Neil Spencer 

Jerry Lee Lewis: Rock & Roll Time review – the Killer’s country heart

The founding father of rock’n’roll remains a defiant presence with a little help from his stellar friends, writes Neil Spencer
  
  

Jerry Lee Lewis Rock & Roll Time
Jerry Lee Lewis enlists the help of a stellar cast on his latest album Rock & Roll Time. Photograph: /PR

Even staring 80 years in the face, Lewis remains a defiantly ornery presence, and the stellar cast here – Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, Doyle Bramhall II – are kept firmly in harness to his still muscular vocals and stridentbarrelhouse piano. There are nods to Lewis’s role as rock’n’roll founding father – Keef ’n’ Ron show up for Chuck’s Little Queenie – but country is where the Killer’s heart resides, and Jimmie Rodgers’s Blues Like Midnight and Dylan’s Stepchild come steeped in stoic sorrow, while Shelby Lynne adds spice to Kristofferson’s Here Comes That Rainbow. A nice appetiser for the new tell-all biography.

 

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