It took longer to read this book because I often stopped to listen to the music or revisit memories shared by my mom. ( )

Book is so good, I was almost depressed when I finished it - I wanted more. Author does such an excellent job of retelling the story and interweaving Jerry Lee's quotes and comments, it's as if Jerry Lee himself is sitting there with you, telling you his story. ( )

I'm a unabashed fan of the Killer, Mr Jerry Lee Lewis, and own more books about him than could well be necessary. So, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Killer.

"Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story" finds the Killer in his eighties, an old man surprised he's still alive, so much in pain that he can barely sit for more than a few minutes, but into his seventh marriage and his seventh decade as a living legend, author Bragg is still able to coax some eyebrow raising fare from the Killer.

Bragg can also write well and while he is not the first to write about Lewis in Old Testament fire and brimstone way he pulls it off, making you believe Lewis nothing less than a Prophet who fears he will spend eternity in hell, away from his loved ones.

Although it's sad to see the killer like this; aged, in pain, fearing for his soul, I feel the closest I've ever been to Lewis since I discovered him all those decades ago. ( )

Rick Bragg's book on Jerry Lee Lewis is frankly adoring. That's the best word I can think of. Not that Bragg doesn't see the faults and the flaws--not that Jerry Lee Lewis (it's "in his own words" after all) doesn't know what those are in graphic detail--but it's still written in the spirit of someone who has met kith and kin in his subject. When Bragg says "there was a beauty about Elvis that southern men found hard to understand, but we get Jerry Lee" -- he is being absolutely sincere.

And that sincerity makes the book. If it is possible to adore a person even if you can't exactly admire them, then Bragg has achieved it here. And that sincerity lifts up the book even when it is inclined to go a bit over the top in the sing-song southern storyteller lingo that is Bragg's lingua franca. Bragg's writing sometimes reminds me of the way people will attempt to mimic Chandler and Hammett's "hardboiled" style and end up with something so imitative that it almost looks like satire:

"Even in the most barren times, when cigarette smoke hung like tear gas in mean little honky-tonks and he might have missed a step on his way to the stage, he gave them something they were looking for. "

Or how about:

"It usually started without fanfare; he just walked out there, often when the band was in the middle of a song, and took a seat. “Gimme my money and show me the piano,” he often said of how the experience would begin. But it ended like an M80 in a mailbox, with such a holy mother of a crack and bang that, fifty years later, an old man in a Kiwanis haircut and an American flag lapel pin will turn red to his ears and say only: “Jerry Lee Lewis? I saw him in Jackson. Whooooooooo, boy!”"

Only Bragg really talks, and really writes, and really does tell stories like this. Has done in every book I've ever read by him. If anyone else had written "but it ended like an M80 in a mailbox" I would have been rolling my eyes. But Bragg is just being honest. So you have to kind of surrender to it, and I think also you have to surrender to the story.

The upside to the book is that you get a really beautiful look at not just the Depression-era and post-War South, but also a stellar account of the grit and crackling energy of the early days of rock and roll -- when it lived in honky-tonks and speakeasies, not stadiums. Odds are, you'll be combing the net for tracks by the names that drift on and off the stages of the juke joints and roadhouses to add to your iTunes list. The coverage of Lewis's early days at Sun Records is especially good, including a detailed account of the so-called Million-dollar Quartet sessions that is probably worth the price of the book.

And the account of Lewis's rivalry-cum-friendship with Elvis is....interesting. It brings depth to the mythology of "the Killer" and "the King" which began in that impromptu meeting at Sun Records and ended when Lewis supposedly tried to kill Elvis twenty years later. It was a misunderstanding, an incident blown out of proportion -- but then, "blown out of proportion" is the way Lewis lived his life. Indeed, it's in the telling of his relationship with Elvis that the wary reader starts to get the sense of the story Lewis isn't telling. It's the down side to a book that lives up to its title: Jerry Lee Lewis, "in his own words." That includes a fair amount of mythologizing on his own account: "I knew looking at Elvis that day that I might have to come through him." he said in remembering the Million Dollar Quartet session.

It also means anything he doesn't want to talk about, doesn't get talked about. And for someone who likes to tell a story as much as Lewis, the places where he shuts his mouth are notable by contrast: the deaths of his wife and his son, for example. His silence on the subject of grief is stands out in an otherwise noisy life.

In the end Lewis apologizes for almost nothing. Not the drugs. Not the misery he caused the women in his life. Not the trouble he gets into and not the destruction he causes. Jerry Lee Lewis was a lot of things, but he was not a nice man. Bragg doesn't whitewash it, and he doesn't make excuses for him, but he does a marvelous job of making you see the full character of the man that all those Southern men just "get him." And when Bragg says "Jerry Lee Lewis was the bunched up fist. He was the swinging tire iron," the reader knows exactly what he means.

Being the rip-roaring life of the legendary rock musician and wild man, grounded in interviews conducted by the author with his subject. The book is enjoyable to the point of being difficult to put down; Lewis' clipped truculence is a strange bedfellow with Bragg's groomed, expansive, almost purple prose stylings, but the effect is a not unpleasant, you-got-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter vibe. It must be said that investigative reporting is not this book's long suit; although Lewis and Bragg are plenty willing to 'fess up to some very wild rides, there are some limits, undoubtedly imposed by Lewis as a condition of his participation. Specifically, the sketchy adumbration of the death of Lewis' fifth wife under dubious circumstances is far from definitive and valuable mostly for a chance to hear Lewis' side of the story. That's basically all right with me, as Lewis' participation is vital to the book, and the voices who believe he should have been tried in that case have had their own outlets which are at least as widely read as this book will be. The book is frontloaded, which to me is a flaw; at its halfway point Lewis is all of twenty-one years old, and I doubt that too many readers would have minded if an editor had tightened this up by fifty pages or so, but books this fascinating don't come along that often, so I'm all in on this one. ( )