Produced by
Huey Meaux, a fellow
Louisiana wild man who had just recently gotten out of prison, the sessions commenced in September 1973, which would go on to be a hellish year for Lewis; he was jailed and fined for driving while intoxicated and, just after his release, his son Jerry Lee Lewis, Jr. was killed when a car he was towing jackknifed and hit the abutment of a bridge near
Hernando, Mississippi. Three weeks later, Lewis's fourth wife, Jaren, filed for divorce. According to Rick Bragg's authorized biography
Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, Lewis was in a foul mood when he showed up at Trans Maximus Studios in
Memphis to record: "During these sessions, he insulted the producer, threatened to kill a photographer, and drank and medicated his way into but not out of a fog." During one exchange that can be heard on the 2013 reissue
Southern Roots: The Original Sessions, Meaux asks Lewis, "Do you wanna try one?", meaning a take, to which Lewis replies "If you got enough fuckin' sense to cut it." Recorded over three days, the album displays a heavy soul influence, with Lewis receiving support from
Stax Records alumni
Steve Cropper, Al Jackson, Jr. and
Donald "Duck" Dunn, fellow rock and roll icon
Carl Perkins, Tony Joe White and the
Memphis Horns, but a single, the overtly lascivious "Meat Man," did not crack either the pop or country charts. (In his essay for the box set ''Mercury Smashes...and Rockin' Sessions'',
Colin Escott calls "Meat Man" "so wonderfully lewd" that Lewis was the "only person in country music who would even have considered cutting it.") Affecting a Southern drawl in his review in
The Pittsburgh Press, critic Pete Bishop lamented that
Southern Roots was "chock full of backup trumpets, saxes, singers and Lordy knows what else--and Jerry Lee, ole buddy, y'all don't need all that." Bishop termed the album "a right big disappointment."
Southern Roots did make the
Billboard country albums chart, peaking at number 6. The album garnered Lewis a lot of publicity and good will, and he remained a huge in-demand performer, appearing on the
ABC series
In Concert and the now classic late-night TV series
The Midnight Special. As recounted in Bragg's 2014 biography, when Lewis played the
Roxy in
Los Angeles a month. ==Track listing==