Billy Lee Riley Needs Our Help!

As reported by our pals over at Blurt magazine, legendary Memphis musician Billy Lee Riley is in a bad way. Riley is suffering from stage four bone cancer (which is about as bad as it gets, folks), and although the MusiCares organization is providing for Riley's rent and utilities, he and his wife Joyce are literally broke and are having trouble scraping up enough money to eat.

Riley was born in 1933 to a sharecropper's family in Arkansas, and he was taught to play guitar by the African-American farmers he worked alongside. After a four-year bit in the Army, Riley landed in Memphis during the mid-1950s, where he recorded for Sam Phillips' storied Sun Records label. Riley's influential early rock 'n' roll singles include songs like "Trouble Bound," "Rock With Me Baby," "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll," and "Red Hot," which featured Jerry Lee Lewis on piano. When Phillips allocated his meager promotional funds to Lewis' recordings, Riley's career came to a full stall.

After his brief 1950s commercial peak, Riley would launch his own independent record label, work as a session musician in Los Angeles for folks like Dean Martin and the Beach Boys and, of course, continue to tour and record on his own. He gave it all up in the early-1970s to begin his own construction business in Arkansas, but returned to music full-time by the end of the decade. In the years since, Riley has pursued his own unique vision of rockabilly, blues, and country-blues music; the guitarist's affinity for the blues could have made him a hot property in the blues world if he'd have focused exclusively in that genre. Riley's 1997 comeback album Hot Damn! was nominated for a Grammy Award.

A donation of $10 or $20 could make a large difference in the Riley's lives right now, so if you have a few extra dollars that you can part with, please consider assisting this worthwhile musical legend. Send your donations to:

Billy Lee Riley
723 Crest Drive
Jonesboro AR 72401

Photo courtesy Price Grabber