Years after he was known as \u201cThe Killer,\u201d, a rock pioneer who released such rock standards as \u201cGreat Balls of Fire\u201d and \u201cBreathless,\u201d Jerry Lee Lewis made a name for himself in a very different musical genre: country. And on this day in 1973, he capped off his road to country stardom with an appearance at the famed Grand Ole Opry.<\/p>\n
Like his contemporary Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis grew up in a place where the musical traditions of the poor and white overlapped and intermixed with those of the poor and black. Just south of the Delta heartland that gave birth to the blues, Lewis\u2019s hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana, also sat in the heart of territory critical to the development of country music. The sounds emanating from the churches, dance-halls, juke-joints and radios of Ferriday were precisely those that would coalesce into rock and roll: black gospel, white gospel, boogie-woogie, Delta blues, rhythm and blues and Western swing. The line separating country from rock and roll was particularly blurry during Jerry Lee\u2019s rise to fame, when songs like \u201cGreat Balls of Fire\u201d and \u201cWhole Lotta Shakin\u2019 Goin\u2019 On\u201d rose higher on the country charts\u2014all the way to #1\u2014than they did on the pop charts.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The line was much clearer by the late 1960s, when Jerry Lee Lewis, long since shunned by the pop establishment over his controversial second marriage, reclaimed part of his musical roots by staging a hugely successful comeback behind country hits like \u201cAnother Place, Another Time\u201d and the brilliantly titled \u201cWhat\u2019s Made Milwaukee Famous (Made a Loser Out of Me).\u201d The comeback reached a high point with his invitation to the Grand Ole Opry, where, on this day in 1973, Jerry Lee put the full complexity of his musical background and colorful personality on display. \u201cI am a rock-and-rollin\u2019, country-and-western, rhythm-and-blues singing [expletive deleted]!\u201d Lewis declared from country music\u2019s greatest stage before launching into a rousing set that included all of the late 50s rock-and-roll classics he\u2019d promised Opry officials not to play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Years after he was known as \u201cThe Killer,\u201d, a rock pioneer who released such rock standards as \u201cGreat Balls of Fire\u201d and \u201cBreathless,\u201d Jerry Lee Lewis made a name for himself in a very different musical genre: country. And on this day in 1973, he capped off his road to country stardom with an appearance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}