Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(17)

That day, he and Elmo and Mamie had come to visit his Uncle Lee and Aunt Stella, to talk of crops and children and other unimportant things, leaving him unsupervised, to roam the big house. “I just kept lookin’ at it,” he recalls. “I just had to get at it. It was just an ol’ upright piano, but I had to get at it.”

His fingers closed and unclosed and he made baby steps, sidling and creeping.

“I wasn’t hardly even walkin’ around too good—I was just a baby,” he says. Still, “I kept gettin’ closer and closer.”

Funny that he did not think he would try and play it.

“I knew I had to play it.”

In those days, a child, even a treasured and somewhat spoiled one, did not just jump onto a piano in another person’s house and play it, any more than he would take out the fine china and start spinning it on a stick. He waited till he could not stand it anymore, as the grow-nups just kept yapping.

“And I reached up and, for one reason or ’nother, it just come to me.”

He touched a single key, pushed it sharply down.

Cool fire.

He has always had a hard time describing what happened that day, in that moment, as he heard that music come out of him. He does not want to make too much of it, but at the same time he is not sure he can exaggerate it, any more than a man could exaggerate standing under a skinny tree in a lightning storm, at the precise moment the world around him turned a smoking blue.

“I don’t know what happened. Somethin’ strange. I felt it in my whole body. I felt it.”

Musicians, great ones, often claim that when they touched an instrument their hands knew where to go. The sound of the first key leaped into his head, ringing, ringing, and told his fingers which key to hit next, and it just kept happening, a cascade, and before he even knew what he was doing he had played a song, or at least a part of one.

Silent night, holy night



“Can you believe that?” he says now. “For a four-year-old kid, to walk by and just reach up and play it?

“Now I know what it was,” he says.

“It was deliverance.”

He laughs at himself then, a little self-consciously, at talking this way. “A talent e-merged,” he says, his words exaggerated, “and not a bad lookin’ kid, either,” as if it is too important to him to take seriously for long. But it was the day that changed everything, the day he knew what he had to be. He still remembers, after so much time, how his Aunt Stella looked at him, so oddly. She had always been a smart woman.

“She knew,” Jerry Lee believes.

Mamie almost fell out as she heard her son play. She brought her hands together and praised God.

“Oh, Elmo,” she said, “we’ve got ourselves a natural-born pianist.”

“Well, Mamie,” Elmo said, “we might have a piano player.”

Jerry Lee smiles at that. “Like there was a difference,” he says now.

“He’s a prodigy,” Mamie said. Such words had rarely even been used.

“Probably is, Mamie,” Stella said, that look still on her face. “Probably is.”

It must have seemed to Elmo and Mamie like answered prayers. They had lost one prodigy; the good son slept safe in the high ground. But now they had seen delivered unto them another one—more or less.


The wild son, seven or eight years old now, barefoot, dirty faced, and grinning, climbed the iron girders of the Mississippi River bridge till he stood swaying in the hot wind at the height of the span, then walked it like a circus rope, one step, two steps, more, as the little boys below, cousins and such, stood slack-jawed and trembling at the rail. Jerry Lee had scared them to death, again, and if the yellow-haired imp fell to his doom in the river below, surely their mamas and daddies would find a way to blame all of them and beat them unconscious. He waved at them, taunting, as the wind sucked at his shirt and almost lifted him off the iron beam as the tugboats and great barges passed beneath his feet, as the drivers of the passing cars wondered which asylum had let that boy slip out. He walked the span over and over, skinny arms akimbo, like a crow on a wire, not even looking at his feet but leering, jeering at the boys below and mightily pleased with his little self.

“Are you conquered?” he shouted.

“Please, Jerry Lee,” they begged, in a chorus, Jimmy, Mickey, Cecil Harrelson, David Batey, others. “Please get down.”

He laughed in their upturned faces.

“Get down!” they wailed.

“Come and get me,” he said.

It had started that morning as all mornings started then along the dirt streets of Ferriday, in an ever-swelling migration of scamps and urchins and ne’er-do-wells, aimed at no place in particular but intent on doing no good when they got there. One of their favorite games was called Conquer, which was basically a game of double-dog dares. One boy would do something dangerous or asinine, anything as long as there was at least some chance of bloodletting or broken bones or bug-eating, and the other boys had to do the same or admit they were just big fat sissies and sing out, “I’m conquered.” It might be anything from jumping off a railroad trestle into a murky creek to taking a punch to hollering at a big girl, and nobody—nobody—conquered Jerry Lee. “I never was afraid. . . . I don’t know why. I just never was scared of nothin’,” he said, which is an easy thing to say but hard to live. But his cousins would stand in amazement at the things he did. Cousin Mickey would say he believed most geniuses were crazy, and his cousin was a genius for sure. But the stunt on the bridge, 150 feet above the big river, was off the scale.