Jerry Lee Lewis was one of the fathers of rock & roll in the 1950s. Called “The Killer” and “Rock & Roll’s First Great Wild Man,” Jerry Lee, who was born in 1935, should have died long ago. He’s gone on countless drug and alcohol-fueled binges, spent a half million dollars on Demerol, crashed cars, shouted obscenities at neighbors, stabbed one man in the neck, smashed another in the face with a broken whiskey bottle, even shot a friend in the chest with a .357 magnum handgun. He has been married six times (the third time to a 13-year-old cousin); two of his children died young; one wife drowned in their swimming pool and another died from a drug overdose.
When he was 16, his Pentecostal mother sent him to an Assemblies of God Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, with the desire to see him train for the Lord’s service. But though he preached a little, he was already deeply in love with the world. After playing a boogie-woogie version of “My God Is Real” at a morning assembly, Jerry Lee was expelled for delving in “worldly” music.
Years later Pearry Green, who was president of the student body when Lewis was kicked out, asked The Killer, “Are you still playing the devil’s music.” Lewis replied, “Yes, I am. But you know it is strange, the same music that they kicked me out of school for is the same kind of music they play in their churches today. The difference is, I know I am playing for the devil and they don’t” (JerryLeeLewis.com).
Nick Tosches, Lewis’s biographer, observed that “if you took the words away, there were more than a few Pentecostal hymns that would not sound foreign coming from the nickel machine in the wildest juke joint” (Hellfire, p. 57).
The same can be said about the Contemporary Christian Music that has permeated every denomination today. One credit that must be given to Jerry Lee Lewis is that he is not a hypocrite, claiming to be a Christian on one hand while living for the flesh on the other. No, Jerry Lee has lived all out for the devil, and he is right about rock & roll being the devil’s music. It always has been and always will be, and those who are using it in the service of a holy God are deceived by their love for sensuality and their carnal desire to get a larger crowd and have a larger following.
Those who stand against CCM have become the minority over the past three decades, but they are right. Those who follow the popular path in this apostate age will be wrong every time.
