People no longer much followed his music. Fame became abject notoriety his life, a tattered sideshow attraction. There were no more big hits, country or otherwise. He rose again a decade later - this time a country star - and, a decade after that, once again fell. So it came to pass, in those distant days when impropriety was to popular idolatry a poison rather than a perfume, that Jerry Lee Lewis, less than a year after he had risen, fell. After two shows, the tour was aborted - “BABY-SNATCHER QUITS,” the London Daily Herald gloated - and Jerry Lee returned to America, which had seen him off in glory but which now, with prurient glee, threw stones of revilement and scorn. A few months later, at the start of a British tour, which was to give England its first shot of living rock ’n’ roll, that marriage, hushed until then, was made into a public outrage by the slavering British press. But, that same December, Jerry Lee took as his third wife his cousin Myra Gale Brown, age 13. In December “Great Balls of Fire” rose high on the pop, country, r&b, and British charts, and it was believed that Jerry Lee was destined to seize the throne of Elvis, who soon would be shorn and shipped to Germany. That fortune and that fame seemed to be boundless. In the summer of 1957, when he was 21, his recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” brought him fortune and fame. He had been pumping piano and singing for even longer: pumping and singing and burning and marrying. A bigamist at the age of 17 and later twice-wed to his teenage cousin, Jerry Lee had been marrying and burning, burning and marrying for most of his life. Jerry Lee Lewis, who knew those New Testament words well, found that the solution was not so simple. But, if men cannot be pure, “let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,” St.
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