Jerry Lee Lewis’ Former Teen Bride Breaks Her Silence After His Death

Last week, we reported that the country music legend Jerry Lee Lewis had passed away at the age of 87. Myra Lewis Williams, the former teenage bride of Lewis who married him in 1957 when she was 13 and he was 22, has now broken her silence to publicly address his death for the first time.

‘It’s A Sad Time’

“It’s a sad time for the music business and the world,” Williams, 78, told Fox News. “They’ve lost a great entertainer, a very talented man.”

Lewis and Williams, who were second cousins, married back in 1957, when he was 22 and she was only 13. Their story would later be depicted on the big screen in the 1989 movie Great Balls of Fire, which starred Dennis Quaid as Lewis and Winona Ryder as Williams. Check out a trailer for that movie in the video below.

Related: Donald Trump Pays Tribute To Jerry Lee Lewis After He Dies At 87

Williams Reveals All About Marriage To Lewis

In her latest interview, Williams talked about how her marriage to Lewis came to be. 

“He had gone to Louisiana and came back,” Williams recalled. “He called me out to his car and showed me something. It was a marriage license. He had taken a friend of his to the courthouse. She posed as me and signed the marriage license application.”

“And he brought his marriage license home to me for us to get married,” she continued. “I looked at him and I said, ‘Jerry, are you crazy? My daddy will kill you.’ And he said, ‘Oh no, he won’t. Your daddy likes me and your mama likes me.’ I just kept telling him, ‘They will kill you.’”

“The next day, he said, ‘You wanna go to a movie or something?’” Williams added. “I said, ‘OK, sure.’ So we got in the car and he drove straight to the preacher that married us. I guess he had it all set up. I was like a deer caught in headlights. You just stare and wonder, ‘Oh my God, where am I? What’s going on? How is this happening?’ And that’s how we got married.”

Williams turned out to be right about how her parents would respond, as they were livid when they learned of the marriage. When news of their marriage broke in the press the next year, Lewis’ career was derailed and he was blacklisted from the radio. Williams found it to be “ridiculous” that the press labeled her a “child bride” because she “did not feel like one.”

“I was the adult in the room and Jerry was the silly child,” she explained. “I was more of the adult than Jerry was. He was still playing with squirt bottles with his friends. I dealt with [the controversy] a lot better than anybody else did… I had not thought like a child in a long time. I was happy to think I would have a home and a husband and children. That’s what I yearned for more than anything else. I went out and found us a house. I took the money to the bank after he came home from his shows.”

Related: Jerry Lee Lewis Shoots Down Reports He’s Dead At 87 – ‘It’s Bulls***!’

Lewis And Williams’ Marriage And Divorce

Lewis and Williams would go on to have two children together before they divorced in 1970. Their son sadly died in 1962 at the age of 3 in a drowning accident, but they maintained a positive relationship over the years for the sake of their surviving daughter. Williams has since remarried, and she owns a real estate company with the husband she’s now been with for nearly 40 years.

“I’ve had a different life here,” she said. “And most of the time, people have no idea who I was!”

As for whether or not she’d do everything the same all over again if she had the chance, however, Williams said the answer to that is complicated.

“That’s the toughest question to answer because it would change everybody’s life – mine, his, our children,” she concluded. “It’s the path not taken…. I don’t know. I guess if I had to do it all over again, I’d have to do some things differently. I just don’t know which ones they’d be.”

Lewis died last Friday following a bout with pneumonia. This came three years after he suffered a minor stroke, and he seems to have been struggling with his health ever since then. May he rest in peace.