It only took five years and four record labels, but Jerry Lee Lewis' Last Man Standing is set for release.

The album pairs him with such artists as Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, George Jones, Willie Nelson, and Rod Stewart for 21 tracks of pure killer music.

Produced by Steve Bing and Jimmy Rip for Bing's Shangri-La Entertainment, the September 26 release will be the debut from Jeff Ayeroff's Artists First label. Alternative Distribution Alliance will distribute the title.

The album was born after Bing approached Lewis in 2001 to write songs for a movie with the fitting title, given Lewis' history, of Why Men Shouldn't Marry. The movie never was made, but Lewis cut two songs.

"Steve said, 'I don't care if we don't have a label. Here's the money, just make the record,"' Rip says. It didn't start as a duet project. "Even Jerry said, 'I don't need all these people,"' Rip recalls. But as word of the album spread, and after Mick Jagger performed on one of the songs cut for the movie, Rip started asking more artists to participate, and eager acts started approaching him.

One obvious omission? There are no female duet partners. Rip says it wasn't for lack of trying. "There were quite a few, at least a handful, of women asked (who had) a scheduling problem. It just didn't work out."

Albums that pair legends with contemporaries and proteges have become all the rage since Frank Sinatra's Duets and Duets ll albums in the early '90s, but they took on a new urgency after Ray Charles' Genius Loves Company, released in 2004, showed a way to reach fans by pairing legends long past their chart heydays with newer artists happy to share the spotlight.

Coming up is a Sam Moore duets album that pairs the Soul Man with everyone from Springsteen and Clapton to Mariah Carey and Fantasia. Tony Bennett will celebrate turning 80 with a duets album featuring Elton John, Dixie Chicks, and Sting, among others.

The Lewis project, which Bing and Rip conceived before Charles' album came out, first was slated for Lost Highway, then had a stop at another label before landing at Columbia, which sat on a release date so it could coincide with a planned TV special. But when the album's main supporters left the label earlier this summer, it once again was homeless.

That's where Artists First stepped in. The creative and marketing company had already been consulting Columbia on the Lewis project when it again became a free agent.

"You feel an obligation and romance in working with a project like this," Ayeroff says, comparing it to how he felt when he and former business partner Jordan Harris worked with Roy Orbison while running Virgin North America.

The project will be promoted through direct TV marketing and will be plugged through a December PBS Great Performances episode.