The 1957 rock’n’roll hit is still one of the most lascivious songs ever recordedRead our 100 greatest list as it counts downThe revolutionary force of rock’n’roll’s first wave echoed down the years because it broke racial taboos, mixing black and white
music, black and white youth and black and white America. But its most explosive individual moments often emerged from a different kind of tension: that between sin and piety, between God and the devil.
It was a real conflict, as the tapes rolling in Sun Studios on 8 October 1957 proved. Jerry Lee Lewis was up in the city from Ferriday, Louisiana, to record the follow-up to Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, the remarkable single that managed to make having chicken in the barn (“Whose barn? What barn? My barn!”) sound like something unspeakably filthy. He’d turned up at Sun to find Sam Phillips had a song for him from Otis Blackwell, who had written for Elvis, and whose Fever was a searingly sexual song without ever being explicit. Blackwell was, if you like, the king of being sexually implicit.