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Historic Love and Marriages From Hell

Khalid Elhassan September 22, 2020 31 min

Jerry Lee Lewis - Myra Gale Brown — Jerry Lee Lewis and his child bride, back home after a disastrous overseas trip. The Commercial Appeal

2. Some Good Advice, That He Just Didn’t Take

Jerry Lee Lewis and his child bride. Today I Found Out

It was not commonplace in 1950s Louisiana to marry one’s cousin, or a thirteen-year-old girl. However, while unusual, it was not considered extreme back then. Given his background and upbringing, Jerry Lee Lewis did not think that Myra’s age, or her blood relation to him, was a big deal. To the extent he was worried about scandal, it had more to with the timing of the wedding: his third marriage had been performed before finalizing the divorce from his second wife.

Lewis was warned not to take his child bride with him on his first European tour. Besotted with love and unwilling to part from Myra, he ignored the warning. He should have listened. Arriving in Britain in May, 1958, he introduced Myra to reporters as his wife, but claimed she was fifteen – still shockingly young. Myra made it worse by remarking that fifteen was not too young to marry, because where she came from: “You can marry at ten, if you can find a husband“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.