Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(119)

Jerry Lee had always thought that at least part of Jimmy’s antagonism came from their old, lingering jealousy. But now both men lived in great wealth, so it couldn’t be that alone. The sin of it all was still in the songs and in the lifestyle.

But it was hard for Jerry Lee to stay angry at his cousin, even when it seemed like his life, his sins, were the stanchions upon which Jimmy’s sermons rested. “We were always just like brothers,” he says now, “and he was a great preacher, and a great person. But he had enough sinners out there to preach about without worryin’ about family, about ol’ Jerry Lee. He probably says he was doing it for me, and, well, maybe he was.”

He did, over time, begin to feel used.

“He’s never said that he was sorry. I don’t think it would hurt him to apologize. But he won’t.”

But he also knew that his cousin was not preaching from the wind but from a Bible they both knew and believed.

“I forgave him, as it happened.”

Later, Jimmy would write that Jerry Lee’s fame was built on “glitter and glamour” and smite him with Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”


He knew his mama made exceptions for him, from love. He knew she never approved of the rock-and-roll lifestyle, but he saw it more in how she reacted to others. “Waylon Jennings took one woman with him to the airport and brought another woman back with him on the plane,” he recalls. “Mama never got over that. Waylon told her, ‘I’m so sorry, Miz Mamie, that you had to see that.’” But she never called her son on his own behavior. He was her boy and always would be.

He could not bear to think of her in the hospital bed, wasting, hurting. He tried to think of her as she was when he was a little boy, when he was always running off to Natchez or Vicksburg or farther places, and how relieved she would be when he came sauntering up in the yard licking on a nickel ice cream. “I charged it,” he told her, when she asked where he found the money for such extravagance as that. He could tell she was always at war with herself, in moments like that, wanting to pinch a welt in his arm or knock a knot on his head, but before he made his last step up into the old shanty house, she would gather him up in her arms and squeeze him till he could barely breathe. “My baby,” she always said.

“Family,” he says, shaking his head. “If you ain’t got family . . .” It was the one place you could go, could retreat into, when no one else would have you. There were days when he wondered if, when his mother left him, there would be anything left at all.

As his mother’s flesh weakened, he saw his own son, Junior, succumb to the same appetites, the same temptations, that his cousin had long preached about from his gilded ministry in Baton Rouge.

It was a time when pills of every kind were almost as easy to obtain as a fast-food hamburger, easier, because they rode in guitar cases and shaving kits and overhead bins, rattling, always rattling. Drugs were a kind of cultural currency, now—not just for touring musicians but for the most sheltered middle-class child on a tree-lined street. Jerry Lee watched, haunted and overmedicated himself, as his son slipped into a set of habits that was as much a part of the music as guitar strings and drumskins. It just seemed like people had to have them to make the music, and by the time he was sixteen, Junior did, too. Jerry Lee tried to tell the boy to quit all that, his band members recall, to spare himself the demons his daddy lived with. Not everyone could take the demons into their body and survive like Jerry Lee. Not everyone could just absorb them, dilated eyes hidden by dark glasses, and walk tall. The drummer, Tarp Tarrant, later said that Jerry Lee blamed him for it, for giving them to Junior, and put a knife to his throat as a warning. Jerry Lee would have killed anyone who threatened his son in any way, and not worried about the rightness or lawfulness of the act until later. He may have never even considered what role he himself played in it by bringing his son into this world. But it was the life his son hungered for and the only life Jerry Lee had to share.

With his mama sick and suffering and his only living son at risk, Jerry Lee decided on a change. He did not, as many have said, renounce rock and roll. He never renounced the music. He did renounce the lifestyle and its most common venues, the bars and clubs where it was played beside a running fountain of whiskey and beer and other substances. He told reporters in early December 1970 that he would play no more shows in places where liquor was served, and would play only at coliseums, theaters, and fairs, and would end his shows with gospel music, and would even give testimony. He swore off drinking and cursing and fighting and wild parties and rejected the attentions of loose women. He would do a clean show and live a clean life, and he would ask God to help the people he loved. He told the Tennessean of Nashville that he had made a stand for God. “I’m just letting the people know. . . . I’ve gone back to church and I got myself saved, and the Lord forgave me of my sins and wiped them away.”

He prayed for his mama.

He prayed for his son.

He prayed his promise and said he would do anything if God would spare his mama.

Later that December, Jerry Lee and his band performed at a Sunday service at a country church on Highway 61 South outside Memphis. In a live recording of the show, he sounds happy, at ease, as if some great burden had been lifted, and maybe that was true.

“First song that I ever sang in church, neighbors, was an old, old song that my mother taught me back when I was just a kid about eight years old,” he told the congregation. “That’s been a while ago, but I can still sing it.”