Jerry Lee Lewis, an energetic founder of rock 'n' roll, is dead

Jerry Lee Lewis, known as "The Killer," at the 2015 Jazz Fest in New Orleans. (Photo by Matthew Hinton, NOLA.com)

Jerry Lee Lewis, the last of the rural-raised founders of rock 'n' roll, died Friday at his home in Mississippi just south of Memphis. He was 87.

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Born in Ferriday, La., Lewis and "two of his cousins, the future evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and the future country singer Mickey Gilley (who died this year), liked to sneak into a local dance hall, Haney’s Big House, to hear top blues acts perform," writes William Grimes of The New York Times. "He showed an aptitude for the piano, and his father borrowed money to buy him one."

“The more he practiced, the surer the left hand and wilder the right hand became,” Nick Tosches wrote in Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, one of two 1982 biographies. The other was Myra Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis, noting both his signature song and the personal scandal and tribulations that diminished his career.

But in 1986, Lewis was in the first class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he was inducted this month to the Country Music Hall of Fame, reflecting the genre in which he found more lasting success. Last year, he and Swaggart did a gospel album, The Boys from Ferriday. But at the start, his "pounding boogie-woogie piano and bluesy, country-influenced vocals helped define the sound of rock ’n’ roll," Grimes writes.

"Tender ballads were best left to the old folks," writes Hillel Itale of The Associated Press. "Lewis was all about lust and gratification, with his leering tenor and demanding asides, violent tempos and brash glissandi, cocky sneer and crazy blond hair. He was a one-man stampede who made the fans scream and the keyboards swear, his live act so combustible that during a 1957 performance of 'Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On' on 'The Steve Allen Show,' chairs were thrown at him like buckets of water on an inferno."