Piano pumpers dealing with Jesus in recent books about Little Richard & Jerry Lee Lewis

book-cover-little-richardIt’s unsurprising that David Kirby‘s Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Joe Bonomo‘s Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost & Found were both released within weeks of each other back in November (and from the same publisher, Continuum). The similarities between the subjects are myriad, and each book references the other’s subject with regularity.

For those unable to make the obvious jump, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were contemporaries, and the boogie-woogie piano was the basis on which each based their rockin’ and rollin’. Both were also notable for their outrageous behavior – Little Richard’s flamboyancy, Lewis’ marrying his cousin, Little Richard writing songs with fairly salacious lyrics, Lewis doing the same – but more importantly, it seems that both vacillated between the sacred and the secular.

As Bonomo aptly sums up the whole trouble, “Rock & roll was the devil’s music,” creating this dichotomy that lay at the heart of Lewis’ music (as well as that of Little Richard) – “the twin pulls of Ferriday’s Assembly of God and Haney’s Big House, light and dark, ascended and damned.”
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