Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(41)

Only the music was extraordinary, and what made it that way, before he finally took over the old upright and stole the show, was a fifty-year-old piano player from Meadville, Mississippi, named Paul Whitehead. “Mr. Paul,” says Jerry Lee, “and he knew every song in the world. And we played ’em all.” To lift the sound of his instrument above the hard-packed crowd, Mr. Paul jerry-rigged his old piano to an amplifier, electrifying its eighty-eight steel strings till they would ring out even over the crack of a .22 pistol. He pumped the keys to get a rich, rolling sound, slapped them like he expected them to give up some secret, some music never heard in a place such as this. Sound was what he had. He could play juke-joint blues or “San Antonio Rose,” squeeze an electric accordion till it spat out a marching band, fiddle up a redneck storm, and blow a trumpet like he was trying to bring down a wall. He did it all while staring off into the distance, as if he was playing not in a tin-roofed den of iniquity but someplace fine, as if he could somehow see how far a man might fly from here with just the right song.

“Pure talent,” says Jerry Lee, “was what it was.” The music washed out in all directions, smoked through the blades of a big electric fan and poured through the propped-open door, across the gravel and the Johnson grass and out to the blacktop, luring in the Hudson Hornets and two-tone Fords and other hunks of big Detroit steel. Young men in penny loafers and snap-pearl-button shirts checked their shine in the gleam of a baby moon hubcap and steered women with big hair and low expectations toward the disturbance within, at no cover charge. Now and then, at the end of a set, a pretty girl would approach the stage to make a request or just to tell the silver-haired piano man how much she loved his songs, and Mr. Paul, suddenly gentle, would bow low, smile, and say, “Thank you, miss.” For Mr. Paul Whitehead was blind, and in the darkness where he lived, they were all pretty girls.

He’d been born with sight, but when he was three years old he got measles and lesions in his eyes, and the world went black. “Put a lightbulb in front of my face,” he said, “and I can’t tell if it’s off or on.” But he could tell where he was on a lonely highway by tilting his face to a window. “Well, we’re passing through Roxie. I smell the sawmill.” He knew, rolling up Highway 51, when he neared McComb. “I smell fresh-cut hay.”

Sometimes at the Wagon Wheel, he would reach out to where a young woman’s voice told him her face would be. “Can I touch your hair, miss?” he would ask, and the girl almost always told him, “Why, yes, of course.” After prying hands off her posterior all night and entertaining offers from men whose smoothest line was, “Hey, baby, wanna go wit’ me,” it was nice to talk to a gentleman. He would take a strand of her hair and feel it between his thumb and forefinger, for just a second or so, never more. “You’re a redhead, miss,” he would say, and he was right every time. The peroxide blondes tried to fool him, but he could tell them what they were and what they used to be. The young women would waste a smile on the hard, smoked glass that covered his eyes, then rush back to tables knocked together from scrap wood and old doors to tell their girlfriends of the magic powers of Mr. Paul.

But it was his musical memory, unlimited and forever, that was the real trick here.

He gave them Hank Thompson . . .

I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels.

I might have known you’d never make a wife.



. . . and Joe Turner, and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and even “Stardust,” sweet as any dream.

The early days of rock and roll are thick in myth, but Paul Whitehead’s place in the greater legend is faded and paper-thin. He has been largely forgotten beyond a sentence or so, a footnote to a legend, but he deserved better than that, says Jerry Lee. He is fiercely proud of his own technique, of being self-taught, of being the one and blessed only, but concedes that he studied the blind man, as he learned the words, learned to read and even take control of a crowd, as he waited for that last element, that one, final, missing thing. “I was gettin’ my sound right,” he says, and Mr. Paul loved sound like few men he had ever seen. He was the rarest of performers, a pure musician, unpolluted by worldly things, yet he and Jerry Lee, who was a tar baby for temptation and a walking catastrophe in the realm of regular people, were in one way the same. The stage was the light. Sixteen inches down there was only the black nothing, for both of them.

“Paul Whitehead done a lot. His lesson was worth a billion dollars to me. I guess he was like a father to me,” an influence, certainly, and a teacher, but more. He showed Jerry Lee that there was a kind of peace in it all, in the middle of the chaos and fighting and drunkards. There was life in it, in it alone.

Paul Whitehead learned the music not from lessons or travel but from the air, from the Blue Room in New Orleans and big bands in Manhattan; he learned Cajun from the Atchafalaya, and every hillbilly song the Louisiana Hayride or the Opry ever broadcast on a dust-covered radio. But that pumping sound in his piano was pure juke joint; Jerry Lee knew it from those days he was routinely thrown out of Haney’s by a man the size of a Frigidaire. Mr. Paul found it not in a club but tapping down a sidewalk in Meadville, listening. He could tell when he passed the color line in a town by pausing a second on the concrete.

In the late ’40s he had played with a picker named Gray Montgomery, from Security, Louisiana. Gray had a white Gibson guitar and a French harp, and could play drums with his feet. For years, he and Mr. Paul toured the South, playing honky-tonks. “The girls would come in the clubs, waitresses who worked the cafés,” Montgomery recalled. “They’d ask if we knew so-and-so, and they’d write down the words for us. . . . That’s how we got our songs, from waitresses.