Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(31)

Hank Williams did not write “Lovesick Blues”—it was an old Tin Pan Alley song, written in ’22 by Clifford Friend and Irving Mills—but he made it his song forever, made his voice and his sound the only ones that would matter, forever and ever. That was what being a stylist was all about. When the Opry put him on the big stage at the Ryman Auditorium to sing it, the song rocketed outward from Nashville across the entire country. Fishermen in the Pacific Northwest heard. . .

I got a feeling called the blu-ues, oh Lawd,

Since my baby said good-bye



. . . and liked it.

But the man from Alabama led an uneasy life, and soon his career and his ways were locked in near-constant battle. The men who dominated the bluegrass and commercial country music broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium, some of them about as country as a subway if you knocked the cowboy hats off their heads, were fearful of this young man with the dark circles under his eyes. WSFA fired him for habitual drunkenness, and before long the Opry wouldn’t have him either. When Jerry Lee first heard him, it was by way of Shreveport, just 180 miles away from Ferriday, on the Louisiana Hayride, the weekly radio show he played when the Opry wouldn’t have him.

After “Lovesick Blues,” the wayward yodeler followed up with a string of hits he wrote himself—“I Can’t Help It,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”—and Jerry Lee loved them all. But that was not the only reason he cleaved to Hank Williams. As much as anything, it was the fact that Hank was also a man raised in faith but pulled and torn by sin, a man who lived with one foot hot and one foot cool, straddling the worlds of sacred music and secular music with a kind of tortured beauty. He would have the crowds tapping their toes in the auditoriums to some hillbilly swing, then mumble, “Neighbors, we’ve got a little sacred song y’all might want to hear, a little song I wrote. . . .”

I wandered so aimless, my life filled with sin

I wouldn’t let my dear Savior in



Jerry Lee knew he was bound to this man somehow. “I think me and Mr. Williams were a lot alike,” he says now. He leaned on the jukebox and listened to “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” He studied the words to “You Win Again” and sensed the unbearable humiliation there.

“I felt something when I listened to that man,” he says. “I felt something different.”

He rarely calls him Hank. It is “Mr. Williams.”

“I listened to Mr. Williams, and I listened real close. I listened to hear a sharp note, or a flat note. And you know what? I’m still listening.”

There was no television, no video, so he could not really see what the man looked like, how he moved or carried himself. There were only the records to go by, and the occasional poster or flyer of an almost emaciated young man who stood a little knock-kneed onstage, but elegant, somehow, in his white suits and big white Stetson; he was elegant to the end, even after Nashville got to him and he started wearing buckskin fringe and big musical notes on his suits and lined his coat sleeves and pants legs with rhinestones and glitter and whatnot, like a dime store blew up all over him. The Opry hired him back and fired him again, but he always reappeared somewhere, saying, “Neighbors, I’m so happy to be back, and I got a purty little song. . . .”

Jerry Lee played the songs over and over. He did the same with other songs, like Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You” and a hundred more, but there was just something different in Mr. Williams’s music, the way some paintings are more vivid, more real than others, and he dreamed about meeting the man and telling him how much he liked his songs. But there was no rush. Jerry Lee was just barely a teenager, and Hank Williams was only in his late twenties, and he’d promised, over the radio, that if the Lord was willing and the creek stayed level he’d be in his town real soon.


It was about this time that Jerry Lee first started to challenge Elmo’s supremacy in the home. Elmo could abide most things, but not sass, and Jerry Lee was born to sass. He came off the bottle smarting off, and as he became a teenager, he figured he could stand up to his father, could defy his orders as a man would defy another man. It was funny when he was a boy, but when he was big enough, he knew he would have to back it up with his fists. “I figured I would try it one day,” he says. He can’t recall exactly what sparked it—maybe the old man had finally gotten old after all—but inevitably that one day came.

“He reached his hand around my head and picked me up by the nape of my neck, and I was looking right into his face.” The last time that had happened he had been a little boy, in Haney’s Big House. This was different. His daddy’s eyes were calm, flat.

He remembers one blow, maybe two, then his mother’s voice.

“Don’t hit him again! Don’t hit my baby again.”

“I remember he picked me up like I was a straw, and I knew that I had been conquered.”


The year 1948 began with a crime wave in Concordia Parish, or at least as close to such as anyone there could recall. All kinds of things were turning up missing, including some items that left police bewildered as to why anyone would want them. It was just Jerry Lee and his cousin Jimmy, who had temporarily backslid, creeping around at night, stealing scrap iron from their Uncle Lee and selling it back to him the next morning, and breaking into warehouses that held things most people would not take on a scavenger hunt. Jimmy, in his own biography, wrote that the cousins stole a roll of barbed wire; they did not need a roll of barbed wire, and Jerry Lee was against taking it, but Jimmy figured if they were going so far as to break and enter, they dang sure were going to leave with something. He left carrying a roll of wire, but it got heavy, so he threw it in a ditch. The boys had better luck with stores, and by the summer of ’48 they had a nice pile of loot. “It’s a whole gang,” said Chief Swaggart, when asked about the rash of thefts, but the crime wave mysteriously flattened to nothing when Jimmy rededicated himself to the Lord and Jerry Lee, his family, and his piano vanished on the two-lane to Angola, where Elmo had found construction work on a hospital for the infamous prison there.