Jerry Lee Lewis Quotes

“He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland, backed by pickers who talked like Ernest Tubb. “James Brown kissed me on my cheek,” he says. “Top that.”
― Rick Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story

“He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms—accidental and on purpose—than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played.”
― Rick Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story

“everyone went and had some turkey and cornbread dressing, and hot biscuits, and mashed potatoes running with butter, and when they prayed, they thanked God for the good fortune that had found their boy, who had sense enough to know that if you’re going to be hit by a train, you have to go stand on the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Amen.”
― Rick Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story

“mature material. Where once he had hollered through”
― Rick Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story

“stripes on their backs. The twentieth century”
― Rick Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story