Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(27)
Haney called them “dances,” which was less likely to offend church people or scare the white folk, and cars lined up on the river bridge from Natchez, headlights making a glowworm a mile or more long. The dances were announced in a Concordia Sentinel column called Among the Colored. “You couldn’t walk in the place . . . it would be jammed, packed,” said Early, whose Hezekiah and the House Rockers played for years at the Big House. “Haney had his floorwalkers, but there would still be some hellish fights, but there wouldn’t be no shootin’.” There were black professionals here, people who, like Haney, operated solely on one side of the color line, morticians and doctors sharing space with barbers, sawmill hands, cooks and maids, track layers, and icehouse workers. The musicians called it the Chitlin’ Circuit, all-black clubs throughout the segregated Deep South where a man or woman with talent could leave with a wad of twenties and still have to sleep in the car. But if you played at Haney’s, you slept on clean sheets in Haney’s Motel, ate Haney’s ham and eggs, and drank Haney’s liquor, and if the police pulled you over, you said the magic word. “The sheriff pulled me over many times,” said Early. “‘Where you goin’? What you got in there?’ I’d say, ‘Mr. Haney gave us this liquor.’ I never went to jail.”
If you were anybody in blues, shoutin’ blues, rhythm and blues, any blues, you played the Big House.
Jerry Lee used to stand in the weeds and broken glass and watch the bluesmen disembark from their trucks and buses, “when I wasn’t old enough to go in,” and not yet desperate enough to sneak in. They had slept in their suits, often, big city suits, from Beale Street in Memphis and as far away as Chicago, and covered their chemically straightened and sculpted hair with kerchiefs, like a woman, till showtime. The guitar men and saxophone wailers, even the famous ones, carried battered cases inside, because no one toted another man’s baby. “Ever’body played Haney’s, big bands, horns and everything,” recalls Jerry Lee. Haney brought in Papa George Lightfoot, the harp man who would cross over and play some of the white honky-tonks in his old age, and trombonist Leon “Pee Wee” Whittaker, who could almost remember the Creation, who had played with the old Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels when the century was new.
Over the years, say the musicians who played in the house bands, the Big House hosted Charles Brown, the smooth Texan, and the elegant Roy Milton and his Solid Senders, who scored nineteen Top 10 R&B records, and Fats Domino, before “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Blueberry Hill.” He brought in the Slims—Memphis Slim and the House Rockers and Sunnyland Slim. A blind piano player named Ray Charles played here, and guitarist Little Milton, and singer Bobby “Blue” Bland; so did Junior Parker, a skinny black hillbilly named Chuck Berry, and a young Irma Thomas. Haney’s hosted young performers like Percy Mayfield, the gentle vocalist and songwriter who begged “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” and big stars of the previous generation like whiskey-voiced Tampa Red and his sometime partner, Atlanta piano man Big Maceo Merriweather, who reminded them, with every downward stroke, what they had endured and were enduring still.
So take these stripes from around me
Take these chains from around my leg
Freedom, sang Maceo, was no easy thing, either, and Tampa Red moaned, “Mmmmmm-hhhhmmmm.” And if ever a thing of nails and wood had a life, a beating heart of its own, it was this place, where even in the hungover early morning, you might hear a single old guitar man tuning, messing, searching for a sound among the empty tables and chairs.
“Haney never did close the doors,” Early said. Jerry Lee had lived in the hot shadow of the blues all his life. The blues traveled on the wind through the low country of Louisiana, and all he had to do was stand still in one place a little while to hear it. Three out of every four people in Ferriday were people of color, and the black man’s blues poured from passing cars and transistor radios and jukeboxes. But he had never heard it—really heard it—till he heard it pour from the Big House. Even before he was tall enough to see inside the place, he would climb to a window or get someone to boost him up, for just a glimpse, for a raw second. It was never enough, and it went on that way, unconsummated, for years.
He dragged his cousin Jimmy with him, tried to coerce him into sneaking in with him. “Jimmy wouldn’t do it. I just couldn’t get him in there. . . . He was scared to go in there.” Jimmy knew the beast when he saw it, “called it the devil’s music,” recalls Jerry Lee, and, after untold pleadings, Jimmy left his wild cousin to his own destruction. Besides, Jimmy told him, if his mama and daddy found out he was sneaking into Haney’s Big House, they would beat him until he did not know his own name. “Mama might not kill me,” he told Jerry Lee, “but Daddy will.”
“Well, I ain’t scared of mine,” Jerry Lee told him.
“Never could get Jimmy to go in there with me,” he says, thinking back. “He was scared of it.” But for him, it was a good time to get out of the house; he might not even be missed, at least for an hour or two. Mamie had recently given birth to a second daughter, another dark-haired girl, named Linda Gail. Mamie and Elmo were distracted, still making a fuss over the new baby. But he truly did not much care if he was found out or not. They did not beat him, only threatened a lot. Besides, some things were worth a good beating, he surmised.