s not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips’ main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song’s writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We’ve met Otis Blackwell briefly before — he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written “Fever” for Little Willie John, “You’re the Apple of My Eye” for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis — “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up”. We don’t have access to his demo of “Great Balls of Fire”, but in the seventies he recorded an album called “These are My Songs”, featuring many of the hits he’d written for other people, and it’s possible that the version of “Great Balls of Fire” on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Great Balls of Fire”] “Great Balls of Fire” seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It’s a refinement of the “Whole Lotta Shakin'” formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where “Whole Lotta Shakin'” starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] “Great Balls of Fire” has a much more dynamic opening — one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins — it’s very reminiscent of the intro to “Blue Suede Shoes”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the “Blue Suede Shoes” manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can’t imagine Lewis turning “Glad All Over”, fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of “Great Balls of Fire” that was suitable for the film, but it wasn’t right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut — paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren’t the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis’ band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums — according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. “Great Balls of Fire”? Didn’t that sound a bit… Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil’s music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was — he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When “Great Balls of Fire” came out, with a cover of Hank Williams’ ballad “You Win Again” on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It’s one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come — everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number “Big Legged Woman”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Big Legged Woman”] But they decided that they didn’t want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, “Breathless”. This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar — Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis’ career at the expense of everyone else’s, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips — and Jerry Lee’s cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name — it didn’t stand for anything — and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis’ band. “Breathless” was very much in the same style as “Great Balls of Fire”, if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Breathless”] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he’d been a hit — Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary — in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music — though that was great — but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry’s father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting “You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake.” Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry’s belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of “Great Balls of Fire”, and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that’s because of Lewis’ admiration for Berry’s songwriting — he’s called Berry “the Hank Williams of rock and roll” before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that’s about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world — Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck’s side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential — a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “High School Confidential”] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I’ve been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn’t erase Brown’s experience, doesn’t excuse Lewis’ behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn’t minimise child abuse — which, and let’s be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl — let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure — then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It’s important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we’ll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is “and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life”. That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn’t see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen — Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her — and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one’s cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee’s extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don’t believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn’t mean we can’t judge them harshly. And it’s not as if everyone in Jerry Lee’s own culture was completely accepting of this. They’d married in secret, and when Myra’s father — Jerry Lee’s cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown — found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn’t. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called “The Flying Saucer”: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called “The Return of Jerry Lee”, having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee “answer” them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, “The Return of Jerry Lee”] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota — especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra’s physical attractiveness — the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis’ career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips’ brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun’s back catalogue — in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun’s vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun’s vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun’s rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and “Another Place, Another Time” went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Another Place, Another Time”] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances — his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It’s not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies — he insists that was an accident — and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra’s brother’s ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He’s eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.  

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rumble" by Link Wray. ----more----  Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra's autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband's side. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis' pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with "Whole Lotta Shakin'" and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis' work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript   We've looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we're going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I'm not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn't see them that way, and I don't want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you're affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on "Johnny B. Goode", and coming back on February the second for "Yakety Yak" by the Coasters. We're hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We'll see from this point on that every few years there's a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions -- and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally... [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with "Whole Lotta Shakin'". He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis' mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn't quite work out that way. "Whole Lotta Shakin'" was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs -- this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who'd appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis' films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn't the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single "Wait and See". There were also a few performances by musicians who weren't strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, "I Don't Like You No More"] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Glad All Over"] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn't written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips' publishing partners as well as being Elvis'. It was to be Carl Perkins' last record for Sun -- Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him -- Jerry Lee's records were credited to "Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano". Why did Carl's records never say anything about Carl's guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as "the rocking guitar man", but it was too late -- Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they'd start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins -- Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash's records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like "Big River" that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like "Ballad of a Teenage Queen": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Ballad of a Teenage Queen"] It's quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn't. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to "Blue Suede Shoes" at Sun, and he'd passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but "I thought both of them was junk!" and he'd chosen the one that was slightly less awful -- that's not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down "Great Balls of Fire": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips' main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song's writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We've met Otis Blackwell briefly before -- he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written "Fever" for Little Willie John, "You're the Apple of My Eye" for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis -- "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up". We don't have access to his demo of "Great Balls of Fire", but in the seventies he recorded an album called "These are My Songs", featuring many of the hits he'd written for other people, and it's possible that the version of "Great Balls of Fire" on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, "Great Balls of Fire"] "Great Balls of Fire" seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It's a refinement of the "Whole Lotta Shakin'" formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where "Whole Lotta Shakin'" starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin'"] "Great Balls of Fire" has a much more dynamic opening -- one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins -- it's very reminiscent of the intro to "Blue Suede Shoes": [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Blue Suede Shoes"] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the "Blue Suede Shoes" manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can't imagine Lewis turning "Glad All Over", fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up "Whole Lotta Shakin'". Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of "Great Balls of Fire" that was suitable for the film, but it wasn't right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut -- paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren't the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis' band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums -- according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. "Great Balls of Fire"? Didn't that sound a bit... Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil's music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was -- he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When "Great Balls of Fire" came out, with a cover of Hank Williams' ballad "You Win Again" on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It's one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come -- everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number "Big Legged Woman": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Big Legged Woman"] But they decided that they didn't want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, "Breathless". This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar -- Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis' career at the expense of everyone else's, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips -- and Jerry Lee's cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name -- it didn't stand for anything -- and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis' band. "Breathless" was very much in the same style as "Great Balls of Fire", if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Breathless"] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam's brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark's Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he'd been a hit -- Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary -- in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music -- though that was great -- but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry's father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting "You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake." Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry's belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of "Great Balls of Fire", and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that's because of Lewis' admiration for Berry's songwriting -- he's called Berry "the Hank Williams of rock and roll" before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that's about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world -- Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck's side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential -- a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "High School Confidential"] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I've been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis' marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn't erase Brown's experience, doesn't excuse Lewis' behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn't minimise child abuse -- which, and let's be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl -- let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure -- then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It's important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we'll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is "and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life". That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn't some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn't see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen -- Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her -- and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one's cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee's extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don't believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn't mean we can't judge them harshly. And it's not as if everyone in Jerry Lee's own culture was completely accepting of this. They'd married in secret, and when Myra's father -- Jerry Lee's cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown -- found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn't. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called "The Flying Saucer": [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, "The Flying Saucer"] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called "The Return of Jerry Lee", having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee "answer" them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, "The Return of Jerry Lee"] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota -- especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra's physical attractiveness -- the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis' career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips' brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun's back catalogue -- in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun's vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun's vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun's rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and "Another Place, Another Time" went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Another Place, Another Time"] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances -- his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It's not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies -- he insists that was an accident -- and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra's brother's ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He's eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.  

Support for The Zest Podcast comes from Seitenbacher Brand Natural Foods, like Muesli cereals, oils, oatmeal, energy bars, gluten free fruit gummies for the kids, organic coffee and more.  Available in supermarkets, health food stores or online at Seitenbacher.com.Best-selling author Rick Bragg was in town earlier this year to talk about his most recent memoir about his family, and about growing up poor in the hardscrabble back country of Alabama. He tells it through stories of food -- and the importance of a good meal in lives full of backbreaking labor and few pleasures. His book, The Best Cook In The World: Tales from My Momma's Southern Table, is also a loving tribute to his mother, Margaret.How can a simple sandwich ignite so much controversy? Well, when it's the Cuban Sandwich, and we're in Florida, there is a bitter battle for the title of who had it first, and who makes it the best! Producer Dalia Colón spoke to Andrea Gonzmart Williams of the Columbia Restaurant, who doesn't think there any controversy at all. You can find the Columbia's Cuban Sandwich recipe HERE.When Dan Bavaro packed up his wife and kids to move from New Jersey to Florida, he didn't have his sights set on opening a New York-style pizzeria. Instead, Bavaro's Pizza serves up Neapolitan-style pies, bringing a taste of Italy to its four Tampa Bay locations.What was once a vacant lot is now an urban oasis. We take you to the St. Petersburg EcoVillage, a community garden whose mission is to reconnect people with nature. Dalia surveys the bounty with Emmanuel Roux, a longtime restaurateur who's using his food knowledge to educate the public about nutrition.Ed Chiles is the son of the late Governor Lawton Chiles. He's also the owner of several seafood restaurants, including the Sandbar on Anna Maria Island. Chiles's interest in local and sustainable food sourcing has led him to experiment with cooking one of the state's invasive species -- wild hogs. I spoke to him about some of the ways his restaurants' chefs have been utilizing wild boars from Shogun Farms.Many well-known local restaurants swear by the sausages they get from The Tambuzzo Sausage company of Tampa. The butchery recently opened up its new location in West Tampa, alongside the company's cafe, "The Boozy Pig." Owner Andrew Tambuzzo says it's a new chapter in what's been a very old tradition for his family in Ybor City. He spoke with me in front of The Boozy Pig on Cypress street about changes in his new neighborhood and his business.When Isabel Laessig's daughter left for college, she told her mom that the thing she'd miss most was their Sunday family dinner together. Eight years later,the Dunedin mother of four is the force behind #SundaySupper, a weekly virtual dinner party where foodies share recipes and inspiration for family meals. Laessig, also known as Family Foodie, reaches millions of people through social media, promoting her Sunday Supper Movement. 

Support for The Zest Podcast comes from Seitenbacher Brand Natural Foods, like Muesli cereals, oils, oatmeal, energy bars, gluten free fruit gummies for the kids, organic coffee and more.  Available in supermarkets, health food stores or online at Seitenbacher.com.Best-selling author Rick Bragg was in town earlier this year to talk about his most recent memoir about his family, and about growing up poor in the hardscrabble back country of Alabama. He tells it through stories of food -- and the importance of a good meal in lives full of backbreaking labor and few pleasures. His book, The Best Cook In The World: Tales from My Momma's Southern Table, is also a loving tribute to his mother, Margaret.How can a simple sandwich ignite so much controversy? Well, when it's the Cuban Sandwich, and we're in Florida, there is a bitter battle for the title of who had it first, and who makes it the best! Producer Dalia Colón spoke to Andrea Gonzmart Williams of the Columbia Restaurant, who doesn't think there any controversy at all. You can find the Columbia's Cuban Sandwich recipe HERE.When Dan Bavaro packed up his wife and kids to move from New Jersey to Florida, he didn't have his sights set on opening a New York-style pizzeria. Instead, Bavaro's Pizza serves up Neapolitan-style pies, bringing a taste of Italy to its four Tampa Bay locations.What was once a vacant lot is now an urban oasis. We take you to the St. Petersburg EcoVillage, a community garden whose mission is to reconnect people with nature. Dalia surveys the bounty with Emmanuel Roux, a longtime restaurateur who's using his food knowledge to educate the public about nutrition.Ed Chiles is the son of the late Governor Lawton Chiles. He's also the owner of several seafood restaurants, including the Sandbar on Anna Maria Island. Chiles's interest in local and sustainable food sourcing has led him to experiment with cooking one of the state's invasive species -- wild hogs. I spoke to him about some of the ways his restaurants' chefs have been utilizing wild boars from Shogun Farms.Many well-known local restaurants swear by the sausages they get from The Tambuzzo Sausage company of Tampa. The butchery recently opened up its new location in West Tampa, alongside the company's cafe, "The Boozy Pig." Owner Andrew Tambuzzo says it's a new chapter in what's been a very old tradition for his family in Ybor City. He spoke with me in front of The Boozy Pig on Cypress street about changes in his new neighborhood and his business.When Isabel Laessig's daughter left for college, she told her mom that the thing she'd miss most was their Sunday family dinner together. Eight years later,the Dunedin mother of four is the force behind #SundaySupper, a weekly virtual dinner party where foodies share recipes and inspiration for family meals. Laessig, also known as Family Foodie, reaches millions of people through social media, promoting her Sunday Supper Movement. 

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn’t have time to cover his career up to that point — even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He’s someone who just dominates other people’s stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we’ve got to the point where he’s about to have his first hit, but we haven’t really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we’re going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams — and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he’d been gone so long, and he said he’d picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin’ Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant — other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics — he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He’d started playing music when he was four years old. He’d been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He’d almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of “Silent Night”, and his parents — who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother — realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn’t have electricity in the house — until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema — a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family — and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his “double first cousin” — Swaggart’s father was Lewis’ father’s nephew, while Swaggart’s mother was Lewis’ mother’s sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his “Waiting For a Train”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Waiting For a Train”] His favourite song to play, though, was “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”, the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] But he had two bigger influences — two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything — Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music — into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, “Piano Breakdown”] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis’ hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it’s spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: “You Are My Sunshine”] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner — who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn “My God is Real” with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis’ life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He’d been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they’d won the machine in a contest. He’d already got married twice, and hadn’t actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he’d also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He’d been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There’s only one recording available of Lewis’ mentor Mr. Paul — his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, “Right Now”, by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, “Right Now”] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He’d already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on — they’d told him he needed to play a guitar. He’d blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened — he’d been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, “Down Yonder”] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as “The Great I AM”. Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they’d ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee’s father’s henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn’t afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course — but they couldn’t afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar — except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed — they needed to get this man in. Lewis’ first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of “Crazy Arms” a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there’s more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams’ hits, including “Cold Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can’t even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I’m going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney’s frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn’t a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, “Crazy Arms”] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn’t sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don’t have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I’ll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price’s version of “Crazy Arms” was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it’s unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he’d also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn’t a massive hit — that didn’t bother him, he knew he’d have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be — but because his father didn’t seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he’d given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he’d been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn’t, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn’t hugely impressed by Jerry Lee’s first record was just that — that seeing his son achieve an ambition he’d given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee’s next record, though, didn’t disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn’t recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he’d cut a few more songs as himself. He’d play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush”, which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] Two people both claimed to have written the song — a black singer called Dave “Curlee” Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song’s writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym “Sunny David”). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it “We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an’ they even keepin’ time on a ding-dong.” That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams — something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him — as soon as the song became a hit, Hall’s ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song’s royalties. Neither Big Maybelle’s version of the song, nor Roy Hall’s, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of “Whole Lotta Shakin'” that was very different from either version that had already come out — they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he’d tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that’s when you’ve got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, “You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” “No,” Jerry Lee had replied, “I’m right on time”. That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”, a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn’t feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn’t feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit… and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis — there wasn’t room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he’d had, and how he’d like to come back as a turd in his ex’s toilet bowl, so she’d look down and see him in there winking up at her. He’d taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into “It’ll Be Me”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “It’ll Be Me”, single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they’d let Jerry Lee cut this “Shakin'” thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they’d recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic — they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts — the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he’d not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips’ new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they’d not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America — at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys”, and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips’ brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee — in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show — the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen’s manager and the head of talent for NBC — they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring — no photos, no records, nothing — and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn’t capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you don’t show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him.” So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month’s time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I’ll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn’t capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed “shake”, he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who’d made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who’d mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent’s lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you’re someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we’ll find out about Jerry Lee’s fall in a few weeks’ time.

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "So Long I'm Gone" by Warren Smith.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis' pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We're in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn't have time to cover his career up to that point -- even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He's someone who just dominates other people's stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we've got to the point where he's about to have his first hit, but we haven't really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we're going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On"] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams -- and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye": [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye"] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he'd been gone so long, and he said he'd picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin' Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant -- other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics -- he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He'd started playing music when he was four years old. He'd been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He'd almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of "Silent Night", and his parents -- who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother -- realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn't have electricity in the house -- until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema -- a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family -- and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his "double first cousin" -- Swaggart's father was Lewis' father's nephew, while Swaggart's mother was Lewis' mother's sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his "Waiting For a Train": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Waiting For a Train"] His favourite song to play, though, was "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee", the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee"] But he had two bigger influences -- two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything -- Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music -- into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, "Piano Breakdown"] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis' hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it's spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: "You Are My Sunshine"] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner -- who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn "My God is Real" with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis' life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He'd been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they'd won the machine in a contest. He'd already got married twice, and hadn't actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he'd also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He'd been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There's only one recording available of Lewis' mentor Mr. Paul -- his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, "Right Now", by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, "Right Now"] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He'd already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on -- they'd told him he needed to play a guitar. He'd blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened -- he'd been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, "Down Yonder"] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as "The Great I AM". Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they'd ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee's father's henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn't afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course -- but they couldn't afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar -- except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed -- they needed to get this man in. Lewis' first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of "Crazy Arms" a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there's more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] "Crazy Arms" is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams' hits, including "Cold Cold Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can't even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I'm going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney's frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn't a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, "Crazy Arms"] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn't sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don't have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I'll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price's version of "Crazy Arms" was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it's unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis' first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he'd also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] "Crazy Arms" would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn't a massive hit -- that didn't bother him, he knew he'd have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be -- but because his father didn't seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he'd given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he'd been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn't, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn't hugely impressed by Jerry Lee's first record was just that -- that seeing his son achieve an ambition he'd given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee's next record, though, didn't disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn't recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he'd cut a few more songs as himself. He'd play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner's "Honey Hush", which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. "Whole Lotta Shakin'" is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] Two people both claimed to have written the song -- a black singer called Dave "Curlee" Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song's writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym "Sunny David"). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it "We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an' they even keepin' time on a ding-dong." That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams -- something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him -- as soon as the song became a hit, Hall's ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song's royalties. Neither Big Maybelle's version of the song, nor Roy Hall's, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of "Whole Lotta Shakin'" that was very different from either version that had already come out -- they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he'd tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that's when you've got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, "You're a bit late, aren't you?" "No," Jerry Lee had replied, "I'm right on time". That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie", a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie"] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn't feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn't feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit... and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis -- there wasn't room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he'd had, and how he'd like to come back as a turd in his ex's toilet bowl, so she'd look down and see him in there winking up at her. He'd taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into "It'll Be Me": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "It'll Be Me", single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they'd let Jerry Lee cut this "Shakin'" thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" -- Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they'd recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic -- they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin'"] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts -- the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he'd not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips' new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they'd not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America -- at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys", and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips' brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee -- in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show -- the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen's manager and the head of talent for NBC -- they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring -- no photos, no records, nothing -- and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn't capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud "I'll give you five hundred dollars if you don't show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him." So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month's time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I'll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn't capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed "shake", he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who'd made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who'd mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent's lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you're someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we'll find out about Jerry Lee's fall in a few weeks' time.

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn’t have time to cover his career up to that point — even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He’s someone who just dominates other people’s stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we’ve got to the point where he’s about to have his first hit, but we haven’t really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we’re going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams — and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he’d been gone so long, and he said he’d picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin’ Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant — other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics — he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He’d started playing music when he was four years old. He’d been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He’d almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of “Silent Night”, and his parents — who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother — realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn’t have electricity in the house — until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema — a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family — and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his “double first cousin” — Swaggart’s father was Lewis’ father’s nephew, while Swaggart’s mother was Lewis’ mother’s sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his “Waiting For a Train”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Waiting For a Train”] His favourite song to play, though, was “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”, the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] But he had two bigger influences — two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything — Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music — into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, “Piano Breakdown”] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis’ hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it’s spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: “You Are My Sunshine”] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner — who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn “My God is Real” with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis’ life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He’d been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they’d won the machine in a contest. He’d already got married twice, and hadn’t actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he’d also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He’d been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There’s only one recording available of Lewis’ mentor Mr. Paul — his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, “Right Now”, by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, “Right Now”] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He’d already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on — they’d told him he needed to play a guitar. He’d blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened — he’d been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, “Down Yonder”] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as “The Great I AM”. Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they’d ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee’s father’s henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn’t afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course — but they couldn’t afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar — except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed — they needed to get this man in. Lewis’ first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of “Crazy Arms” a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there’s more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams’ hits, including “Cold Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can’t even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I’m going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney’s frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn’t a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, “Crazy Arms”] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn’t sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don’t have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I’ll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price’s version of “Crazy Arms” was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it’s unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he’d also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn’t a massive hit — that didn’t bother him, he knew he’d have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be — but because his father didn’t seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he’d given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he’d been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn’t, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn’t hugely impressed by Jerry Lee’s first record was just that — that seeing his son achieve an ambition he’d given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee’s next record, though, didn’t disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn’t recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he’d cut a few more songs as himself. He’d play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush”, which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] Two people both claimed to have written the song — a black singer called Dave “Curlee” Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song’s writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym “Sunny David”). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it “We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an’ they even keepin’ time on a ding-dong.” That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams — something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him — as soon as the song became a hit, Hall’s ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song’s royalties. Neither Big Maybelle’s version of the song, nor Roy Hall’s, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of “Whole Lotta Shakin'” that was very different from either version that had already come out — they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he’d tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that’s when you’ve got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, “You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” “No,” Jerry Lee had replied, “I’m right on time”. That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”, a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn’t feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn’t feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit… and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis — there wasn’t room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he’d had, and how he’d like to come back as a turd in his ex’s toilet bowl, so she’d look down and see him in there winking up at her. He’d taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into “It’ll Be Me”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “It’ll Be Me”, single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they’d let Jerry Lee cut this “Shakin'” thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they’d recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic — they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts — the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he’d not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips’ new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they’d not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America — at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys”, and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips’ brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee — in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show — the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen’s manager and the head of talent for NBC — they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring — no photos, no records, nothing — and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn’t capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you don’t show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him.” So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month’s time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I’ll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn’t capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed “shake”, he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who’d made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who’d mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent’s lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you’re someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we’ll find out about Jerry Lee’s fall in a few weeks’ time.

Southern storyteller Rick Bragg talks with host Robin Sussingham about food, family, and his new memoir, “The Best Cook In The World: Tales From My Momma's Southern Table.” Food, Bragg says, represents “our finer nature.” And he tells us why he takes the cooking of grits so personally. Plus, on a humid evening in April,The Zest attended WUSF's signature event, Longest Table, an outdoor foodie feast in downtown St. Petersburg that offered a chance for Robin and producer Dalia Colón  to ask local chefs what they like to serve when the weather heats up.

Southern storyteller Rick Bragg talks with host Robin Sussingham about food, family, and his new memoir, “The Best Cook In The World: Tales From My Momma's Southern Table.” Food, Bragg says, represents “our finer nature.” And he tells us why he takes the cooking of grits so personally. Plus, on a humid evening in April,The Zest attended WUSF's signature event, Longest Table, an outdoor foodie feast in downtown St. Petersburg that offered a chance for Robin and producer Dalia Colón  to ask local chefs what they like to serve when the weather heats up.

Kate Sullivan interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Bragg. His best-selling and critically acclaimed books depict the people of the foothills of the Appalachians and the titles are: "All Over but the Shoutin’" and "Ava’s Man"....This item has files of the following types: Item Image, Item Tile, JSON, Metadata, VBR MP3