Memphis Beat (album)

Memphis Beat is the fifth album by Jerry Lee Lewis released on the Smash label march 1966.^[1]

More than half the songs on Memphis Beat were recorded on January 5 and 6, 1966 at Phillips Studio in Memphis. The remaining selections were taken from a rare New York City session eight months earlier and Lewis's earliest sessions at Smash in 1963. The album includes one of the few songs composed by Lewis called "Lincoln Limousine," a remarkable tribute to John F. Kennedy. In his book Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Joe Bonomo calls the track "simply weird, so ambiguous and amateurishly written that it's impossible to determine exactly what motivated him to write it."^[2] The album also includes "Too Young," a piano lounge number that Bonomo deems "a real laugher" and "hysterically uncomfortable." Most of the other songs show a more familiar side of Lewis, up-tempo Boogie and Blues standards such as "Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee" and "Big Boss Man", the Swamp pop classic "Mathilda" from Cookie and his Cupcakes, and George Jones' Country classic "She Thinks I Still Care." Two cover songs were selected as the album's singles, but neither Sham the Sham's "Memphis Beat" nor Ray Charles' "Sticks and Stones" reached the Billboard charts^[3].

After Memphis Beat was released in May 1966, it stalled at 145 on the Billboard albums chart.^[4] Lewis's commercial slump would continue until 1968, when he finally broke on the country charts with "Another Place, Another Time." In 2014 Lewis biographer Rick Bragg wrote, "Throughout the mid-1960s he cut one album after another of other people's music...But none of it was new, not really."^[5] Bruce Eder of AllMusic praises the album: "After veering hard into country (and country-pop) territory with Country Songs for City Folks, Jerry Lee Lewis came roaring back with Memphis Beat in 1966, featuring his hardest rocking sounds in years, and a band who were as good as any with whom he'd ever recorded."^[6]