Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(34)

“The boy’s doing pretty good,” said Aunt Eva. “Maybe we ought to take up a collection.”

“Money makes the mare trot,” Mamie said.

They passed a hat. When it came back around, it sagged with silver.

“I think I made about fourteen dollars,” says Jerry Lee.

He was a professional at last.

“I was paid to sing and play the piano.”

He walked in the clouds for a little bit after that. He quit school, just saw no future in it. He and Elmo heaved the piano on back of the Ford, and they went on the road, making a little money here and there, Jerry Lee singing and playing gospel and hillbilly and blues and even that Al Jolson, and in time he was taking home trophies from talent shows and doing regular spots on nearby radio stations. “I had my own show,” a fifteen-minute spot on WNAT out of Natchez sponsored by a Ferriday grocery store. “People started to hear about me, started to say, ‘Hey, who is this kid down there?’” It was mostly gospel, and some country; he couldn’t cut loose—not yet—and do the kind of music he wanted.

His cousins did similar gigs, spreading their own talent through the bottomland, though Jimmy still worried that singing and playing boogie-woogie was sending them all to hell on a handcar. Jerry Lee sometimes worried the same—every Sunday in church reminded him of the danger of such intense secular pleasure—but not as deeply or as often. “I wanted to be a star. Knew I could be, if . . .” If the starmakers in Memphis or Nashville would listen to him, really listen, and hear in his piano and voice that he was the only one like him in the ever-lovin’ world.

Impatient as he was, he knew his music was wasted if the people couldn’t hear it, and for that he needed a bigger stage. What he wanted was a honky-tonk, and that troubled his mama. Mamie would have loved to see her son in the ministry, would have loved to see him onstage in a white suit singing only sacred songs, but to say that she castigated her boy for his secular music would be to exaggerate things, her son says. “Mama didn’t like some of it,” said Jerry Lee, “but Mama was with me,” no matter what came, and he knew it then, and he believes it now.

He tested that tolerance and allegiance across the river in Natchez. The rough nightclubs there were the only place he knew in his small world where musicians could make a living, or at least a little piece of one. But ten dollars or so a night was more than he would make picking cotton, which he wasn’t going to do anyway, even at gunpoint. So while he was still living under his daddy’s roof, he snuck off to the clubs in Natchez to ask for steady work. The no-nonsense club owners, men who had seen it all, started to smile when the boy walked in. The smile slipped off their faces when they heard him play the boogie and the hillbilly music and even Gene Autry. He told them he was looking for work as a piano man, mostly, but could beat the drums, too, if there was cash money in it.

“I was thirteen the first time I left home to play, soon as I was big enough,” he remembers. “I was sittin’ on a piano stool where my feet weren’t even touchin’ the floor. That’s how young I was. This was the Blue Cat Club, down Under-the-Hill, the old Natchez,” a riverfront neighborhood that had been a warren of iniquity and villainy for more than two hundred years but a gold mine for musical style. Here a musician had to know everything. A request was not always a suggestion, not from a man who cut pulpwood for a living and drank his whiskey by the shot. Jerry Lee played hillbilly. He played “Release Me,” and “Goodnight, Irene,” and even Glenn Miller. “I learned to play everything as long as I could get a tip out of it”—and learned to get down low when the bottles started flying. After a while, he says, “I’d get homesick and tell ’em, ‘I got to go home and see Mama.’” But he kept coming back.

At those clubs in Natchez Under-the-Hill, he played with six or seven watches dangling from each skinny arm, put there by customers who figured they’d be safe on the arms of a boy if there happened to be a raid—which happened frequently at the Blue Cat Club. “The owner’s name was Charlie. He says, ‘Now, if the cops come by and ask you how old you are, you tell ’em you’re twenty-one.’ I said, ‘Oh, sure.’”

The police, at least, had a sense of humor.

“How old are you, boy?” they always asked.

“I’m twenty-one,” he lied.

“Well,” they always said, laughing, “that sounds about right.”

“I have been twenty-one,” said Jerry Lee, unwilling to let a good lie go, “for some time.”

For the next few years, the clubs would nurture Jerry Lee’s music, as much as any place can when the owner walks around with a big .44 sagging his slacks and women routinely have their wigs slapped off their heads by other women. He walked to his car past whorehouses and heroin fiends. Nellie Jackson ran a famous cathouse in Natchez in those days, where you might run into a high official with his suspenders down, but Jerry Lee says he was not a customer. “I walked up to the front door one time, and I turned around and left,” he says. He had no business there.

His mama worried and would stay up all night sometimes, till she heard her son’s car pull up in the yard, sometimes in the dawn. It went on and on, night after night, till he was fourteen, fifteen, and there were moments of great doubt, moments when, looking at her tired face, he wondered if he could somehow have it all, if he could tame that boogie and bend it to the Lord, tame his lusts and get himself a white suit and a tent and use his burgeoning talents for the church. But he was surviving by playing music. By fall of ’51, he was going on sixteen, “and was already a man and acted like one,” and past ready to find a wife and marry, at least by the standards of his people. But he worked in a bar, and he knew that a man—a smart one, anyway—does not find a wife in a bar. Such a union is well and truly doomed, built in the quicksands of sin. A man, a wise man, found his wife in church.