Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(120)

What will my answer be? What can I say

When Jesus beckons me home?



“Very true song,” he says.

He sang “I’ll Fly Away” and “Amazing Grace” and “Old Rugged Cross” and “Peace in the Valley,” preaching all the while: “Hallelujah, glory to God, there will be peace in the valley too, brother. I’m looking for that day, I guarantee you.” Then he introduced his band: Edward DeBruhl (“He’s a good boy, a good Christian-minded boy. Me and him have set around the motel room many nights playing religious records and crying”), Kenneth Lovelace on electric guitar and fiddle (“one of the finer musicians in the United States . . . an all-around musician and an all-around guy”), “and Jerry Lee Lewis Jr. is playing on the drums tonight,” said his father, proudly. “Junior comes from Ferriday, Louisiana, and you know, he kinda likes to wear his hair long, and I told him yesterday, I said, ‘Son, y’oughta get a haircut, you know, and he wouldn’t do it. He’s a little bit too big for me to try to make him get a haircut—bigger than I am—but I’m not really worried about his hair. He’s a good boy. I’m just worried about his soul, him being saved. I appreciate Junior very much, and I love him with all my heart. He’s my only boy.” And the boy looked at his daddy and grinned and laid the beat down in perfect time.

It was the rockingest day in the history of Brother E. J. Davis’s church, though he was a little scandalized when Jerry Lee got so full of the spirit that he played part of “I’m in the Glory-Land Way” with his boot.

The congregation shook the boards. Jerry Lee laughed with joy. “Thought I’d better do that just to show you I could still do it,” said Jerry Lee. “I didn’t hurt it, Brother Davis. Brother Davis got an evil eye on this piano tonight. I’m not gonna jump up on it, Brother. I guarantee you. Not tonight.”


He followed up that date with a studio gospel album titled In Loving Memories, and even had Mamie come in and sing in the chorus on the title track.

Well, I stand here so solemn, with a blank look on my face

As you lay there dressed in pure white lace



It was clear that her sickness consumed him, too, say the people who watched him suffer through the winter of 1970 and on into the spring of ’71. It also seemed that he had in some ways blamed himself, as if her death was somehow the cost he had to pay for his success and his sins. As she was beginning to fail, he recorded Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mother, the Queen of My Heart,” a parable of a prodigal son who promises his dying mother that he will “always go straight,” a promise he cannot keep.

Ten years have passed since that parting

That promise I broke, I must say

I started in drinkin’ for pastime

Till at last, Lord, I was just like ’em all



Mamie died two weeks later, at midnight of April 21, at the hospital in Ferriday. As with the death of his little boy, he did not cry in front of his family, not in the church in Ferriday as the preacher stood over the specter of death and warned that time was nigh, nor at the little cemetery in Clayton. He stood straight and silent, like his mama used to do, and watched the earth take her. “I’ve learned,” he says. “I’ve learned to do it.” The preacher preached again, and then, with those lovely voices, her kin sang her favorite hymns. They call it “singing them into heaven,” but his mama didn’t need no help.

“She was the best mama in the whole world,” he says. “I took care of her. She took care of me.”

She had dragged a cotton sack all day, in the rising dust, to buy him a shirt to wear, to sing a song.

“I miss her,” he says.


His kin would say he would never recover. Some would say he wanted to die, that he tried to kill himself with all the excesses of his fame, with all the weapons of destruction his money could buy, but then, had it not always been that way? Some would say he blamed himself for refusing to give up rock and roll and play only church music, only gospel, or at least something tamer, easier. But then he would have had to have been another man entirely, and he doesn’t believe his mama wanted that. “Mama was always with me,” he says, again and again. It might be dramatic to say she condemned her son for his music, but that is just a lie. “My talent was a gift from God, not from Satan.” His mama was the first to tell him that and would remind him of it in his moments of doubt, he says fiercely. “If my mama had not been for me, she never would have accepted any of the things my music got for her.” She would have refused houses and cars and cast the other presents from her. He holds to this belief in his lingering doubt.


“A man ain’t meant to be alone.” He says it, and the Bible says it.

In ’71, for once actually legally divorced before remarriage, he married a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée named Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate, a secretary in the Memphis sheriff’s department. They separated two weeks later, and would not live under the same roof again. He would later say that he married her at least in part because she was pregnant, though not with his child. Five months after the wedding, Jaren gave birth to Lori Leigh Lewis, and listed Jerry Lee as the father on the birth certificate. He disagreed, but quietly. He has long refused to air the matter in public, a choice his kin view as a kindness. But people close to him, including some in his own family, say that one of the reasons the marriage was in name only was that the child was not his.