Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(152)

“He was lethargic, out of it . . . ,” she says, and worse, “Had systemic infections—shingles, pneumonia.” But treatment was difficult. “He was scared of needles,” she said, afraid of the old demon he had beaten back after a lifetime.

“Yeah,” Jerry Lee says now, “it was no bed of roses.”

As he lay there between fevers and bouts of pain, they spent long hours talking about where they grew up and how. They talked about old songs, and old ways. “I fell in love,” she said. “Well, I probably fell in love before then.” They had met more than a quarter century before, in Las Vegas, where he said that if Rusty didn’t marry the woman, he would. “We went to see him with sawdust on the floor in the Cherokee Plaza, in Atlanta,” she said. “I remember the women screaming. . . .”

“And you wanted to be one of them,” smirked Jerry Lee.

“Yes,” she said, “I did.”

She divorced her husband in 2010 and immediately clashed with Phoebe and Myra.

“Phoebe told me, ‘You have no right to take him.’”

“She probably thought she was lookin’ out for me,” said Jerry Lee.

“They told me, ‘Well, give her two hundred dollars and the old Buick,’” as incentive to leave, Judith said.

Money was never the reason, she said. There was not much of that, hadn’t been for some time.

“I was told he would kill me,” Judith said. “I was told he would kick me out after one month. But Jerry stood by me and we made it.”

“I got her down here,” said Jerry Lee, “and wouldn’t let her leave.”

At Christmas 2010, he gave her a diamond ring, but did not tell her it was an engagement ring until a few months later. “I want you to know that the ring I gave you for Christmas is a promise that I will marry you,” he said, as she later told the Natchez Democrat.

“I’d never had a diamond like that,” Judith said.

Jerry Lee just lay in his bed and smiled.

She was treating him for various ailments, all over his body. “I figured if she got that close,” he said, “we might as well go all the way.”

He was still weak and ailing, but he was feeling better.

She traveled with him, to do a show in Budapest.

“That’s when it was ‘Great Balls of Fire,’” he said, and then, quietly, ‘hee, hee.’”


In those early days with Judith, he would rise from his bed and do a show, then slump exhausted in the car or plane seat for the long ride home. They were all long rides then, even if they were just up the road.

In a concert at Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville in April 2011, fans lined up by the hundreds to get tickets, to buy posters and T-shirts with the young man’s face and the simple legend KILL. They were mostly young people, people who were not alive when he was the hottest thing in rock and roll, not even alive when he was the hottest thing in country music; many of them may not have been alive when he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He had been old all of their lives.

“A lot of the old fans are gone,” he says now. “But I guess there are new ones to take their place.”

In a plain black suit and white starched shirt, he played them some barroom music:

Wind is scratchin’ at my door, and I can hear that lonesome wind moan

Tell me baby, why you been gone so long?



Then he raised his loafer, gave it a final lick, and smiled.

It seemed different, somehow, though it is easy to read so much into such little things. But that day he seemed different from the man of a million self-referential smiles, leering and mugging from the stage, the stage that was his due.

He seemed, simply, happy to be there.

The crowd, with their young voices, roared and roared.


Tragedy continued to dog those in his life, even those on its outer reaches, even those who were bound to him in name only. Lori Leigh Lewis, Jaren’s daughter, accidentally smothered her infant son to death in May 2011 when, police said, she passed out on top of the child after ingesting a dose of muscle relaxants. “It was awful,” he says. The next year, his longtime bass player, B. B. Cunningham, was killed in a shootout at the Memphis apartment complex where he worked as a security guard. Jerry Lee was not involved, but the tragedy evoked violent memories of the past, a side of him he sometimes refuses even to recall.

“I don’t believe in fightin’ and carryin’ on,” he says now. “That’s not my game. I sure don’t want to shoot nobody.” He says this within easy reach of the automatic on his bedside table and three feet from a drawer of firearms, including one that looks like it was made to fell a charging Cape buffalo. But those, he clarifies, are just there in case someone bothers him.

He was hospitalized in January and February 2012 for various old ailments, including the nagging stomach trouble and a new bout of pneumonia. On March 9, when he was seventy-six and Judith was sixty-two, they were married in a small ceremony house on the Natchez Bluff, overlooking the big river, the one that swallowed Jolson when he was a boy.

“They kind of hemmed me in,” he jokes now, pretending he was somehow bushwhacked. “What with that Baptist minister there, and all.” The wedding party sang hymns, “but it wouldn’t have been shoutin’ music,” he says, because the Baptists could not have kept up.