Jerry Lee Lewis has died at age 87

Rock 'n' roll's first great wild man, Jerry Lee Lewis — the singer and pianist nicknamed "The Killer" — has died. He was 87 years old.

Sam Philips, the founder of Sun Records — and the producer who also discovered Elvis, Howlin' Wolf, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison — called Lewis "the most talented man I ever worked with, black or white ... one of the most talented human beings to walk God's earth." But almost as quickly as his star ascended, his career collapsed, after he married his 13-year-old cousin in 1958 — mere months after his first hit song was issued.

Born Sept. 29, 1935 in Ferriday, La., Jerry Lee Lewis grew up caught in a binary quandary over music and morality, perpetually torn between his religious upbringing and a burning desire to boogie. His mother was a Pentecostal preacher who disapproved of secular music; his cousin, the influential and eventually infamous evangelical preacher Jimmy Swaggart, was also fond of condemning "the devil's music." But when Lewis was just eight years old, his father (who had served time in prison for bootlegging), took out a mortgage on the family farm to buy young Jerry a piano. And he grew up sneaking into the black clubs, hiding under the tables until he got kicked out.