In 2011, I had an absolutely delightful interview with Laura Lee Perkins (her stage name from the fifties—she was born Alice Faye Perkins), sometimes referred to as the Female “Jerry Lee Lewis” in press.
Our conversation focused on her journey from a small coal mining town in West Virginia, to the Cleveland area where she was first discovered by DJ Jeff Baxter, to California where she recorded for Imperial Records, to eventually Detroit where she settled and continued to perform and tour until her early twenties.
Perkins talked about the difficulty she found promoting records as a young, single woman working as a waitress in an age of payola:
And how she became “Laura Lee” instead of “Alice Faye”? Or who decided to call her “the Female Jerry Lee Lewis”? She had no idea!
Find the full recording in the Interview section.