Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(28)

He had long suspected there was something in black music he wanted and needed, but he could not figure out exactly how to get to hear it. He scouted the problem over and over; Haney’s was an easy walk from his house, even if he had to swing by after a trip to the Arcade to catch another Western or maybe Frankenstein. Over the years, several people would claim it was they who gave him access to the forbidden nightclub, who hoisted him to an open window or left a locked door unlocked so the boy could creep in. The truth is, one day he just couldn’t stand it anymore, the itch, and walked alone to one of the two front doors that faced Fourth Street. It was a Sunday night, and he was AWOL from Texas Street. At Haney’s he saw a raggedy bus outside, which meant a traveling band and maybe even a bluesman of some renown; the nightclub was already bulging with people, the red sun not yet fully down. He would not be missed for hours. “Ever’body else was in church,” he recalls. The Assembly of God met twice on Sunday, morning and evening; the devil never took a day off.

He waited for his chance, till Haney and the money-takers were looking the other way, and darted into the smoke and noise. He searched around, frantic, for a hiding place, but there was none he could see. “So I got in under a table,” he says, just slid underneath smooth and slick and unseen—or at least that was what he told himself—till he was safe in the dark among the patent-leather shoes and the high heels.

I’m in, Jerry Lee kept telling himself. I’m in Haney’s. In that place that threatened his immortal soul.

And it was worth it. “I could see everything,” he remembers, though it is unclear if he is talking about the club or something more. Above him, people swayed in rickety chairs, drank, and laughed. On the dance floor, men and women came together in a grind, legs locked inside legs, so tight that if you cut one, the other one would bleed. “Couldn’t have been a better place for me,” says Jerry Lee. “I got right with it.”

The blues starts rollin’

And they stopped in front of my door



The guitar man onstage sang with a voice filled with all the suffering in the wide, flat, dusty world. In his voice is the sound of clanking leg irons. In his music is a daddy who grows smaller, less distinct, as a battered pickup pulls away on a bleak Delta road, and a mule that drags him over a million miles of dirt. His guitar wailed like a witness, too, to every mile and every slur and every pain. The man, his head cocked to one shoulder like it was nailed on at a cant, moved nothing but his thick fingers, fluttering around the frets like a hummingbird, and sweat poured down his face. “I just sat there and thought, Man, look at him pick. He was playing all over that guitar,” recalls Jerry Lee. In this man’s hands, it did not seem so much an inferior instrument. “And I tell you, he was singing some songs.”

The applause was still slapping, people even stomping the floor, when the guitar man lit into some stomping blues and snatched the people still sitting out of their seats. “Them cats could dance,” Jerry Lee says. Men leaped into the air, impossibly high, like they were flying. Women shook things he had believed were bolted down; some jumped onto the tables and danced up there. “They was throwin’ each other over their shoulders, throwin’ each other over their heads. And I was in seventh heaven.” This, he knew, was what had been missing. This was the spice, the soul he’d been looking for.

Woke up this morning,

My baby was gone . . .



He was already thinking how he would play it, how he would mix it with what he knew. But mostly he just let it fill him up, sink in, become part of him. “I just introduced myself to the atmosphere,” he says.

Please, God, don’t let Haney catch me now, he thought—and just then a big hand closed around the nape of his neck and lifted him like a doll from under the table and then high, high up off the floor, till he was looking Will Haney in one red, angry eye.

“Jerry Lee?”

He just dangled. Everyone in Ferriday knew the boy. Most little boys, born to overalls, did not strut around like him, like they owned every mile of dirt they walked. But Haney also knew his Uncle Lee and his Aunt Stella, and had business with them.

“What you doin’ in here, white boy?” Haney asked.

“I’m tryin’ to listen to some blues,” he said.

“You ain’t supposed to be in here.”

“I know. But I am.”

Jerry Lee tried to sound brave, but in his mind was thinking, Haney is big as a door.

“I’m tryin’ to hear some music,” he said, “if you don’t mind.”

Haney was breathing fire and seemed genuinely worried. This was a social breach, and a dangerous one. “Your Uncle Lee will destroy me for this,” Haney said.

Jerry Lee dangled.

“If your mama caught you here, she’d kill me! And your Uncle Lee will shoot me. And your Aunt Stella? She would—they would—have a heart attack.”

The music had not stopped; you could have dragged a bull alligator and a rusted washing machine through the joint when the music was going good. Haney hustled him to the door. The boy did not have to be dragged, but he did not act contrite, either. “And don’t come back,” Haney said from the door. Jerry Lee started walking in the direction of home, but as soon as Haney turned his back, he doubled back and crept through the dark to the band’s old bus. “I had to get on that bus,” he says. “I sat down in a chair, and I thought, I bet this is where he sat.” He sat there for a long time, dreaming, the music fainter now. Finally, banned for life, he walked home, the rhythm and the blues thumping inside his head.