Jerry Lee Lewis, the Louisiana-born singer and pianist known for his flamboyant style and energetic stage presence, has passed away.  He was 87.

Born in Ferriday, Louisiana in 1935, Lewis became known as “The Killer” for the way he knocked out his audiences, mastered a unique, piano-driven sound all his own. Lewis placed 28 Top 10 Billboard Country singles, including hits, “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On.”

Lewis was also the first person inducted into the first class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. The Recording Academy honored Lewis with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and earlier this month, he was formally inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

In 2003, writing for OffBeat, Michael Hurtt, contributed to the OffBeat series, Masters of Louisiana Music on Jerry Lee Lewis. Following are excerpts:

Jerry Lee Lewis was 21 years old when he took the world by storm. The piano-pounding Pentecostal battled Elvis Presley for the title of King of Rock ’n’ Roll, the British and American press for his very career, and himself for playing what he’s openly admitted is the “devil’s music.” He’s made rock ’n’ roll that’s induced riots, gospel music convincing enough to save your soul and country that’ll break your heart. A man for whom exceptions has to be made, he was the first artist to occupy this space.

Jerry Lee Lewis never claimed to be a songwriter. His talent, he was often been quoted as saying, was of a far more rarified form than simply being able to pen a tune. Jerry Lee was a stylist. “There’s only ever been four stylists,” he stated matter-of-factly on many an occasion. “Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Williams, Al Jolson, and Jimmie Rodgers.” Giving his argument credence is the record that introduced him to the world, a re-working of Ray Price’s honky-tonk chestnut “Crazy Arms.” The song utilized exactly two instruments—drums and piano—and bore almost no resemblance whatsoever to the original. More importantly, it sounded like virtually nothing that had come before it.

Separating the man from the myth has not been easy, though countless authors have tried. Nick Tosches—whose “Hellfire” is as much a piece of Southern gothic literature as it is a biography—came closer than anyone else to unraveling the complicated personality of the man. Even William Shakespeare would have trouble dreaming up a story as full of dramatic nuance as Jerry Lee’s.

Born on September 29, 1935, in Ferriday, Louisiana to Elmo Lewis, Sr. and his wife Mamie, Jerry Lee was only three years old when his brother Elmo Jr.—who had a remarkable talent for singing and composing songs—was killed by a drunk driver at the age of nine. Now an only child, Jerry Lee and his cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Lee Swaggart grew up inseparable, closer in many ways than true brothers. A shared fascination with music of all kinds soon led all three of them to the magical discovery of the piano.

When the Assembly of God came to Ferriday in the late ’30s, Jimmy Lee Swaggart’s father—who’d never attended a church of any kind—was drawn in by the music he heard there, and soon began attending services to play his fiddle. Likewise, Elmo Lewis, Sr.—who’d spent the past few years buying and playing along with every Jimmie Rodgers record he could get his hands on—brought his guitar down and joined in. Elmo could play a little piano, and he showed young Jerry Lee what he knew. The boys were encouraged to practice on the church’s piano with the promise that when they were good enough, they would be able to play at Sunday services. In 1945, sufficiently impressed after witnessing his son transform “Silent Night” into a relentless boogie, Elmo went into debt to buy Jerry Lee an old Starck upright.

That same year, Jerry visited his cousin Carl Glasscock, whose father was a Pentecostal preacher, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Carl specialized in what’s been termed “Holy Ghost Boogie,” much to his father’s disapproval. As Tosches so succinctly points out, “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.”

“Jerry Lee couldn’t play too well then,” Glasscock told Tosches. “He stayed with us about a month and a half, and he made me play the piano every day. When he left to go home, he could do everything I could do. He didn’t have those big fingers yet—he couldn’t hit those octaves—but he knew the boogie. It was great.”

Jerry practiced and practiced, developing a heavy-hitting left-handed bass technique while he let his right hand explore the upper reaches of the keyboard in wild abandon. He absorbed whatever he heard on the radio, be it country, blues or pop, applying all of it to his quickly growing repertoire. When Shreveport’s KWKH began broadcasting the Louisiana Hayride in 1948, he became spellbound by the lonesome whine of Hank Williams.

Lewis’s first public performance took place in 1950 when he banged out a sizzling version of Stick McGhee’s 1949 R&B smash “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” in the parking lot of a recently opened Ford dealership in Ferriday. “That 14-year-old boy,” Tosches wrote of the performance, “sat there, rocking, howling a song that was about nothing but getting drunk and fucking up, and all the people there started howling along with him, loving it. He was making the sort of music that most folks had only heard in conjunction with the Holy Ghost, but the boy wasn’t singing about any Holy Ghost. He was singing something he had taken from the blacks, from the juke joint blacks, but he had changed what he had taken… changed it by pure, unholy audacity.” Jimmy Lee Swaggart had his own experience playing “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” not too dissimilar to Jerry’s, around the same time. He suddenly realized that his fingers were hitting licks that he’d never been able to play before, as if there was some invisible power guiding his hands to the piano keys. Swaggart had been by far the most religious of the three cousins, being the first to speak in tongues and also the first to get the calling to preach. Interpreting his musical epiphany as the Devil guiding his hands, Swaggart walked away from the secular piano bench that day and never looked back.

Jerry too, was struggling with his faith and even enrolled in Bible college, only to be thrown out after ravaging “My God Is Real” during chapel. In 1954 he joined a local country band led by Johnny Littlejohn, though the spontaneous combustion that the group produced when they hit the bandstand jumped genres as quickly as its audience downed shots of whiskey. “We played everything from ‘The Wild Side Of Life’ to ‘Big Legged Woman,’” Littlejohn told Tosches. “Hell, we did ‘Stardust.’ Whatever we did, we did it, honky-tonk style, hard-core barroom style. Paul Whitehead made that electric accordion sound like a damn brass section. A guy came into the club one New Year’s Eve when we were playin’ and he thought it was a black band. Hell, man, we just did it—we played it all.” Jerry Lee, Littlejohn concluded, often couldn’t remember the words to the songs, “But he was somethin’ to see, man. He was always a showman. Always.”

Lewis made two trips during the time he was with Littlejohn. The first was to Shreveport, where Slim Whitman helped him cut an acetate of two songs, mostly to get rid of him; the second was to Nashville where he knocked on various doors with said acetate, to no avail. “Go get yourself a guitar,” was a rebuff he heard more than once. Broke, he lucked into the one man in Nashville who understood a hillbilly piano player’s plight: Roy Hall. Hall gave him a job at his club, the Musician’s Hideaway, an after-hours joint where busts were routine. “I hired him,” Hall told Tosches, “for fifteen dollars a night. He worked from one ’til five in the morning, poundin’ that piano ’til daylight.” Unbeknownst to Jerry Lee, Hall would give him more than a short-lived job, he’d give him his first number one hit.

Lewis’ first single, “Crazy Arms,” was only a hit below the Mason-Dixon Line, but his second, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” was a different story altogether, especially after he stormed through it on national television, violently kicking the piano stool across the stage of The Steve Allen Show in mid-song. (Allen responded by gleefully throwing some furniture around the stage himself). By the fall of ’57, the song had zoomed to number one on the country, R&B and pop charts, eventually selling in excess of a million copies.

Songwriter Otis Blackwell whipped up Jerry’s next hit, “Great Balls Of Fire,” in the same spirit as “Whole Lotta Shakin.’” Getting it on tape, however, was another story. Gathered in the studio on a hot August day in 1957 were bassist Billy Lee Riley, drummer James Van Eaton, engineer Jack Clement, Sam Phillips and Lewis himself. The booze was flowing freely, as it often did in Phillips’ studio, and after a sufficient amount of imbibing, Riley, Van Eaton and Clement were clearly ready to get down to business. Lewis was not. Nevertheless, the tape was rolling.

“Great Balls Of Fire,” another number one hit, was followed by “Breathless” and “High School Confidential” as Lewis was pitted against Elvis Presley for the crown of King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In 1958, Jerry Lee journeyed to England for a five-week tour. As he stepped off the plane, he introduced his brand-new wife Myra Gale to questioning reporters who soon discovered that she was not only 13-years-old, but also his second cousin. After only three shows, the tour was cancelled and the Lewis entourage were flown back to the States in disgrace, where they awaited similar persecution by the U.S. media.

Lewis’s stature as a star—even a menacing rocker—couldn’t withstand such stacked odds and he was reduced to playing one-nighters for chump change in back road honky-tonks for the next decade. To his full credit, his music survived without a scratch. Recording for Sun until 1963, he injected the same masterful stylization and shimmering glissandi into recently penned rockers like “Milkshake Mademoiselle” and “Pink Pedal Pushers” as he did into century-old plantation melodies like “Old Black Joe” and “That Lucky Old Sun.” His recorded repertoire touched on virtually every genre of American music, and he made every song indelibly his own. Though much of this material went unreleased at the time, it ranks as some of the finest work of a career brimming with brilliance.

There was always more to Lewis than the hits. When he erupted into a fervor somewhere between demonic and evangelical on storming re-inventions of Charlie Rich’s “Don’t Put No Headstone On My Grave” and the traditional standard “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” the songs seemed as much autobiographical statements of proud survival as proof that the rock ’n’ roll fire within him would never be put out.

Roland Janes, whose guitar work is as much a part of Lewis’s Sun records as that inimitable piano, doesn’t like to talk to the press about Jerry Lee because, in his words, “Nobody’s interested in the truth anyway.” Of the outrageous stories that have obscured much of Lewis’s legacy, Janes doesn’t mince words. “I think a lot of it’s made-up horseshit. Folks do have a tendency to play with the facts sometimes; if they don’t know the facts, they make up facts. To me, he’s always been really on the up and up and one hell of a really nice guy. Sometimes misunderstood, but a very generous person. And he’s one hell of a musician. He’s so much more talented than what you’ve heard and what you know about him. ’Cause he’s never done all that he’s capable of doing.”

Sarah Trahern, Country Music Association CEO, said of Lewis: “One of my most vivid memories of Jerry Lee was in 1997, when he was a guest on “Monday Night Concerts” at the Ryman. Ricky Skaggs and Brian Setzer joined Jerry Lee for a set that started with the classic “Great Balls of Fire” and ended with a stirring rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross.” A true force of nature, it was amazing to be able to witness Jerry perform in person that night. As one of the most talented musicians and entertainers of our time, it warms my heart to know that he got the chance to accept his rightful place in the hallowed hall as a member of the newest class of Country Music Hall of Fame inductees just a few weeks ago. My deepest condolences go out to Jerry Lee’s family and friends during this time.”

Jerry Lee Lewis is survived by his wife, Judith Coghlan Lewis, his children Jerry Lee Lewis III, Ronnie Lewis, Pheobe Lewis and Lori Lancaster, sister Linda Gail Lewis, cousin, Jimmy Swaggart and many grandchildren, nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents Elmo and Mamie Lewis, sons Steve Allen Lewis and Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., his siblings Elmo Lewis Jr. and Frankie Jean Lewis and his cousin Mickey Gilley.