Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(45)

Jane believed she was married, and she expected Jerry Lee to act like he was, too. In the span of a year, Jerry Lee went from a preacher-in-training who was acting single to a man with a baby on the way and a wife who hollered at him and could curse like a man and who insisted he give up his dreams and those Natchez clubs and go make a living. They fought, and fought hard and ugly. “Man, Jane could fight. She hit like a man. She knocked me down the stairs, one time.”

They moved into a garage apartment on Louisiana Avenue, and people would marvel at the hail of projectiles that would follow Jerry Lee as he emerged, hollering, from the apartment door, and at how the projectiles—some of which looked like Santa Claus figurines—rained down on him as he descended the steps and flew in great arcs at him as he slid behind the wheel of his car or jumped into the car of someone giving him a ride to work, cars that sometimes barely slowed down because you never knew when something heavy would come winging out of the dark.

“She loved them Santa Claus figurines,” says Jerry Lee, but not as much as she hated him, in the moment.

Once he was getting into his car when a bottle shattered against the windshield.

“You gonna regret you did that,” he hollered at her, but she didn’t.

“That woman was hard on a windshield,” he says.

He half wished things would calm down, half wished they wouldn’t.

“We fought every night. Why? Because it was somethin’ to do.”

They had almost no money. He rode to work in a 1940 Plymouth, “six cylinders, but only hittin’ on five. Used oil. Used a lot of oil.” He drove it till it slung a rod, then found another car, another windshield for Jane to go at with a claw hammer or a high-heeled shoe.

“It was like living in the Twilight Zone,” he says.

But the storm abated in November 1953, when Jerry Lee Lewis Jr. was born. Jerry Lee held him and just looked at him for a long time, and saw his own face. He was born into a people who didn’t believe a family had to be perfect. Families fought, men drank, women hollered, and in the middle of it all, babies got born and held and marveled over, and on and on it went, until the grave. “I was raised to believe it, that if a man ain’t got a family, then he ain’t got nothin’.” So he held his son, between storms. “I loved my boy. He was the apple of my eye. So you see, somethin’ good came out of all that.”


Trying to get fatter and steadier paychecks, he drove up to Shreveport to audition for the Louisiana Hayride, which had given Hank Williams his launching pad. Jerry Lee auditioned for Slim Whitman, who had a villain’s pencil-thin mustache straight out of a Saturday matinee, and a yodel so high that Hollywood would one day use it in the spaceman parody Mars Attacks! as a weapon that could knock spaceships from the sky. Jerry Lee met Whitman at KWKH Studios and recorded two sides—a Hank Snow song, “It Don’t Hurt Anymore,” and “If I Ever Needed You (I Need You Now),” a song recorded by Joni James. No matter what happened next, he was living one of his dreams, recording a song with genuine country-music stars looking at him through the glass. Elvis Presley had worked on the Hayride, says Jerry Lee, “so I thought I had a chance.” But he let a little too much boogie-woogie creep into his piano playing, and the engineers and Slim Whitman rolled their eyes.

“They looked at me like I was crazy,” Jerry Lee says.

Slim sidled over.

“Well,” he said, “I just don’t think we can use a piano player.”

The Hayride’s piano player was Floyd Cramer, who would become one of the most famous pure instrumentalists in country music and whose elegant “Last Date” would become a romantic standard.

Jerry Lee told him he would be as close as Ferriday if they needed him.

“Don’t call us,” Whitman told him. “We’ll call you.”


On New Year’s Eve 1952, Hank Williams slept in the backseat of a powder-blue Cadillac, riding through the rain and sleet of Alabama and Tennessee, sick and weak, on his way to holiday shows in Ohio and West Virginia. He would have said to hell with all of it if they had not been big sellouts, and if the promoters had not made him sign a thousand-dollar penalty clause. Rotten weather had grounded his plane, so he hired a college student from Alabama Polytechnic for four hundred dollars to drive him up from Montgomery, about six hundred miles. He was mildly drunk from a pint of whiskey, and vaguely sick, and exhausted; the boy had to stop on the road to get Hank a couple of shots, B6 and B12 laced with morphine. They had stopped off at the old Redmont Hotel in Birmingham to get a good night’s rest, but two lovely fans of Hank’s had made it impossible to get any sleep, so he had just tried to eat a few bites of food and take a little nap. But he got sick and fell on the floor. He’d been delivered to the Cadillac in a wheelchair, and now, in the big backseat, he tried to rest. He finally drifted off to sleep, and the miles stretched ahead. The West Virginia show had been canceled, but the Canton sellout was still on, and there might be time to make it, if the weather allowed. Outside Bristol, Tennessee, the boy at the wheel noticed that Hank’s blanket had slipped partly off him, and he reached back with one hand to cover him. He touched Hank’s hand, and it was ice cold. He could not even tell the police where Hank Williams died, for sure, as if they were all living out some song Hank wrote, like that one about the lost highway.

In Canton, in the packed auditorium, the announcer stepped to the microphone. “This morning,” he said, “on the way to Canton to do this show, Hank Williams died in his car.” Some people laughed, thinking it might be a joke, since Hank had used up every excuse for a no-show but this one. “This is no joke, ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said. “Hank Williams is dead.” People began to cry, and the man working the spotlight threw a yellow circle of light on the stage, where Hank would have stood. Don Helms, Hank’s friend and steel guitar player, started to play, and the audience sang his words.