New York City-born Huey Lewis is best known for his involvement as the lead in the 1980s music group Huey Lewis and the News. In addition to singing and acting, Lewis plays the harmonica, an ability he frequently used during the peak of his song-recording success.

Born Hugh Anthony Cregg III on July 5,  1950, "Huey's" family moved from New York to Marin County, CA, where he spent most of his childhood. Lewis' parents divorced when he was 13, at which time he was sent to Lawrenceville, a preparatory boarding school in New Jersey. Lewis took a detour after high school, hitchhiking his way across the country. It was during the sometimes long waits for rides that he taught himself to play the harmonica, a story he later recounted on The David Letterman Show. Landing in New York, Lewis made his way to Madrid, Spain as an airplane stowaway, where he refined his talents and became an accomplished blues player.

Lewis' small-scale European concerts earned him enough money to purchase a ticket back to the U.S., where he attended Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, at the school's engineering program. Lewis' interest in higher education soon flagged, and he dropped out of Cornell to join a band, Slippery Elm, in 1969. Lewis and his bandmates moved to San Francisco where Huey earned a living doing a variety of practical jobs, including a stint in landscaping. In 1971 Lewis joined San Francisco-based band Clover and adopted the stage name Huey Lewis.

Following only sporadic success, Clover moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Here the band was spotted by singer-songwriter Nick Lowe, who convinced the group to try their luck in the UK. However, the folk music sound of Clover was trumped by the upcoming and highly popular punk rock bands abundant in England, and Clover's two U.K. album releases flopped. Upon their somewhat disappointed return to California, the members disbanded.

Lewis remained active in the music industry, backing veteran band Tin Lizzie on his harmonica in the 1978 album Live and Dangerous and recording the single Exo-Disco, a takeoff on the theme from the movie Exodus. Huey contracted with Phonogram records under manager Bob Brown and in 1979, the band  Huey Lewis and the American Express was formed. The band soon changed its name to Huey Lewis and the News and enjoyed its first major success, the gold record Picture This, in 1982, with its hit Do You Believe in Love? rocketing to Number 7 on the billboard charts. Huey Lewis and the News enjoyed phenomenal pop culture success during the next several years. The album Sports (1983) went platinum and remains one of the top-selling pop LPs of all time. Fore!, 1986, was also a platinum album. In addition,  the band sang on We Are the World, a fund-raising single produced in 1985.

Shortly after this period, Huey Lewis and the News faded somewhat from the public eye, but Lewis himself made headlines in 1995 for a very different reason: he sued Ray Parker, Jr., claiming Parker's was inspired by and heavily borrowed from Lewis' I Want a New Drug with Parker's theme from the movie Ghostbusters. Lewis remains a 1980s pop icon. Though Lewis claims the band is in semi-retirement, Huey Lewis and the News still plays approximately 80 engagements a year.