Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(100)

“I tried to make them both happy,” he says now. “I never took sides. I imagine Mama had it pretty rough. Daddy? Daddy was up and goin’.”

His daddy would continue to follow him on the road when he could, and they would open a bottle of whiskey, kill it together, and speak of finer days. “Sometimes you just need to drink a little whiskey with your daddy,” he says. Elmo even went into the studio at Sun and recorded his own version of “Mexicali Rose.”

“He finally got to be me,” his son says.


Then, in February 1961, Jerry Lee went back into the studio for one more try. For the very first session in Sam’s new Nashville studio, he chose the Ray Charles hit “What’d I Say,” and when it was done, he knew he had a hit, finally, after all this time. The original was less than two years old; it was the song that broke Ray Charles out of R&B into the pop charts, and it would put Jerry Lee back there, too. He had such deference for Ray that he was honored even to try it, but he knew it was the kind of song he was meant to play. “A great song,” he says, and he didn’t try to copy the original but did his own thing, channeling all those nights at Haney’s into this one record. And he knew Ray Charles—“Mister Charles”—did not begrudge it; he was too much of a gentleman. Jerry Lee and the boys had tried it several times before at Sun, almost every time he came to the studio, but hadn’t yet captured what he was seeking. On this session, though, he managed to conjure all the soul of Ray’s version and give it something else besides—a little extra rock-and-roll drive—and people liked it, people on both sides of the pop/country divide.

It would not be deliverance, would not be another bolt of blue lightning, but it might be a handhold on which he could pull himself up to another hit, and then maybe another. “I liked that record,” he says now. Billboard said so, too, and spoke of him the way it had when he was new. “It’s been a long dry spell . . . [but this] song can bring him back with the proper push.” By late that spring, it reached number 30 on the Hot 100, and Jerry Lee was invited back to New York, back to the Paramount, where he played with Jackie Wilson.


The disappointments and time weren’t showing on him, not yet. His face was fuller, and there were lines there that had not been there before, but he was still thin and sharp as a straight razor, and he still looked dangerous staring down from the posters on the auditorium walls.

In the early months of ’62, with “What’d I Say” still ringing in their ears, promoters in England reached out to Jerry Lee to see if he would even consider a return to the country where he had been castigated and all but ruined before. “They insisted I come back,” says Jerry Lee, “said people were screaming for me to come back, and I said, ‘Well, I might come back to England, if the money’s right.” The tour was scheduled for April, with some of the concerts to be played in some of the same venues where he had been canceled before, as if the disaster of ’58 had just been some bad dream. It was, for a man of Jerry Lee’s character, a chance not to redeem himself in the eyes of the British people—he couldn’t care less if they approved of him or not and would not approach the island with even a trace of apology on his lips—but it would be one more chance to play them some good rock and roll, and maybe this time that would be the thing that mattered.

He would take Myra with him again, by God. He wouldn’t go unless he could take her with him again.

He returned to the club circuit to make a living, and to await his return to England. “It really wasn’t so bad,” he says of the constant touring and the endless string of small gigs and honky-tonk bars. “It was sometimes, when you’d get a sad phone call from home,” from a wife who wondered what went on out there in the great unknown of the road. But they both believed the talent would win out, that he would be a star again, and if the unthinkable happened, and he was not, no one could say he did not chase it down with his last breath. “We didn’t get along that good, later on,” he says, but there was a time when they were in agreement on this much: it would get better. Still, he hated the sad phone calls, dreaded them, sometimes beseeching, sometimes accusing. “Ain’t no woman rule me,” he says.

Sun surely wanted another strong hit to follow up “What’d I Say,” but Jerry Lee’s next several singles matched a motley assortment of covers—a standout take on Hank’s “Cold, Cold Heart,” an early cover of Barrett Strong’s “Money”—with novelty tunes like “It Won’t Happen with Me” and “I’ve Been Twistin’,” an update of Junior Parker’s old Sun R&B hit “Feelin’ Good.” In an effort to placate Jerry Lee, Sam even signed his teenage sister, Linda Gail, cutting several sessions with her and even putting their duet on “Seasons of My Heart” on the B-side of his cover of Joe Turner’s “Teenage Letter.” It did not placate him.

He was in Minnesota on Easter Sunday 1962 when the phone began to tremble on the nightstand. It was not Myra this time but Cecil, telling him he had to call the hospital in Memphis, had to call home.


Construction on the Coro Lake house was still ongoing. It had rained hard that Easter Sunday, and the swimming pool had partially filled with water. Inside the house, seventeen-year-old Myra was working on supper, on a big pot of spaghetti, and thinking about buying groceries. Elmo was there, and Jerry Lee’s uncle George Herron. Steve Allen was at Myra’s side, munching on jelly beans and candy chickens. It had been a good day. She had dressed the boy up like a little man and taken him to church for the first time. Now he had candy on his hands and his face and he was happy.