Jerry Lee Lewis, hell raising rocker, died on October 28, 2022. Myra Lewis Williams, also known as Myra Gale Brown, was the third wife of the late rock ’n’ roll pioneer and — more infamously — his 13-year-old cousin at the time they got married.
She filed for divorce in 1970, citing allegations of abuse and adultery, but she wrote, “Because we have a daughter, Jerry I remained in contact for many years…Phoebe worked for him and when I visited her, I would still see him, too.
However, since his marriage a few years ago to my ex-sister-in-law, who wasn’t an ex yet when they got together (yes, you read that correctly), Phoebe quit working for him and I haven’t seen him since. He’s no longer part of my life. I find living is nice and calm this way.”
The “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire” hitmaker had eloped with Myra Gale Brown in December 1957, the result of a romance that developed when he moved into the Memphis home of Myra’s father, JW Brown, who was Lewis’ cousin and bass player, according to Lewis’ obituary in The Times.
Lewis was 22 and Williams was 13, and the press came down hard on him when it was revealed that she was also his second cousin and that Lewis was still married to his second wife, Jane Mitchum, when they wed. In short, whiffs of incest and bigamy.
“It was really the first scandal of rock ’n’ roll,” Williams told Georgia’s Gwinnett Daily Post in 2016. “What was happening back then, rock ’n’ roll was coming on very, very strong. The preachers hated it. The radio stations that didn’t play it hated it. They called it the devil’s music. It was crude and rude and ridiculous what it was doing to the teenagers. Little did they know what it was going to turn into.”
Lewis, who died at the age 87, weathered professional exile in 1958 after a reporter covering his arrival in London inquired about the young girl in his entourage who ultimately introduced herself as “Jerry’s wife” and all hell broke loose.
He continued to record music and perform in theater during that time and mounted a comeback about a decade later.
“When Jerry Lee and I went to England there was a whole lotta trouble going on… The press made me out to be a seductive Lolita, which was as far from the truth as it gets. Remember, gossip is not gospel,” Williams wrote on Instagram in 2015.
The revelation resulted in the abrupt cancellation of Lewis’ tour; he was blacklisted by radio and his earnings dropped overnight. It’s interesting to note, however, that couples married young in his Louisiana hometown of Ferriday, and he wed for the first time when he was 16 and had seven wives over the course of his life.
In 2016 Myra wrote a new memoir, “The Spark That Survived,” in which she recounts her story with Lewis her way, not the way it was told in the movie that resulted from her first book in 1988, Great Balls of Fire, which she saw as a travesty of what she had written. While promoting the book, she took to Instagram to air some of the sordid details. She described the memoir as her story “of how to overcome life’s worst tragedies and your own dumbass decisions.”
Lewis went on to marry four more times. Two of those unions ended in untimely deaths for the brides, and his fourth and final marriage came in 2012. It was to Judith Brown, who was the ex-wife of his cousin Rusty Brown, Myra’s younger brother.
You might say that Jerry Lee Lewis had a thing for cousins.
