Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(43)

It is romantic to believe that Mr. Paul really did somehow foresee it all, really did see Jerry Lee’s future and the future of rock and roll entwined. Jerry Lee only knows what he was told. Mr. Paul told the boy he was a natural-born blues crier and a genuine honky-tonk man, and that was just the start of things. He said he would have loved to have seen him, just once, seen that golden hair and ferocious face the people talked about, the women crowded up close, to touch. But in a way he did see it, every time Jerry Lee cut loose with the blues and out poured something raw and wild.

But it was his piano that moved Paul Whitehead the most. He knew the boy had been playing in front of crowds since he was nine, and there was a lot of church in the boy’s music still; some bar owners did not want a piano player whose songs made your wedding ring glow hot on your hand as you danced with a waitress. Mr. Paul heard the genius in it and told the boy to “go ’head on, son.” Most right-handed piano men really just played one-handed, keeping rhythm with the left hand while finding the melody with the right, but Jerry Lee had mastered that kid stuff on a thousand late nights on his old upright and moved on to something different. His left hand was sure and deft, and his right hand was controlled chaos, wildly searching for new sounds across the keys till it almost seemed he could play two melodies at once, like there was someone or something else there beside him on that piano bench, something spooky. To Mr. Paul, who was pretty good himself, who knew the limits of the instrument, it was lovely. He knew Beethoven and Brahms, and three-fingered juke men, and every piano man living or dead who ever drifted down from an antenna, and in that boy’s piano he heard it all and none of it. The boy was a species unto himself, and he was still learning.


By summer of ’52, Jerry Lee had given up on the straight world completely. He had tried manual labor again, tried to shovel gravel and push a wheelbarrow in Ferriday. “I told the boss man, Mr. Durant, to put me on the sand pile or on the rock pile. . . . I was just a kid, trying to pour that cement, pushing them wheelbarrows beside them big men. Then I told Mr. Durant I didn’t want to do that no more. He told me, ‘Well, if you ain’t gonna be no bull, you shouldn’t have bellowed.’ I told him, ‘Well, you won’t see me no more around here,’ and they cut me my check for half a day’s work—half a day—and I went to the house.”

He cast around for anything he could. “I tried construction, tried driving a truck, tried being a carpenter’s helper . . . didn’t last at that too long.” The bald, hard truth is, the things a body was supposed to do and expected to do and required to do in this life, if you were anybody else in this universe besides him, had never lined up exactly tongue-in-groove with the way he went about living. The thing is, he tried, till he did not try anymore. His daddy had been a great carpenter and fine farmer, yet he dreamed the whole time of singing “Mexicali Rose” at the Grand Ole Opry. Jerry Lee saw no reason to labor in a long life of that, on a treadmill of hoping, dreaming, wanting, and not to cut right to the dream. “I couldn’t,” he says.

The churches of home had acknowledged and welcomed his gift. But the churches and revivals and camp meetings did not pay well; mostly did not pay at all. He was like a tick on a leather sofa; it feels like home, but there just isn’t much profit in it. His cousin Jimmy had devoted himself full-time to the Lord. He had seen a red-eyed demon outside his trailer and was flung into the ministry like a human cannonball, but Jerry Lee was not called that way.

That pretty much left the beer joints. Week after week, six days a week, he played with bands that tore up the night, serenading the fallen, the drunken, and the lonely, and a growing number of people who were just on fire with this new music, this music that did not even have a name. “Singing and piano playing . . . and women. That’s all I ever needed,” he says. Some nights, some glorious nights, he made a hundred, even two hundred, from the tip jar, but most nights he made walking-around money, hamburger money, and even on the fattest nights, he was still stuck fast in small time.

He remembers, on one long-ago gig, an empty tip jar.

“Not a resounding success,” said his beloved Aunt Stella, worried for the boy.

“Not resounding,” Jerry Lee said.

But even as a boy he knew, if you were ever going to be hit by lightning, you had to stand under a tree. The Wagon Wheel and places like it scattered around the South were where the music was in great disturbance, right here in his own dirt. Why, Memphis itself was a fast car ride away, and Memphis was where the whole world was changing, even if it seemed a distant universe. In the small clubs, people wanted that hillbilly music, and the old, raw, bloody blues, and they wanted it shouted loud, to make the hot divorcée in the corner forget her sorry husband and shake something. Jerry Lee was born to do it. He had heard it all before, had heard it all at Haney’s, and he was out from under the table now. “Wasn’t nobody gonna throw me out.”

She roll her belly

Like she roll her biscuit dough



But instead of parroting a black bluesman, he almost yodeled on the higher, bleaker notes, in a rolling, keening exultation of pain and suffering and lust, something from the other side of town or way out in the lonesome pines, but a place as rough, hard, and mean. His people pulled the cotton sack, too, and walked a chain gang, and sat in the hot dark of the federal prison in New Orleans. To understand it, to see the way it was, you have to think of it in the box it came in, the smoke and cave dark, for discretion, where a hundred people jammed jaw to jaw to medicate themselves, overalls and bow ties and strapless dresses lined up at the bar, all there to fight and cuss and rave and cheat, and some to just get lost in the liquor and the rhythms for a few hours; no one was asking for anything more. But they got Paul, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his benign face unchanging, the accordion around his neck and the trumpet at his lips and the fiddle at his right hand, and no one would know, as he sipped his milk, if it was a good day or the deepest, darkest night of his soul. And they got Jerry Lee, whip thin, hair in his eyes, intent on the music, the keyboard. He was not the showman then he would become in just a few years. The hard shell of the Pentecostals had not shattered, but it was beginning to vibrate, and if you listened close enough you could hear it crack. More and more he was replacing Mr. Paul on piano now, and he played rough with it and howled the blues. But for now, he did it all sitting down. Like Mr. Paul, he was unconcerned with the louts and loud talkers, the knife fighters and dustups and drunken husbands. “People was always pullin’ guns and knives,” he says. “Didn’t amount to nothin’ . . . I carried a pistol myself,” in case a blind-drunk farm boy got crazy over his girlfriend’s wandering gaze.