Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(46)

I saw the light, I saw the light,

No more darkness, no more night.



Even as a raw boy, Jerry Lee enjoyed the notion of the troubadour, always liked it, the idea of a man just traveling, talking poetry, singing songs. He did not know the origins of the word or the history of the composers and poets who flourished in the High Middle Ages and spread throughout Europe before fading out about the time of the Black Death. But he knew it meant a singer of songs and a wandering man, and Hank Williams was that, just that, and the fact that he traveled in a Cadillac and was born in Mount Olive, Alabama, ought not to make him any less of one, and if Hank was a troubadour, then young Jerry Lee was a troubadour, too. Hank Williams was twenty-nine years old when he died, but look what he did, look at all the people he touched in that life, says Jerry Lee. He and his daddy would have driven to Texas, to Tennessee, anywhere, to see him sing, if they had only known, but they figured, with such a young man, even a tragic young man, there was time. Now suddenly there was a dull, empty place on the radio, even when someone else was trying to sing, a dead place, the way it gets when you drive through the tunnel over in Mobile or down in a holler so deep the airwaves just fly over your head.

Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine

And a woman’s lies make a life like mine.



“I would have liked to have met the man,” he says, maybe even showed him what he had done with his songs, especially with his version of the great, heartbreaking “You Win Again.” He got a gold record later for that Hank Williams song. “I changed it up, some,” he says, “but I think he would have liked it.” Many years after the man’s death, he would place a simple black-and-white photograph of Hank Williams on his dresser, the frame draped in a black ribbon, and the thin man has remained there throughout the years, looking down on him. Sometimes he likes to think Mr. Williams somehow knows of his great respect for him, a respect he has granted to so few, and that Mr. Williams knows that he is still here, carrying on his music, music as good as maybe there ever has been. “It’s nice,” he says, “to think that. You see, you can’t fake feelin’. Hank Williams delivered a sermon in a song, and nobody else could do that, nobody else could touch it. He was like a preacher, that way. He could make you glad, and he could make you cry. I would have liked to have seen him. I hate that I didn’t.”


Turned down, turned away, and his hero dead, he arrived back in Black River and went back to work at the Wagon Wheel. He and the blind man played into the night, sometimes into the dawn. All his life, he would be cast as a wild creature careening from one crisis to the next, succeeding on raw talent and surviving on gall and guts and luck, with a dose of what country people called the “just don’t cares,” and by God that was just about right, wasn’t it? Life outside the clubs had always been not just a runaway train but a runaway train hauling dynamite on fire on a hairpin curve. But as hopeless as it seemed even inside the clubs, as dead-end dangerous, he was creating his sound and his moves and his look and his thing, and even when he stumbled out the door into the rising sun, he knew someday people would buy his records instead of trying to charge him three dollars to record one, the way studio men in Memphis did with other dreamers. The Lewises did not let anything run over them, and certainly not fate or destiny or any other sissy-sounding thing, not the Yankee War that took their gilded past or the federal men who locked his male relatives away in the dark heart of the Depression when all they were trying to do was make a dollar selling liquor. “I didn’t give up hope, not ever,” he says, his chin in the air. “I wasn’t raised that way.” How could it begin bright and shining, with talk of miracles, of prodigy, and get lost somehow in a whiskey-and-Benzedrine blur in a mean little beer joint on Highway 61?

He told his mama it was just a matter of time, and when he hit it big, he would buy her a new house with hot and cold running water and a television set, and buy Elmo a farm, and buy them both Cadillacs and Lincolns till there wasn’t room to park them in the yard, and she would never have to worry about money again, as she had worried about it almost every day of her life. It would be music that did it, or nothing. “I’m gonna enjoy this ride,” he told himself. “No use in even going, if you don’t enjoy the ride.” He had seen what life did to men who didn’t. He saw them, fresh-scrubbed and upstanding on the outside but dead inside, like an old cornstalk or a burned sugarcane field. “I’m not much on being careful,” he says. “I don’t even know what that means. When I was a little boy, Daddy would say, ‘Be careful, son, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll try.’”


It is hard, in talking with him now, to elicit any admission of weakness, even disappointment; every crushing setback was a stubbed toe, a pothole, little more. “I don’t know how to quit,” he says, in a low growl. If the Louisiana Hayride would not have him, if its promoters had so little vision, he would reach even higher, further. If he was too edgy for Slim Whitman, then he would go to the mountaintop. He scraped together some traveling money and drove to Nashville.

By the 1950s, Music City had been country music’s holy grail a decade or more, a place where countless country boys and girls had seen their dreams of stardom come apart outside the cold red bricks of the Ryman Auditorium, home since 1943 to the most vaunted country music attraction in the city of Nashville and therefore in the entire world. The Grand Ole Opry had been begun in 1925 by radio station WSM, as the WSM Barn Dance, mostly as a venue for hillbilly pickers, cloggers, old-time fiddlers, and a kind of cornpone slapstick, vaudeville in overalls. It featured such musical sophisticates as the Gully Jumpers, Fruit Jar Drinkers, Binkley Brothers’ Dixie Clodhoppers, Possum Hunters, and a sour, hawk-faced man in a white Stetson and business suit named Bill Monroe, and people throughout the land loved it. In the years to come, it would make stars of Monroe, Roy Acuff, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, and later Patsy Cline. Minnie Pearl, the sales tag from her atrocious hat dangling in front of her face, came onstage with a raucous “Howdeeee!” She told one story a thousand times, about kin who picked up a still-hot horseshoe and dropped it quick, and when asked if it was hot replied, “No . . . jes’ don’t take me long to look at a horseshoe.” Grandpa Jones played the banjo in hip waders. The featured singers sported hand-tooled cowboy boots, big hats, and glittery suits emblazoned with rhinestone cactus and wagon wheels.