Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(114)

“They wrote what people feel,” he said of the writers of those songs and the songs to come. “I sung it like people feel.”

He did it again in “She Still Comes Around (To Love What’s Left of Me)”:

I know I’m not a perfect husband, although I’d like to be

But payday nights and painted women, they do strange things to me



By the end of the summer of ’68, he was the hottest country artist in the nation.

He might even have worn a rhinestone or two in those heady days, he says, “but not like Porter Wagoner.” It was all coming together. “Songs were great. The words were perfect, the melody was perfect, the song was perfect. All I had to do was play it, sing it, be done with it. Go on to another one. Number one. Number one. Number one. ’Bout thirty-three number-one records in a row.”

He cut songs of great romance, like “To Make Love Sweeter for You”:

You’ve cleared the windows of my life, and now that I see through

I’ll do my best in every way to make love sweeter for you



It was perhaps the closest thing to a pure love song he would ever cut, and it would be his first number one on any chart since “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” a long, hard ten years before.

But if there is a song he was meant to sing, it was probably the sadly beautiful “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye”:

Once again, the whole town will be talking (yes they will)

Lord, I’ve seen the pity that’s in their eyes



It is not the song of a man wronged unfairly; it is a song about a man who deserves every heartache and knows it.

Baby’s packed her soft things and she’s left me, she’s left me, she’s left me



Some songs make people think they were written for them. This is the opposite: in this song, it’s as if Jerry were living inside the lyrics. “A couple of years later,” he says, he realized that “these people was writing songs for me all of my life. I said, They’re tellin’ me something.”

Finally, in the wake of “Another Place, Another Time,” Jerry was back at the top of the songwriters’ wish list—and they obliged with a slew of new material that fit perfectly with his voice and leather-worn persona. Some of them actually were created for him—like “Think About It, Darlin’,” written to capitalize on one of his catchphrases. “Songs like that,” Jerry Lee says, “that’s a masterpiece. I mean, that and ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ by Kris Kristofferson,” which was also covered by everyone from Elvis to Joan Baez. Jerry Lee did it with some blues. He took care to stick to the writers’ words on those great country songs, especially those of Kristofferson, who would become one of his dearest friends. “You don’t mess with Kristofferson,” he says. And his new country style was the perfect complement to these simple, plainspoken songs: It was familiar enough to slide easily onto country radio playlists but warmer, more intimate, and with a little more honky-tonk feel.

This new run of songs changed everything for Jerry Lee. “It put me back on top,” for the first time since 1958. And it made him richer than he had ever been as the firebrand of rock and roll. Gone were the days when he loaded his band into two dusty Cadillacs and sprayed gravel across the United States and Canada. Once the first few big records hit the airwaves, the hits came in a cascade, more than thirty in all, till Jerry Lee’s voice, singing new songs and covers like “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” leaked from the window of every station wagon, pulpwood truck, and Airstream trailer in the South and Midwest, in Bakersfield and Detroit City and, of course, Nashville.

“I played that good kind of country, not that other kind,” he says, and you only had to listen to Top 40 country radio for five minutes in almost any area to know precisely what he was talking about. When he played his live shows, he mixed his country hits in with the rock and roll and blues and his old, old music, his childhood songs, as he always had. He never considered himself a country music artist—labels were bridles to him—but rather a rock and roller who was reaching back into his roots. Nashville might have saved him, but it was Memphis that swelled his heart.

He lived for a while athwart the two, appearing in April 1969 with Little Richard and Fats Domino in a rock-and-roll revival TV show called 33? Revolutions per Monkee, proving that a man with talent can survive anything, even the Monkees. Then it was back to Nashville, four more times that year: a duets session with Linda Gail that ranged from hard country to rock to soul, then a solo session in which he cut Jimmie Rodgers’s “Waitin’ for a Train,” one of his finest renditions of the white man’s storytelling blues:

I walked up to a brakeman, just to give him a line of talk

He said, “If you’ve got money, son, I’ll see that you don’t walk.”



The session with Linda Gail became an album (Together), and he would continue to feature his sister onstage and on television specials to come. She was a fine talent in her own right, he says—“It’s in the blood”—though some would call that evidence of his largesse, that he would do anything for blood.

Kenny Lovelace had as close a view as any as Jerry Lee rose out of the wasteland and into country stardom. Elvis must have seen it, too, had to have seen it, and in the summer of ’69 he made a historic comeback of his own.