Memphis Beat (album)

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].