Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(33)

She seemed content to just curl up with him, in the shade, by the river, or on a couch when her mama and daddy were away. “But I never was much of a cuddler,” he says. One day, they found a secluded spot on the bank and put out a blanket. “Right there on the sandy banks of Little Creek. Couldn’t have been a more perfect spot. . . . You know, you spend a lot of time in your life seeking some kind of perfection, but we’re a long way from gettin’ there. But this seemed like it, that there. I had spent a lot of time, thinking about things like this.”

They kissed, and Jerry Lee started asking.

“No,” she said.

He asked some more.

“No,” she said, but weaker.

He talked her into it; he had talked himself into it, he believed, already.

“I had been fighting it for a while,” he says, because of his raising. But he kept on. “I finally talked her into it—gettin’ on with the program, so to speak.”

Then there she was, naked, and it was as perfect, that moment, as he thought it might be.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“And, uh, we got down to the nitty-gritty,” he says, thinking back. “And . . . I slowly approached the situation.”

But at the last second, he hesitated.

He could hear Scripture in the air.

He heard his mama.

He looked up at the sky, for lightning, for the accusation.

“Help me, Lord.”

Ruth looked at him, puzzled.

She waited.

“I can’t do this,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“I won’t.”

“It was you,” she reminded him, “got me naked.”

“I thought I was willing,” Jerry Lee told her.

“You mean you got me like this, and you ain’t . . .? You can’t do this to me, baby. You know what I want, and I know what you want. You ain’t foolin’ me.”

“No,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right.”

She was hurt, and mad, and embarrassed, and mightily confused.

“I was wanting to . . . but I just wasn’t taught this way. I’m doing you a favor,” said Jerry Lee, and pulled on his clothes.

“I was scared to,” he says, so many years later. “I heard the sermon, and I was scared to death. I heard my mama. I thought there would be lightning flashing and everything else, and I just knew that it was wrong. And I never went with a woman, till I got married.”

He knew, even then, what was at stake. “It wouldn’t have worked. I wanted to be a star. I wanted to play that piano. Sometimes you have to pick, and I picked the dream. I was not gonna let that dream go by. I hear she married a nice man. Probably had a whole stack of kids. They moved away. But I do think about her, quite a bit. Put that in there, in the book. I want her to know that.”


The work ran out in Angola, and the family moved home to Concordia Parish, to a house in Black River. He looked up Elizabeth, but pretty girls do not linger for long in small Southern towns; they slip away, quickly, lightly. But then women were not his first love, anyway.

He had been dreaming since he was nine of being a real musician, and though he knew a hundred songs, no one had ever paid him a dime to sing one till the summer of ’49. It was the year Ford Motor Co., in Detroit, Michigan, made a car that will always be beautiful to Jerry Lee, because it was there, against those bulbous fenders, that his future began to take shape. The Ford cost only $1,624, and it had a flathead V8 and three on the tree, and a hood ornament fashioned from a seventeenth-century European crest of lions or something; it was hard to tell. But that flathead was about the meanest thing on the blacktop in ’49, and the bootleggers bought a lot of them. Unfortunately, so did the government, so the whiskey men and G-men were in a dead heat. But regardless of your affiliation, you could get your hands on one at Babin-Paul Ford Motor Co. in Ferriday that summer, and people came to see it, and hear a hillbilly band play “Walking the Floor Over You” from a stage hammered together from plywood and two-by-fours.

By afternoon a small crowd had gathered—farmers, barbers, store clerks, insurance men, and tired women dragging children around by sticky hands—to peer under the hood and to hear Loy Gordon and his Pleasant Valley Boys play “Wildwood Flower.”

Elmo, Mamie, Jerry Lee, and his Aunt Eva were looking on, listening to the free show. “My boy can do better’n that,” Elmo suddenly said, and took off for the stage, with purpose, and told the organizers of this hootenanny that the real talent was standing down there in the crowd popping his bubblegum. The car dealers did not see what harm it would do, and Jerry Lee was welcomed onstage to polite applause. People thought it was cute, letting this boy sit in, and the piano player relinquished his old upright. Jerry Lee took a breath. They were expecting something country, something gospel, and he looked out across the crowd and hollered “Wine Spo-dee-o-dee!” so loud it made Mamie blanch and Elmo grin like a loon.

Now I got a nickel if you got a dime.

Let’s get together and buy some wine.

Wine over here, wine over there,

Drinkin’ that mess everywhere



The crowd at first did not know what to think about this kid banging that piano like a crazy man and hollering that “nigra music.” But the sunburned men tapped their Lehigh work boots in time to Stick McGhee, and people were grinning and looking downright foolish.