Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(44)

He played from late in the evening until two, three, even four in the morning, sometimes till the last drunk had tumbled to the floor. He never got tired, or at least his body never told his mind that it was running on fumes. The truck drivers tipped him with Benzedrine. “They’d give me a whole bag of ’em, if I’d play ’em a song. I’d flip one into my mouth and just keep on playin’,” he says, “and never even miss a lick.” And the crowd ate it up like peach ice cream.

It didn’t hurt that he was tall and handsome and had eyes like the sun shining through a jar of dark honey, and that he carried himself like the King of England. And then there was that hair. “That hair, it used to be just waves, just lay in waves,” said Doris Poole, who was born in ’34 and lived in Ferriday when Jerry Lee was a boy. “He looked so good.” And when it fell into his face, it made the women like him some good bit better, so of course he shook it and made it do that right off.

He did not have to act dangerous; he was. He did not have to act a little bit crazy; he was. He did not have to act like he would steal your wives and daughters; he would, in front of you, because he had a good taste for it now and it was like trying to keep a bull out of the dairy lot when the fence was down. He might have been a little rough, a little coarse, but he could get smooth if he ever wanted to, and the smooth guys would never have the grit and the menace of Jerry Lee. And no matter how many women say to their husbands and other nice men that they want no part of such a man, the truth is . . . well, the truth.

He was getting a name, a persona, in the flat country and the piney woods. “I went up and played the Atlas Bar in Monroe. They let me play a few tunes, put a jar up there for tips. Before I knew it, I was making two hundred dollars a week, playing my piano, singing my songs.” But the good money never lasted. Since the days when he’d played the talent shows and car lots and played on the back of his daddy’s truck, people had been talking about how he would hit it big someday—just never the right people. Someday seemed to stretch on forever, like those endless brown fields that surrounded him. To sustain this life—and, more important, to survive it and push beyond it—he knew he had to have a record, and if it was to carry him out of here, it had to be a big one. “I knew once I had my record, I was off to the races . . . knew there wouldn’t be stoppin’ me. It all tied together. I noticed the girls right off, knew they liked my playin’ and singin’, knew they liked me . . . that they looked at me and they saw something different.” But the record men up north hadn’t yet noticed, did not yet seem to care.

This life was not what Mamie had dreamed of for their son. But she and Elmo came to see him, and dreamed still.

“You sweat too much,” Mamie told him.

Well, let me tell ya somethin’—what I’m talkin’ ’bout.



When Elmo walked into the smoke-filled room the first time, he knew that he was home, here with the music and the dancing and the pretty women and the smell of legal whiskey in the air.

I’ll bet my bottom dollar, ain’t a cherry in this house.



Mamie stood with her purse in front of her like a shield.

“Why you sweatin’ so much?” his mama asked.

She had never refused him anything, but this. . .

“You gonna have a heart attack,” she warned.

Mamie worried, yes, but she also knew that the world is hard and it’s harder if you’re broke, so she told him she was with him, as she would always be with him, and made sure he had an ironed shirt. The young girls, these new brides, forgot such as that sometimes. If you’re going to toil in Sodom, be neat about it.


In ’53, on a late-night trip to Natchez radio station WNAT, Jerry Lee met another lovely brunette—he was developing a taste for them—named Jane Mitcham, and when a protesting boyfriend told him to “Hold on now, hoss, that’s my girlfriend,” he answered with a line he would use all his life.

“Naw,” Jerry Lee said, “she used to be your girlfriend.”

Jane was seventeen and different. She was not a trembling flower. She would also soon be pregnant. Jerry Lee told her he would like to do the right thing, but he was still married to Dorothy, who was currently residing in Monroe. Jane went home to Natchez and told her family about her situation and about Jerry Lee’s refusal to wed. Not long after that, the male members of Jane’s family showed up in Ferriday with horsewhips and pistols and a duck gun. Jerry Lee did not think much of the marriage law, but he did not think much of threatening relatives either. He downplays any actual danger to his person, but people here still say, only half joking, that it all came down to whether the boy wanted to be a bigamist or a dead man. Not all of Jane’s family wanted her to marry; some just wanted him to be dead, and it is believed his Uncle Lee Calhoun stepped in to negotiate. The result was that Jerry Lee did not die but instead got two wives, though because one of those wives was in far-off Monroe, this was acceptable. He married Jane two weeks before he was divorced from Dorothy. “I was bad to get married,” he says. “Never let it be said that Jerry Lee Lewis turned a lady down.” But Jerry Lee secretly knew he had won. He had lied on his first marriage license, claiming to be a twenty-year-old farmer, and his second was null and void because of the preexisting marriage. “So, see, if you think about it, I ain’t never really been married,” he says, at least to that point.