6. Jerry Lee Lewis recorded for Sun Records in the 1950s
Jerry Lee Lewis began pounding the piano at Sun Records in late 1956, recording his own music and working as a session musician, including with Carl Perkins. In 1957 Lewis, who listed himself on his records in the early days as Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano, recorded Great Balls of Fire, released in the United States in November. It sold one million copies in ten days, eventually surpassed 5 million, and climbed to the top of music charts around the world. In the United Kingdom, it reached number 1, and Lewis’s popularity reached heights which rivaled any preceding American star.
The song was featured in the 1957 film Jamboree, which was marketed in Britain as Disc Jockey Jamboree. The film began rivalry between Alan Freed, who often falsely claimed to have coined the term rock and roll as a Cleveland disc jockey, and a young Dick Clark. Clark was at the time a disc jockey for WFIL in Philadelphia, the same station from which he later hosted American Bandstand. The film was popular with teens in both the United States and the United Kingdom, though Jerry Lee Lewis’s popularity in the latter soon took a hit, when it was learned that his third wife was both his first cousin and only 13 years old at the time of marriage.
