Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(140)

None of it prompted charges against Jerry Lee or changed the state prosecutor’s conclusions. Police in northern Mississippi and Tennessee had been responding to incidents involving Jerry Lee Lewis for years: fights, cussfights, accidents, gunfire, threats, and untold other infractions. He had been helped into police cars in handcuffs in three counties and judged and fined, usually in absentia, on a regular basis. The notion that they would give him a pass on murder did not make sense, officials here would say. It was not a storybook marriage, obviously; divorce records indicated that none of Jerry Lee’s marriages had been harmonious, but investigators would say that the evidence was a long way from proving murder.

Jerry Lee told reporters that he did not believe Shawn meant to kill herself. “We had our usual arguments, but there was no reason for that,” he said.

The Rolling Stone story was devastating to him, he says now.

“They treated me like a dog.”

He has called it ridiculous, a manufactured lie.

“I was innocent, and they never proved nothin’. . . . Never proved I hurt no one. She done it herself. She wasn’t beaten at all. There wasn’t a touch of circumstantial evidence that I done it. It was a mistake,” he says of the overdose. “But I hurt nobody.”

The worst of it, he says, was that it made him seem like he had no feelings for the young woman, that people assumed he would not grieve. “That’s the ‘Killer’ part, I guess,” he says now. “You don’t take something you can’t give, when it’s a person’s life. You can never do that.”

But his persona made the tragedy into a story people would hunger for, especially so soon after Jaren’s drowning.

“If I had done everything these people think that I’ve done, I would have been buried in the penitentiary years ago,” he says. “I never killed anything in my life.”

He believes there was another reason that story spread.

“I ain’t never sued nobody,” he says, “and everybody knows it.”

Shawn was buried in Clayton, with his people.

He retreated behind the gates of his ranch and sealed them with a padlock. But it’s hard to be a private man if you are him. In October, two months after Shawn’s death, he taped a concert for Austin City Limits, playing the show behind a set of dark sunglasses that concealed his emotions. Thin and solemn, he played the boogie-woogie in a sweat, but it would be a lie to say he did not still play it like him, did not put on a show, and when he was done, he flew home to wait for the next show and medicate himself in seclusion.

The guilt in it, in the death of his fifth wife, was in the lifestyle he lived, and had lived for so long. He was the unstable rock his blood kin leaned on, and the rock the people who loved him broke themselves against.


Record labels were not courting him. As a last resort, he signed a deal with MCA, but throughout the mid-’80s, the sessions yielded only a few memorable tunes, including yet another signature song, this time by Kenneth Lovelace, called “I Am What I Am”:

I am what I am, not what you want me to be



Meanwhile, the tax man was relentless. Jerry Lee had developed a bad habit of ignoring official documents as if they could all be thrown into the Black River, treating court summonses and marriage licenses like throwaway comic books. It had been his experience that most of them just went away with time, that the courts always got tired of waiting. But on February 14, 1984—Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t you know—he got a piece of paper he could not just discard. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of tax evasion.

Prosecutors charged that he had tried to hide assets under the names of other people to avoid having them seized to pay another million dollars in taxes he owed between 1975 and 1980. When he was no longer able to ignore the charges, prosecutors alleged, he went on the lam.

He left his car at a Nashville hotel, hid behind dark glasses and a massive cowboy hat, and sneaked into the studio to record some more songs. Two days later, as if just to show that he would turn himself in on his own schedule, he surrendered to federal authorities in Memphis. He pleaded not guilty and was released on $100,000 bond, after Kenny “Red” Rogers put his club, Hernando’s Hideaway, up for security. The high bond reflected the court’s opinion that Jerry Lee Lewis had shown “a defiant attitude toward the court,” for as long as anyone could remember. “I was just glad to do it,” Rogers told the Associated Press.

When he showed up to be fingerprinted and photographed, he was with a new girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old singer from Hernando’s Hideaway named Kerrie McCarver. “Honey,” he told her as he was processed, “this is a breeze.”

They were married on April 24, 1984, making her wife number six. They said they were very much in love and wanted children.

Jerry Lee went on trial in October. He was facing a maximum sentence of five years. “Mr. Lewis’s job is to play the piano,” said his attorney, Bill Clifton. “He doesn’t know anything about business.” Jerry Lee thought he was paying his taxes, he said.

When the jury came in with the verdict, Jerry Lee was sitting in the courtroom with his new wife. “I saw that two or three young women on the jury winked at me and gave me the ‘Okay’ sign, so I knew I was in.”

The jury indeed believed him, that he’d meant to do right by the government, but had allowed others, less righteously inclined, to handle his business; they said the government hadn’t proven its case. The courtroom erupted in cheers, and Jerry Lee said he felt the power of God.