Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(23)

The shocking thing was how quickly he could learn a song, and adapt it into something new. Elmo wired the house for electricity, and got his boy a radio so he could snag what was drifting through the air. He listened to the radio like a man sifting for gold. Some stations came in maddeningly faint, wafting down from Chicago or some other big city, but the best music in the world was being played almost next door, anyway. The Jesuits at Loyola University had fifty thousand watts pushing big band and Dixieland up from New Orleans, and you could hear Sharkey Bonano like he was standing in the hall. In Natchez, WMIS played the blues almost nonstop, from the rusty piano shuffle of Champion Jack Dupree to the citified jump bands of Louis Jordan and Amos Milburn. WSMB in New Orleans piped in hillbilly music from Nashville, and before long KWKH started bringing the Louisiana Hayride in from Shreveport, on a signal that would change his life. He bought records every time a little money came his way, boogie and hillbilly and pop hits, sounds that were obscure only to people with a tin ear, and eavesdropped endlessly in Ferriday’s black section to hear the most lowdown blues he could find drifting from the flung-open doorways, always collecting, absorbing. In time, he only had to hear a song once to store it inside his head. Then he would match the words to the rows of black and white, anything from country tunes like “You Are My Sunshine” to the old New Orleans song “Margie” to blues songs and drinking ditties.

It was a grand time in American music, when field hands laid the bedrock of rock and roll, elegant orchestras held sway in hotel ballrooms in New Orleans, jump blues combos toured the South continuously, and country music was maturing from fiddle tunes and cornpone to something a soldier returning from the war could cleave to, drink to, even dance to, with his baby. New music was busting out all over, but the old music still shined. He feasted on the new, but also listened for Al Jolson, who had never truly gone out of style, and Hoagy Carmichael:

Now he’s poppin’ the piano just to raise the price

Of a ticket to the land of the free

Well they say his home’s in Frisco where they ship the rice

But it’s really in Tennessee



On Saturday nights he sat by the radio like it was something he could see into. He listened to the Grand Ole Opry, even bore up to Roy Acuff, who was “the worst singer I ever heard.”

“What do you mean you don’t like Roy Acuff?” asked his mama.

“Well,” he and his daddy would say, almost in concert, “he ain’t no Jimmie Rodgers.”

The Singing Brakeman lived in their house now the way he had bunked with Elmo in New Orleans. His daddy played his boy the music on the Victrola, and he heard the genius in it, heard the train whistle across the tortured land and heard the blues bleed into this white man’s music, the way he heard it in the fields of the parish. Rodgers was the father of country music, but he was also “a natural born blues singer,” Jerry Lee says. “I loved his blues.” In no time he was singing and playing about hopping freights and getting drunk and the perils of no-account women, and if he was ten years old, it wasn’t by much.

Oh, my pocketbook is empty and my heart is full of pain

I’m a thousand miles away from home, just waitin’ for a train



Mamie frowned at that, at the little boy singing such raw, secular music, but there was no containing it now. “Mama supported my music” from the beginning, he says, even if she blanched at the words. When he was fourteen or so, he was moved by a song called “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” which a rhythm-and-blues singer named Stick McGhee had adapted from a nastier, profanity-laced chant he’d learned in the army. Mamie’s son worked up a slightly cleaner version of his own, so that she wouldn’t faint or fall to praying for his soul or pinch a plug out of his arm, and boogie would echo down Tyler Road. . .

Way down in New Orleans where everything’s fine

All them cats is just a-drinkin’ that wine

Drinkin’ that mess is pure delight

When they get sloppy drunk they sing all night

Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee, drinkin’ wine

Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee, drinkin’ wine

Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee

Won’t you pass that bottle to me



. . . then he would do another hymn. His cousins Jimmy and Mickey had also fallen in love with the piano at about the same time, and they would play together, sometimes, the three of them, and the people of the town would wonder at such talent in one bloodline, even if it was dad-gum impossible to figure exactly which lines ran in what direction. “All three played,” he recalls. “Me and Jimmy would play together, and you could hear it for three blocks.” But there was never any doubt about who was leading that trio. “You think Mickey and Jimmy could have cut it like me, could have cut that Al Jolson like me?” he says, as if daring someone to disagree.

But he did not, even as a child, hear anyone playing exactly like he wanted to play, no one singing precisely as he wanted to sing. Most of the standout artists were guitar men; the piano players still seemed mostly in the background, trapped in one genre or another.

Then he heard a man who defied any one label, a man who looked like a country-and-western piano man and played next to men in rhine-stones and big hats but who played jazz, too, and blues, and anything he damn well pleased, from Cab Calloway to Texas swing. Some people called his music Western swing, others said hillbilly boogie. Jerry Lee just knew it sounded good, like something he could do.