Linda Gail Lewis knows about strong women; her mother was one. “She raised all of us—Jerry Lee, Frankie Jean and me—to think we could do whatever we wanted to,” she says. “We can’t credit her enough. People should do that for their children.”

Lewis speaks of the same qualities when discussing her sister-in-law, Kerry McCarver. “She’s a pistol,” she says of Jerry Lee Lewis’ sixth wife. “She’s been so good for my brother, you know. She’s not afraid of him; she’s strong enough to stand up for herself, and that’s what he needs in his life.”

She also perceives those same strengths in herself. Looking back, she can see that she had the guts to strike out on her own as a solo artist in 1987, 10 years after she had originally retired from touring. She did, however, receive a necessary nudge before taking the solo plunge: “My sister-in-law opens for my brother now,” says Linda Gail, holding court in a corner booth at Shoney’s. “When I started back singing with him, Jerry Lee had just gotten himself a new wife, and she really wanted that opening slot I had. To be honest, I’m grateful to her. I was so devoted to him, I wouldn’t have done it on my own. If she hadn’t pushed me out just a little bit—and of course she did it in just the nicest possible way—I wouldn’t have done all that I’ve done since. That would have been just terrible. It horrifies me to look back and think I could have lived my whole life and not done this. There’s a big difference between singing backup and doing duets, and singing your own music and playing in Europe every year and doing two-and-a-half-hour shows for people who love me and really appreciate what I do.”

By next year, fans on this side of the Atlantic will get a chance to appreciate Lewis as well. Love Makes a Difference is her first American solo release since The Two Sides of Linda Gail Lewis came out 27 years ago. Recorded over the last four years in Memphis, the album will be released by Icehouse Records, an independent label known primarily as an outlet for blues-rock bands. Icehouse is owned by Johnny Phillips, nephew of the legendary Sam Phillips, who founded Sun Records and discovered Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, among others. “I’ve known Johnny my whole life, just about,” Linda Gail says.

Her best-known album is 1991’s International Affair, which was put out by a French label, New Rose. The collection rocks harder and more fiercely than the country-oriented Love Makes a Difference, and it created a sensation among European fans when it was released. It also drew an ecstatic reaction from a cult of American fans. One of them, Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau, named the import as his “pick hit” for the month; Lewis, he said, registered “more twang per syllable than prime Duane Eddy, belting and screeching like a flat-out hillbilly.... She’s Jerry Lee’s sister, wildass before anything else.”

included songs by Bob Dylan, Dave Edmunds, Peter Wolf and Billy Swan. The newer one, which will be out in January, features several songs cowritten by Steve Diamond, whose work includes the country and R&B chart-topper “I Can Love You Like That.” Much of the album mirrors Diamond’s sophisticated way with a ballad. “We thought it might be easier to establish me as a country singer first,” Lewis says. “But when I’m doing my live show, I like to keep it rocking. I’ll slow it down every once in a while, but I like to keep the tempo up. But I guess after all these new songs become big hits, we’ll have to do all of them, won’t we?” She flashes a bright smile.

Like her brother, Lewis openly believes in her own talent—and, indeed, her strong, expressive voice and pumping piano style are worthy of such surety. Unlike her brother, however, her brash self-assurance doesn’t come with a sneering aggressiveness. She doesn’t have the self-absorption or bitter edge that might be expected from someone who has spent most of her life on the road and has been through seven failed marriages. She comes across as extremely positive and poised, and her open friendliness is both engaging and disarming. “I’m not conceited about it,” she says of her musical ability. “I think music is a gift from God, and I think God gives it to us so that we will share it with people. I don’t take credit for it.”

She assumes a similar tone when talking about her upcoming album’s title song, which she wrote shortly after falling in love with Eddie Braddock, a songwriter and record promoter who worked for Stax Records in the 1960s and ’70s. “I think God gave me the song. I don’t feel that I myself could write anything that beautiful.” Lewis married Braddock the day her divorce from Elvis impersonator Bobby Memphis became final. “I finally found the right one for me,” she says with a smile. “It took me a little while.”

As she hints, Linda Gail Lewis has experienced a life every bit as colorful as that of her better-known brother—not to mention her cousins, fallen TV evangelist Jimmy Lee Swaggart and country star Mickey Gilley. Her first husband, whom she married at age 14, blew his brains out. By the time she was 16, she had been married two more times. Later husbands included Jerry Lee’s bandleader, Kenny Lovelace. She married him after leaving Cecil Harrison, Jerry Lee’s longtime road manager. She then married Harrison a second time after splitting with Lovelace. Throughout all of this, the three continued to travel together in Lewis’ entourage.

Obviously, the stories surrounding this small, tight-knit family from Ferriday, La., are worthy of a pulp novel. “We’ve had quite a life,” she says. “My dad was a sharecropper, you know. We were very, very poor. My sister Frankie Jean and my mom and dad and I gathered up eggs so that Jerry Lee would have money for gasoline to go to Nashville. My dad brought him up here. It was cold, and they didn’t even have a heater in the car. That’s how poor we were. They came up to Nashville first, and my brother was turned down here by everyone. That’s when they went through Memphis on the way home, and Sam Phillips discovered him—Sam Phillips and Jack Clement. I think it was Jack Clement who he first tried out for.

“One day we were living in a sharecropper’s shack—we didn’t even have a bathroom in the house. The next thing, we had all this money. You see, my brother is really a unique person. Everything he had he shared with us.... It wasn’t like things got a little better. It was like, ‘Here Momma, here’s a thousand dollars for each of you.’ We went to Doris’ Dress Shop in Ferriday, La., and bought $3,000 worth of clothes. That was a lot of money back then. It was so exciting.”

Lewis says she and her brother have “a great relationship,” adding, “He’s such a great guy. You know, my brother can be a character too. I remember he used to go on the set of the movie [the horrid biopic Great Balls of Fire] and chase them around with guns, give them a little heart failure every now and then. I don’t think they were used to that. But he’s really a wonderful family man.”

Linda Gail, who last performed in Nashville in 1986 as a member of her brother’s band, returns to appear with Doug Cook and his band at the Boardwalk Saturday. “I can’t imagine what’s going to happen with Doug and me onstage, as wild as we both are,” she says. “I don’t know if the world is ready for it.”