Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(24)

Yeah I’m an ol’ pipeliner an’ I lay my line all day

I got four or five women, waitin’ to draw my pay



Moon Mullican’s musical talent had germinated in the church, like his. Mullican learned first on an organ, but he was drawn to the sounds he heard drifting from the fields and chain gangs in Polk County, Texas. His daddy put a strap to him, but it was hard to stop the boy from listening to what drifted in on the Texas wind. He was Scots-Irish and as white as white could get—his grandfather fought for the South at Shiloh—but he would mix blues and big-city jazz into his stage shows between tear-soaked country ballads. The people who paid good money to hear him sometimes didn’t know what to think, with him playing that colored music so loud, and disc jockeys didn’t know where to play him, and record producers did not know what to do with him, but Jerry Lee listened to him closely, very closely, and heard in the music some of the first heartbeats of what he would one day know as rock and roll. “Moon Mullican knew what to do with a piano.” And Jerry Lee was playing it in no time.

He sat at the old piano and mixed and matched and experimented. In a way, it was like the piano was the heart of the old Lewis house, always pumping, pumping. “When it would flood, and Ferriday was under water, Daddy would put my piano on the back of the truck, and haul it out” to safety. It was not a hard decision, what to save and what to leave: the piano was the one good piece of furniture they owned. Then, when the water receded and the house dried out, he would fetch it back, and Mamie would breathe a sigh of relief.

“We gathered around the piano every night, back then, me and her and Daddy,” says Jerry Lee. It had always been that way for them, through poverty and misery and death, and now, again, in hope. It was clear that their boy was going places. It was all a matter of direction.


Mamie laid out his white shirt and bow tie. That was how you knew in the Lewis house that a great day was at hand. They rode to church in Elmo’s Ford and parked among the other ragged cars. Here and there, a backslid husband made himself comfortable across a seat, to wait out the preaching and singing and the altar call. Even Lee Calhoun drove up in a battered Chevrolet for the same reason a good poker player never flashed his wad. He had had the house of worship built on blocks, to prevent flooding, but blocks were dear, so it could not be much of a flood. There was electricity wired in the walls but no plumbing beneath the plain wood floors—an outhouse had been dug out back—and there was no stained glass in the windows to filter and soften the Louisiana sun. A rusted potbellied stove, the only heat in winter, sat in a corner. But inside, on a Sunday morning, there was no question whose house this was, and it was not Lee Calhoun’s.

It was a hothouse in summer; it seems it was always summer. The parishioners threw open the windows and installed two massive box fans on opposite sides of the building to draw the rising heat and expel it outdoors. It drew with it the sounds of the church, and created a phenomenon on Texas Avenue that people could not recall seeing anywhere else. The Assembly of God was an all-white church, but black neighbors would come by on Sundays and sit under trees to hear the music that poured from the place. People parked their cars and rolled down windows or opened doors to listen. The austerity of the Pentecostal sect did not extend to its music, even before Jerry Lee Lewis and the other boys put their stamp on it, and you could hear the piano on Main Street. Elmo whupped guitar, Mamie sang, Son Swaggart sawed his fiddle and the rest of the family joined in. In time, there would be drums, steel guitar, bass, accordion, and more, the place literally shaking. “It was lively,” says Gay Bradford, who was born in 1931 and went to church with Jerry Lee.

This Sunday his kin filed in a carload at a time—they were almost all kin, in here—and took seats in the simple, dark-wood pews: tall, angular Swaggarts, the smaller, good-looking Gilleys, the fiery Herrons, the wild Beatty boys, his pretty Aunt Stella and his rumpled Uncle Lee, and all the rest. Mamie and Elmo had a baby daughter now: Frankie Jean, born on October 27, 1944. She would be an annoyance for her brother but an ally in the long life to come. Mamie held the child in her arms, rocking her gently in the pew as the service began. The congregation prayed for strength, for the courage to be a warrior for Christ, for deliverance from all sin, and for life everlasting at the foot of His throne. Then there was a song. Here, pure genetics made the place different. There was no robed choir. The whole place, front to back, was choir.

Then Jerry Lee, his hair slicked down with hair oil, slid out of the rough pew and walked to the front of the church. It was not a long walk, so why did it seem like he was walking through a vast cathedral? He faced the congregation, about forty people that Sunday, but it looked like a lot more then. They waited politely for him to begin . . . and waited, and waited.

Jerry Lee took a deep breath, spun on his heel and walked, a hundred miles at least, back to his family’s pew.

“Mama,” he whispered.

“Yes, son,” Mamie said.

“What song was it I’s supposed to play?”

“‘What Will My Answer Be?’” she said.

He nodded.

“People just busted out laughin’.”

He marched back to the front of the church.

What will my answer be, what can I say

When Jesus beckons me home?



“It was the first song I ever sang in church.”

Everything he has sung or played since rests on the pillars of that day, that church, and that song. He sees no irony in it, asks no questions, abides none: “The music comes from God.”