Wealth & Money Quote by Jerry Lee Lewis

There is a defiant humility baked into Jerry Lee Lewis asking to be remembered "simply for my music". He’s not pleading innocence; he’s negotiating legacy. The line winks at the tabloid inventory that followed him for decades - wives, scandals, mansions, "high livin'" - then tries to shove it off the stage with a pianist’s brisk, percussive shove. The phrasing matters: "I want 'em" isn’t a PR consultant’s mantra. It’s a Southern, second-person challenge, aimed at the gawkers and moral accountants who never stopped circling his name.

The subtext is that he knows exactly what the world wants from him: a cautionary tale with good hair and bad impulse control. By naming the excesses himself ("although I’ve had a few"), he steals the audience’s easy smirk and keeps the power. It’s a classic move from an artist whose persona was always part swagger, part self-sabotage: admit the mess, then insist it isn’t the headline.

Context does the heavy lifting. Lewis came up in a moment when rock and roll was treated as both new religion and public menace, and he embodied that threat: Pentecostal fire translated into secular noise. His private life became a national morality play, and it nearly buried the work. This quote is Lewis trying to re-center the story where he believes it belongs: not on the wreckage, but on the sound that outlasts it - the pounding left hand, the grin you can hear, the sense that the song might burst into flames.