Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(39)

But the crowd was still moving.

“They were screaming, howling,” he says.

The applause boomed inside the chapel, went on and on. It was the most applause, the loudest, he had ever had.

“It scared me, a little bit,” he says. “I said, What’s going on here?”

They wanted more.

He was willing but saw the dean coming toward him.

“He crooked his finger at me,” he remembers. “He was a little bit upset.”

“Do you see what you’ve done to all these young people? You’ve driven these young people crazy.” He said the word crazy like he was dragging it down a cabbage grater.

Jerry Lee told him he didn’t mean to.

“You’ve ruined a great Christian college.”

He told Jerry Lee he was history at Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas. But when the other students heard that, some of them chanted in support, and shouted that “if he goes, we go.”

Why, the dean must have wondered, couldn’t everyone be like Coleman McDuff?

One of the students let out a holler.

“Look,” the dean said to Jerry Lee, “what you have done.”

The next day, Pearry Lee Green was called to the president’s office. When he arrived, “Jerry Lee was there.” The president told Jerry Lee that he had wantonly solicited an impure response from the entire student body of the college by playing reckless and prurient music, and the president and deans gave him the left foot of fellowship and told him not to let the door hit him in his behind on the way out. Jerry Lee, who never lacked gall, told the deans and the president that he would not accept their expulsion.

“I’ll just go home for two weeks, but I’m comin’ back,” he said. He had no intention of coming back, not even if they were handing out free doughnuts and pony rides, but he wanted them to watch the gate every day to see if he was.

Then the school officials turned their wrath on Pearry Lee. Such a break of decency in a schoolwide event had to be a plot, a conspiracy. “They asked me, ‘Why did you let Jerry Lee Lewis play the piano?’ I told them, ‘Well, I didn’t know him from anybody else. And they told me he played the piano, and I’d heard him sing.’ They expelled us both. They told us they wouldn’t put up with that kind of music. They told us to pack up our books and get our clothes off of the campus. ‘You are no longer welcome here,’ they said. As we both started out the door of the president’s office, Jerry Lee turned around and said, ‘I want you men to know Pearry Lee had nothing to do with this. He didn’t know what I was going to do.’ They reversed my expulsion, and I didn’t have to leave. Jerry Lee stood up for me.”

Some of the students waved as he walked away, headed for the bus station and Ferriday.

“I think sincerely, in his heart, he wanted to be a preacher,” says Pearry Lee.


Jerry Lee did not need college or the process of ordination to preach, and he did not immediately give up on it. He felt what he felt, and he preached on it, preached as the sinner he was. Small churches in and around the river parishes welcomed him, “and I preached up a storm on the Holy Ghost.” He will not talk about it much—it is one of those things he finds too private, too real, in a way, to talk about. But the people who would say he had no right to preach as a sinner, that he should not have been allowed, know nothing of the faith in which he was raised, and besides, if only men of perfection preached, there would be scarce preaching at all. It was stories of failure the people tended to cleave to, because without failure there could be no redemption. Those without sin walked a lonely road, echoing and empty. The funny thing was, the red-hot music that Jerry Lee played in Waxahachie would come to be welcomed and encouraged and even commonplace in the Assembly of God, as it already was on Texas Avenue and churches like it throughout the rougher South.

But Jerry Lee did not preach for long. He went back to the clubs in Natchez and Monroe and elsewhere, but despite some rare nights when he hit it big with tips, the money was still not a real living, so he went looking for day work again. He again tried manual labor, only to rediscover that it required manual labor.

At one point, considering his powerful and winning personality, he thought he might have some luck as a door-to-door salesman. So he took a job on commission with the Atlas Sewing Machine Company. The company sold their sewing machines on an installment plan; the hook was that it required no money up front, just a signed contract committing to a small payment every month. With his partner, Jerry Lee prowled the river parishes in a ’47 Pontiac, lifting the sales model in and out of the car with every call. They discovered quickly that if the people of Louisiana did need a new sewing machine, they were not going to buy one from the trunk of a Pontiac.

“Then,” Jerry Lee says, “I figured out a way to really sell sewing machines.”

He knocked on the door of the wood-frame houses and mobile homes and garage apartments and said, “Good afternoon, ma’am, my name is Jerry Lee Lewis and I am from the Atlas Sewing Machine Company of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, . . . a great sewing machine. Congratulations, ma’am, you have won a sewing machine.” Then he collected ten dollars, check or cash, “for the tax,” and had them sign an innocuous-looking piece of paper—“which was a contract”—and told them he hoped they enjoyed their sewing machine and the many happy hours it would bring. Then he and his partner took off down the road a piece and split the cash. “The bill come later,” Jerry Lee says.