Most arguments an artist has with their conscience never get recorded. Jerry Lee Lewis's did, by accident, in between takes of the song that would become one of the biggest hits of his career.
Lewis was raised in the Assemblies of God. As a teenager he briefly studied at the denomination's Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, before being expelled for playing an irreverent boogie woogie version of a church hymn. That upbringing did not stay behind him when he sat down at a piano for Sun Records on October 8, 1957. Partway through the session for Great Balls of Fire, Lewis stopped and told producer Sam Phillips the song was blasphemous, its title an echo of language used for the Holy Spirit. Phillips argued back that music itself could be a force for good, that a performer could play rock and roll and still, in his words, save souls. Lewis was not persuaded. "How can the devil save souls?" he shouted back. "I got the devil in me!"
The tape kept rolling. Within the hour, by every account of that session, Lewis made his peace with the conflict long enough to finish the recording, and Great Balls of Fire went on to become one of the defining singles of early rock and roll. What survives from that afternoon is not just a hit record. It is a rare, unscripted document of the exact tension between a performer's upbringing and the music that made him famous, captured in his own voice, arguing both sides.