Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(42)

“There wasn’t no rock and roll, but people were tired of the slow songs. We’d take an old country song, and I’d say, ‘Paul, I think the people want to jump a little bit.’ And we’d watch the crowd, and if you hit some jagged notes they liked and they stomped the floor, you knew to just keep goin’. We didn’t know that was rock and roll.” Montgomery even played briefly with Mr. Paul and Jerry Lee together. He never hit it big himself but will never forget seeing the silver-haired man and the golden-haired one together onstage at the birth of a music, like a man watching a comet. Who gets to say they saw something like that?


Outside the clubs, Mr. Paul was all but invisible, living quietly in a small house in Natchez, dressing neat but plain. Jerry Lee would take him home after the gigs and watch him walk unerring down the path to his door, counting his steps. He was resistant to the vices that swirled around musicians. He did not drink or smoke or jazz himself with pills or avail himself of loose women. He drank milk in the fifteen-minute breaks; bartenders kept a glass bottle of it behind the bar. Sometimes, after a show, he would get a ride to a late-night place called Joe’s Eats on Route 61 and order a bowl of chili. He would not eat it unless it was scorching hot, and stuck his right index finger in the bowl to make sure. He wanted the first bite to be perfect. Then, alone, he ate carefully till it was gone, and waited, silent, for a ride home. “Same thing, every night,” says Jerry Lee. “Chili and a cold glass of milk.”

Mr. Paul did not talk much for a man who worshipped sound, as if what came out of people’s mouths, absent melody, was grating somehow. But he talked to Jerry Lee. They were often seen hunched over a piano or a song. People, wanting to believe in myth, said it was because he heard the future in him, that he would be the one to take the music to that fine place, a place he would have taken it himself if only he could have found his way alone out of that coiled nest of spitting cords. But people say a lot of things.

“He was just happy to play,” says Jerry Lee. “He taught me. I’d sit beside him, and say, ‘Mr. Paul, can you show me exactly how you do that?’” recalls Jerry Lee, in one of those moments when he was not himself, when bravado sloughs away and you see the ghost of a desperate, searching young man. “Mr. Paul was good to me.”

To Paul Whitehead, dull music was just one more place to sit in the dark. “He’d wedge that violin in place with two pieces of pasteboard,” so it would hold still as he tried to saw it in two, and Jerry Lee beat the drums or the piano like it stole something, and they made people stomp and howl. Some nights it seemed like Mr. Paul, his scarred and clouded eyes hidden by round tortoiseshell sunglasses, was wired into their very bones, and he would play hotter and quicker to make people move faster, faster, and stomp the boards harder, harder. He could tell when it happened through the soles of his shoes. What power, in a man who had to be led to the bathroom and back out again. “And I liked his style,” says Jerry Lee.

“Looka here,” Mr. Paul would say, then run his thumb all the way down the keyboard, in that waterfall sound, and play Hoagy Carmichael in a redneck bar.

Ah, but that was long ago.

Now my consolation is in the stardust of a song.



“Then he’d say, ‘Let’s do “Jealous Heart.”’ I mean, we covered everything.”

Some people, numbskulled, thought he was deaf and would yell a request into his ear. He always recoiled, as if they had shouted into his ear through an electric bullhorn. Some people would say that was myth, too, that a blind man’s other senses are not so heightened, but then Mr. Paul could tell you how high the cotton was from the rising dust, the far-off drone of crop dusters, or the lingering bite of cotton poison. He could tell if a club owner shorted him, too, by the feel of the fabric of the bills—people try to pull a lot of things on a blind man. “I told him once, ‘Mr. Paul, I hear you used to be pretty tough in a fight,” says Jerry Lee. “He told me, ‘Yeah, but I’ve tried to forget those days.’ They say he swung at where he thought they was. ‘But I don’t do that fightin’ no more,’ he told me. ‘Those days are gone. I just play, now.’”

Jerry Lee beat the drums and spelled Mr. Paul on piano when he played trumpet or accordion, and never missed a thing. He spent every minute he could with the older man, and over time he became protective of him. Once a man named O. Z. Maples led Paul to the bathroom and came back without him. “Where’s Paul?” Jerry Lee asked.

“I left him in there,” the man said.

Jerry Lee told him to go back and get him, now.

“Oh, he’s all right in there,” O. Z. said. “I asked him if he wanted me to turn the light on for him.”


“Gonna be kinda hard for me to play piano around this place, after hearing you,” he told Jerry Lee. “You tickle that ivory real nice, son.”

Once, in that odd calm after a blistering set, he said quietly: “You gonna be a big star, Mister Jerry.”

“He didn’t have a jealous bone in his body,” says Jerry Lee now. “He was my true friend.” He was a witness, night by night, as the boy’s talent tumbled into alignment, as old music was remade in those hot, heaving little clubs. It was like waiting for a storm to build, but slower, over months, then years, but he heard it coming. He never claimed he showed the boy a thing, but he always, always reminded the boy that big things were coming, ’cause he heard the lightning building and heard it better than anyone.