Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(21)

“I mean, I got him a motor scooter,” Elmo said.

“Just please come and get him, sir,” the officer said.

Elmo drove into the night. It was no pleasure trip in those days, on those roads. When he finally got there, he just looked at his son for a moment, his face cloudy with fury, and sighed.

Jerry Lee said he would have been home sooner, but, “Daddy, it’s hard for a little boy to get home.”

Elmo sighed again and drove his son back to Ferriday.

“There stood Mama,” he says, remembering.

She ran to the car and grabbed his shoulders. “Boy,” she said, “I should kill you.” Then she snatched him to her chest. “I love you so. Come here, baby.”

He knew then that he would get away with just about anything.

“They loved their boy,” he says, again. “They were just glad to get him back.”

He is not certain, anymore, exactly why he left.

“I just knew that a motor scooter was not what I was looking for.”


Elmo had long since decided the boy was special and not always in a good way. He knew quickly that he was never going to be a farmer or a carpenter; he refused to pull his own weight around the house and might have been the sorriest cotton picker who ever put on a sack. He not only came in light, he came in almost empty, and he could tear up a tractor in no time, just disappear with it down a road, plowing up the asphalt. And he had accepted that the boy was no scholar. He had hoped, at least, to keep his son out of reform school or prison, but even that was looking grim. Before he was able to see over the dashboard, he had stolen Elmo’s Ford and gone joyriding down the roads of Ferriday and Black River, whooping. The first time it happened, Elmo had looked up to see his car rolling out of the driveway, ran up to see who was driving. It appeared to be nobody. Then he caught a brief flash of just the top of a blond head, and cursed, and considered praying. The car went sliding out of the driveway wide-open and roaring down the dirt road, and Elmo watched and listened for the sound of great tragedy. All he heard was the roar of the engine, roaring, roaring. There was something wrong. It finally hit him. “Oh Lord,” he said, “the boy ain’t changing gears.” Jerry Lee must have been pulling about four thousand RPM, the engine smoking, before he finally turned around and headed home.

When he pulled up in the driveway and killed the motor, his daddy was standing there aghast, his big hands on his hips. He could smell gaskets melting, metal smoking.

Jerry Lee decided to act like he was supposed to drive.

They stood there looking at each other.

“Well,” Elmo finally asked, “how’d you do, son?”

“I did pretty good, Daddy,” said Jerry Lee, “but I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of low gear.”

Elmo knew he should lock the boy in a pen, but he was one of those animals who would kill himself against the wire.

“Well,” he said in defeat, “maybe I better show you.”


By the fall of ’43, he was becoming more enamored of music, so that a song on the radio, or at a clothesline, or in the fields, could freeze him midstep. Music, black and white, blues and hillbilly, swirled around him, and as he sang it back, his own voice grew richer, till he sounded less like a freckle-faced kid. He knew something about the purity of music, the unvarnished beauty of it. It was among the first sounds he heard as a baby, even before Elmo Jr. was sent to heaven and Elmo Sr. was sent to New Orleans, and it would never desert him. “It was beautiful,” he says, “when Mama and Daddy sang their duets. They sang ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ and ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’ and ‘Old Rugged Cross,’ and they sang ‘Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?’” And sometimes when they sang, it looked like their hearts were breaking, but to Jerry Lee then it just sounded like the soul of music itself was laid bare, when he heard them sing the songs from church. “You simply,” he says, “cannot beat them old songs.”

He would never improve on that beauty; never wanted to sing with more heart. He just wanted to make it move faster, harder, and for that he needed an engine, but the only pianos in his world all belonged to someone else. His daddy had a guitar and encouraged him to play it, but there was just a limit to the thing—he had always despised limits—and it seemed like the strings were designed to hold him, not set him free. “I learned to play guitar, could play it pretty good,” he says, but “a guitar just has six strings.” He says it like a man would say his dog just has three legs, with dejection and pity. In church he heard the future on those old pianos, battle-scarred from all those crusades against the devil one big tent at a time. But only the rich people had one in their house, or at least, people richer than they were.


He was playing in the yard when he saw his father’s old truck lumbering up to their house on Tyler Road. The better times, the carpentry work and cotton prices, had allowed Elmo a little breathing room, and for the first time in his life he had purchased his own land. It was the first dirt he had ever put his name on.

“He had a piano on his truck,” he says, “and my eyes almost fell out of my head.”

He started hopping, like old man Herron used to hop when Elmo lifted him over a fence.

“I found out later he mortgaged his farm to buy it for me,” he says. “I tol’ you. I had the best mama and daddy in the world.”