Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(38)

“I really could preach,” he says, and he did plan on giving the place a solid try, at least at first. Almost immediately, however, he was stultified. The classes were as dull and irrelevant to his life as the ones he had dodged before. He did not see the point, in a school in which he was purportedly readying himself to be a preacher, of immersing himself in a library of thick, dusty books. The Bible was the Word of God, the Rock, the Great Speckled Bird, and a man preached from it, period. The Bible was all a man needs to know, he says even now. The rest was just fluttering paper and wind.

So he dodged these classes too, and crawled from his window late at night to go carouse. But the problem with playing hooky from Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, was that when you got over the wall you were still in Waxahachie, Texas. So he caught a ride to Dallas, a half hour or so up the road. Dallas, with its bars and big-haired women, was a whole other temptation, and he even found some boogie-woogie there. But he almost always made it to supper in the college dining hall, and he became popular at the school, especially with young women, who liked the haystack of wavy blond hair on his head and liked the way he could sing and how he was not afraid to sing anytime he felt like it, whether it was sanctioned by the school or not, as though demerits just rolled off his back. After singing in the Blue Cat Club, where men went after each other with the jagged ends of broken beer bottles, a demerit did not exactly send him aquiver.

“Me and Joey Walden and two or three other guys, we’d just start singing together,” a cappella in the dinner line, says Jerry Lee. “We done it all the time,” so often that it became a ritual for the students in the cafeteria.

“We all tried to get there in the dining hall when they got there because we enjoyed their singing,” said Pearry Lee Green, who started at Southwestern the same year as Jerry Lee and would go on to be the pastor of the Tucson Tabernacle. “They sang hymns. You didn’t sing anything that wasn’t a hymn, then.” To Jerry Lee, it was just natural; in the Assembly of God you were supposed to sing and sing loud, and send the ascending devil skulking and beaten back down into the netherworld with the power and exultation of your voice. Jerry Lee also made sure that the trio sang as the young ladies descended a double stairway into the dining hall, so he could get a good look at them. “Dorothy came to see me up there,” he says, “and that did not go over well.” He was still married to her but had long since stopped acting like he was.

He was three months into his fall semester when the Institute put on a “singspiration,” a kind of assembly and talent show that gathered the school’s musicians and singers for a night of religion-themed entertainment. The emcee would be Pearry Lee Green, who led a prayer group for postwar Japan, was business manager of the college yearbook, a member of the student council, president of the Texas Club, and president of the Governor’s Club, and had a loose affiliation with the Future Business Leaders of America. Jerry Lee was invited to play a piano solo. One of the students who had heard him play, who knew Jerry Lee’s style on the piano, warned Pearry Lee that the boy was “different,” maybe even “too different.”

“Look,” Jerry Lee told them all when they voiced their concerns, “you want this to go over right, don’t you?”


As Pearry Lee remembers, Coleman McDuff, who would go on to become a stalwart singer in the Assembly of God ministries, opened the program by singing “The Lord’s Prayer” in a lilting tenor. Some of the students had tears in their eyes. “I mean, Coleman was a singer,” said Green. “He could break a glass with his voice.”

Then he walked out to introduce Jerry Lee Lewis of Ferriday, Louisiana, who would perform the Assembly of God standard, “My God Is Real.”

“I understand,” he told the crowd, “we’re going to have a change in tempo.”

Jerry Lee looked out over the student body, still in the peaceful glow of Coleman McDuff.

He stabbed one key, drove it home like a claw hammer coming down on a bell, and launched into “My God Is Real.” It was so hot and fast, Green thought it was “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

“It was up-tempo, a little bit,” concedes Jerry Lee.

It was rolling, thumping, rollicking. So much so that at first the young people, all raised in the church but not in the church on Texas Street, did not know what to think. Even the ones from the smaller, rawer, more distant Assembly of God churches, where people spoke in tongues and wept and danced in the pews, had never seen it done like this, because it had never been done like this. Only the words were familiar.

My God is real, He’s real in my soul.

For He has washed and made me whole.



“People were shocked,” said Pearry Lee.

It would only get better, or worse, depending on your affiliation.

“Up-tempo, spiritual,” is how Jerry Lee describes it now.

Then he unleashed the boogie. He was true to the song, but he was also true to what was in his heart in that moment, and that ripped and roared through the chapel. He stuck that leg out toward the audience and shifted around so he could see them twitch and suffer, and all that hair tumbled into his eyes as he hammered out:

His love for me, His precious love, is like pure gold.

My God is real, for I can feel him in my soul.



The students, the ones who were not paralyzed by this point, started to move. They started rocking in their seats, and tapping their feet in time, and then some of them even started waving their arms in the air. A few of them came up out of their seats and even did a little dance, right there in the pews. Now we’re gettin’ somewheres, Jerry Lee thought, and he pushed it harder. He raked the keys like he was wringing out the last bit of boogie they had in them, and by the time he was done, he was sweating. “I always knew when I started sweatin’,” he says, “I had it knocked.”