The Killer

 Roughly ten years before the British invasion was the hillbilly invasion, or if you like you may call it the birth of rock and roll.

Sam Phillips, Sun studios, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, all gone now, and the last one Jerry Lee Lewis now also gone.

I guess I first saw him on Ed Sullivan because that's the way things went back in the fifties.  Who was this guy playing his piano with his feet, his butt, banging away?  Well my sisters were all into Elvis and this rock and roll thing so of course I had to be against it, so maybe I didn't quite approve of him right then.  Then quick as he burst onto the scene there was that marriage to his fourteen year old, cousin, was it?  Maybe not a big deal in the south, particularly Louisiana, the wildest of the forty eight (at the time) states.  When I was in Texas, even the Texans, who were pretty damn wild themselves, clucked their tongues at the state to the east.  But kind of alarming to the rest of the country.

Anyway his career was gone.  Well not quite, he got into country music, and I kind of did too, and there he was.  Saw him maybe in the late seventies, a roadside inn twenty miles west of Champaign, not like a stage or anything just a piano in the middle of the room, maybe thirty tables around him, that was it.  He sang his sad songs, and then he was down the road.

We used to bring tapes into the watercolor class, music to paint by.  I brought in my Jerry Lee Lewis tapes once and some young girl was not impressed.  He sounds like some hillbilly trying to sound like Elvis she opined, and I guess she was not that far off.

With the fullness of time his reputation got restored some what, but he was still a wild man, sort of like James Brown, I remember reading in the papers about how he caused some late night fuss drunk at the gates of Graceland, bemoaning that this should all of been his.

I'll close with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4NquCaWIQI