Mickey Gilley

A cousin of both Jerry Lee Lewis and the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, keyboardist/singer Mickey Gilley took several years to discover that his brand of music, while highly derivative of Jerry Lee's, was best suited to the country charts. Gilley's honky-tonk versions of soul classics and country standards made him one of the biggest country stars of the '70s and '80s, and the undisputed star of the "Urban Cowboy" phase of country music. By the late '80s, as Gilley's brand of country went out of style, he branched out into acting, closed down his club Gilley's, and became one of the first country stars to open his own theater in Branson, MO.