Jerry Lee Lewis

Jerry Lee Lewis was an American singer, songwriter, and pianist whose 1957 hits "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls of Fire" helped establish rock and roll, and who later became a leading country artist with songs such as "Another Place, Another Time" and "What's Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)." He was born on September 29, 1935, in Ferriday, Louisiana, to carpenter Elmo Lewis and Mary Ethel Herron.

Largely self-taught at the family piano, he was sent briefly to the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, but was expelled. He drove to Memphis in 1956 and auditioned at Sun Records for producer Sam Phillips.

His Sun recordings of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" in 1957 and "Great Balls of Fire" later that year sold millions and made him, along with Elvis Presley, one of the label's biggest stars. A 1958 British tour collapsed when reporters revealed his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown, and his rock career stalled.

He rebuilt his career in country music at Smash and Mercury Records during the late 1960s and 1970s, scoring more than a dozen top-ten country hits. He was a charter inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 and joined the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2022. He married seven times and had six children. He died on October 28, 2022, in Nesbit, Mississippi, at age 87.

Their name Jerry derives from a short form of Jerome (Greek Hieronymos, meaning "sacred name") or of Gerald and Gerard (from Germanic ger, meaning "spear"). Jerry was a common American boys' name through the mid-twentieth century.