Jerry Lee Lewis

The 20-track album will be titled "The Pilgrim". Rebel Music: The Bob Marley Story. B. King, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Owl Books (NY), 1998. At the presentation it was announced that his new album would be made with a line-up that will include Eric Clapton, B. Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley. In February 2005 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award, by the Recording Academy that also gives the Grammy Awards. Timothy White.

After several years of inactivity in the studio, Lewis plans to put out a new album in 2005. The birthday celebrations for what would have been his 60th birthday on February 6th 2005 were celebrated in Shashamane for the first time, having previously always been held in Jamaica. He has never stopped touring and can still deliver great unique concerts that are always unpredictable exciting and personal. In announcing the decision to move Marley's remains to Ethiopia, Rita Marley said: "Bob's whole life is about Africa, it is not Jamaica." There is as lot of resistance to this proposal in Jamaica. In 1986 Jerry Lee Lewis was part of the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In January 2005, it was reported (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4168883.stm) that Rita Marley is planning to have her late husband's remains exhumed and reburied in Shashamane, Ethiopia. Nicknamed The Killer for his forceful voice and piano production on stage, he was described by fellow artist Roy Orbison as the best raw performer in the history of rock music. Bob Marley's music and legend have gone from strength to strength in the years since his early death and continues to produce a huge stream of revenue for his estate, and has brought him nearly mythic status in music history similar to that of Elvis Presley and John Lennon.He is enormously popular and well known all over the world, and particularly so in Africa.

Despite the personal problems, his musical talent is unquestioned. He is buried in a crypt at Nine Miles, near his birthplace. Jerry Lee's sister, Linda Gail Lewis, is also a piano player, and has recorded with Van Morrison. His funeral in Jamaica was a dignified affair with combined elements of Ethiopian Orthodoxy and Rastafarianism. Swaggart is also a piano player, as is another cousin, country music star Mickey Gilley. He passed away at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami, Florida on May 11, 1981. The very public downfall of his cousin, television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, resulted in more adverse publicity to an already deeply troubled family. He wanted to spend his final days in Jamaica but he became too ill on the flight home from Germany and had to land in Miami.

The film was based on the book by Lewis' ex-wife Myra and starred Dennis Quaid as Lewis, with Winona Ryder, and Alec Baldwin. A month before his death, he was awarded Jamaica's Order of Merit. In 1989, a major motion picture based on his early life in rock & roll titled Great Balls of Fire brought him back into the public eye. Marley sought help, and decided to go to Munich in order to receive treatment from controversial cancer specialist Josef Issels for several months, but it was to no avail. When questioned about why he was at the front gate, Lewis displayed a gun and told the guard he had come to kill Presley. The illness made him unable to continue with the large tour planned. Lewis had been invited to visit by Presley but a security guard was unaware of this. This was after a series of shows in England and at Madison Square Garden.

A few weeks later on November 23, Lewis was again involved in a gun related arrest at Elvis Presley's Graceland residence. While on tour in the summer of 1980 trying to break into the US market, he collapsed jogging in NYC's Central Park. Owens miraculously survived. The cancer spread to his brain, his lungs and his stomach. The gun was loaded and Lewis shot Owens in the chest. The cancer was kept a secret from the wider public. Pointing it at his bass player, Butch Owens, he pulled the trigger. I and I don't allow a mon ta be dismantled." [Catch a Fire, Timothy White] He did have surgery to try to excise the cancer cells.

While celebrating his 41st birthday in 1976, Lewis began playing with a .357 Magnum, which he later stated he thought was unloaded. Still, Marley based this refusal on his Rastafarian beliefs, saying, "Rasta no abide amputation. Addicted to drugs too, Jerry Lee Lewis checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic. He also was concerned about the impact the operation would have on his dancing; amputation would profoundly affect his career at a time when greater success was close at hand. Little more than a year later, his fifth wife was found dead at his home from a methadone overdose. He was advised to get his toe amputated, but he refused because of the Rastafarian belief that doctors are samfai, confidence men who cheat the gullible by pretending to have the power of witchcraft. Following this, his fourth wife drowned in a swimming pool under suspicious circumstances. Marley actually had a form of skin cancer, malignant melanoma, which grew under his toenail.

Lewis' own erratic behaviour during the latter part of the 1970s led to his being hospitalized and near death from a bleeding ulcer. It was then that the correct diagnosis was made. Earlier in the sixties his first son Steve Allen Lewis drowned in a swimming pool accident. The wound would not completely heal, and his toenail later fell off during a soccer game. Plagued by alcohol and drug problems after Myra divorced him in 1970, tragedy struck when his 19-year-old son, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., was killed in a road accident in 1973. In July 1977, Marley was found to have a wound on his right big toe, which he thought was from a soccer injury. Although he toured and played many sold-out concerts, he never again achieved the heights of success that he had prior to the scandal of 1958 despite a major international hit with "Chantilly Lace" in 1973. He released "Africa Unite" on the Survival album in 1979, and was then invited to perform at the Zimbabwe Independence Day celebrations on April 17th 1980.

He achieved many No.1 and Top 10 country hits. Bob Marley left Jamaica at the end of 1976, and went to England, where he recorded both Exodus and Kaya, and where he was famously arrested for possession of a joint of marijuana. After more than a decade playing rock and roll, in 1968 Lewis began focussing on country and western music with reasonable success. Though the police never caught the gunmen, Marley devotees later "caught up" with them on the streets of Kingston. His popularity recovered somewhat in Europe, especially in the UK and Germany, in the mid 1960s, but success eluded him in the USA. However, there is little evidence to support this. His only hit during this period was a cover of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" in 1962. It is widely held that he was shot by supporters of the conservative political party of Jamaica, the Jamaica Labour Party.

The scandal followed Lewis home to America and, as a result, he almost vanished from the music scene. The concert was seen as being in support of the progressive prime minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley. The situation caused a public uproar and the tour was cancelled after only three concerts. Jamaican politics being somewhat violent at the time, especially when close to elections time as it was then. Lewis’ personal life was always turbulent but kept from the public until a tour of Britain in 1958 when the press learned the 23-year-old star was with his third wife, Myra Gale Brown, who was also his 13-year-old second cousin. It is generally believed that this shooting was politically motivated. His dynamic performing style can be viewed in films, including High School Confidential in which he sang the title song from the back of a flatbed truck and the big-budget film The Girl Can't Help It. Rita also recovered of the head wound she received that night.

He kicked the piano bench out of the way to play standing, raked his hands up and down the keyboard for dramatic accent, and even sat down on it. He was registered in serious condition after he was rushed to the hospital but fully recovered later. Lewis's performances were dynamic. Don Taylor took most of the bullets in his legs and torso as he accidentally walked in the line of fire. His early billing was as Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano. Marley received minor injuries in the arm and chest. Watching and listening to Jerry Lee Lewis play, Elvis said if he could play the piano like that, he'd quit singing. In 1976, just two days before a scheduled free concert that Marley and the then Jamaican PM Michael Manley had organized in the run up to the general election, Marley, his wife Rita and manager Don Taylor, were shot inside the star's 56 Hope Road home.

"Great Balls Of Fire" soon followed and would become his biggest hit. It was his 1975 hit No woman, no cry that first gained him fame on a wider level. In 1957, his piano and the pure rock sound of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" propelled him to international fame. Though many people believe that Blackwell interfered with what Marley wanted to do with his own music, others think that the knowledge this producer brought to the scene was critical in Marley's wish to bring reggae to the world. Lewis' first recording at Sun studios was his own distinct version of the country ballad "Crazy Arms". Island Records boasted a retinue of successful and diverse artists including Genesis, John Martyn and Nick Drake. Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash also began their recording careers at Sun Studios around this same time. He signed to Chris Blackwell's Island Records label in 1971, at the time a highly influential and innovative label.

In 1956, Lewis joined Sam Phillips at his Sun Records studio in Memphis, Tennessee. Marley's work was largely responsible for the mainstream cultural acceptance of reggae music outside of Jamaica. Leaving religious music behind, but bringing its sound and his piano playing talents to the new music developing at the time, in 1954 he cut his first record. They did work together again in London, though, and remained friends until Marley's death. He began playing the piano at a very early age in his church, and in 1950 he attended Southwestern Bible Institute in Texas but was expelled for misconduct, including playing rock and roll versions of hymns in church. This pair also split apart, this time over the assignment of recording rights. He was, like Elvis Presley, brought up singing the Christian gospel music of integrated southern Pentecostal churches. That relationship later deteriorated due to financial pressure, and in the early 1970s he produced what is believed by many to be his finest work with Lee Perry.

His parents, though poor, took out a loan to buy him a piano, and within a year he had developed his mature style of playing. Much of Marley's early work was produced by Coxsone Dodd at Studio One. Born in Ferriday, Louisiana, he early showed a natural talent at the piano. Livingstone and Tosh later left the group and went on to become successful solo artists. Jerry Lee Lewis (born September 29, 1935) is an American rock and roll pioneer piano player and singer. Marley is perhaps best-known for work with his reggae group "The Wailers", which included two other celebrated reggae musicians, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh. "Breathless". Marley started his musical experimentation in ska and gravitated towards reggae as the music evolved, playing, teaching and singing for a long period in the 1970s and 1980s.

"Great Balls of Fire". As a person of mixed race, Bob Marley may have been rejected and even the object of bitter ridicule by both white and black Jamaicans for his mixed heritage. "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On". Norval never really knew his son because of the white upper class' disdain for mixed race relationships. "Another Place, Another Time". Approximately a week before the wedding, however, Norval informed Cedella that his chronic hernia had begun to trouble him and as a result he would be changing jobs and moving to Kingston. "Crazy Arms". Cedella and Norval were to be married on June 9th, 1944.

"High School Confidential". Bob Marley was born on February 6, 1945 in Jamaica to Norval Marley, a middle-aged white plantation overseer from England, and Cedella Booker, a black teenager from the north country. "It'll Be Me". Marley also makes many references to Judah and his tribe, in reference to Haile Selassie, God incarnate of the Rastafarians. "What's Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)". The tribe of Joseph is Aquarius. "Who's Gonna Play this Old Piano?". Marley was known to have connections with the Twelve Tribes of Israel sect of Rastafari, and he expressed this with a biblical quote about Joseph, son of Jacob on the album cover of Rastaman Vibration.

"End of the Road". On the cover of Catch a Fire he is seen smoking a big spliff, and the spiritual use of cannabis is mentioned in many of his songs. "Me and Bobby McGee". As a Rasta, Bob Marley was a great defender of cannabis which he used as a sacrament. Towards the end of his life he was also baptised into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church with the name Berhane Selassie. Through his music he preached brotherhood and peace for all of mankind.

He served as a de facto missionary for the faith (his actions and lyrics suggest that this was intentional) and brought it to global attention. It was his wife Rita who first inspired him in his faith, and he then received teachings from Mortimer Planner. Marley was well known for his devotion to the Rastafarian religion. Another of his sons Damien Marley (aka "Jr Gong") has also started a career in music.

She had 4 of his 9 children, including David Ziggy Marley and Stephen Marley who continue their father's musical legacy in their band the Melody Makers. He was the husband of Rita Anderson Marley (who was one of the I Threes, who acted as the Wailers' back up singers after they became a global act). He has been called the Charles Wesley of the Rastafarian faith for the way he spread Rastafari through his music. Much of his work deals with the struggles of the impoverished and/or powerless.

He is the best known reggae musician of all time, famous for popularising the genre outside of Jamaica. Robert Nesta Marley (February 6, 1945 - May 11, 1981), better known as Bob Marley, was a singer, guitarist, songwriter from the ghettos of Jamaica. Christian site critical of Marley's Rasta beliefs (http://www.av1611.org/crock/pod_rast.html). Bob Marley Forever - Posters, Shirts, Books, Lyrics and more (http://www.bobmarleyforever.com).

Family tree of Bob Marley (http://hem.passagen.se/ielbo/wail/wailerft.htm). Lovers and Children of the Natural Mystic: The Story of Bob Marley, Women and their Children  (http://debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/dixon.html). www.bobmarley.com. On October 4, 1963, Haile Selassie addressed the United Nations with his famous peace speech (http://www.bobmarley.com/life/rastafari/war_speech.html) from which Bob Marley made the song 'War'.

Bob Marley (http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0002490/) at the Internet Movie Database. Bob Marley Lyrics (http://lyrics.rare-lyrics.com/B/Bob-Marley.html). Bob Marley Lyrics (http://www.jamaicalyrics.com.ar/index.php?mod=search&type=0&find=bob+marley). Bob Marley at 60, what's planned? (http://www.tributetobobmarley.com/).

Download sample of "Redemption Song". "Rastaman Live Up". "I Know". "Stiff Necked Fools".

"Trench Town". "Blackman Redemption". "Give Thanks & Praises". "Mix Up, Mix Up".

"Jump Nyabingi". "Buffalo Soldier". Confrontation (1983)