Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(47)

They acted like royalty, some of them, because they were: if you played the Ryman, you were somebody in country music, and the promoters treated it like a private club. You were not hired to play the Opry; you became part of its membership, as long as you behaved. They were high and mighty enough to kick even Hank Williams out for drunkenness, and when Elvis Presley auditioned for them a few years later, he was told by the Opry management to go back to Memphis and try to get back his old truck-driving job.

Jerry Lee had no invitation, not even a ticket, unless you count nerve. He walked the streets and sat down on every empty piano stool he saw and finally once talked his way backstage at the Ryman, but the men in big hats looked right through him, and the rhinestones hurt his eyes. “I never did like them rhinestones,” he says. The tall, thin men “looked like they had been there one hundred years, and maybe they had,” he says. “They kept telling me I needed to play the guitar. They said, ‘Hey, boy, you might be somebody if you’d learn to play the guitar.’ I said I can play the guitar, but I’m a piano man.”

“I did try to tone it down a little,” he says, but it was impossible in the end. “There’s just soul in a piano,” he says, and it just had to come out. In the end, he knew he had no place on a billing where Ernest Tubb could do “Walkin’ the Floor Over You” and get only polite applause.

“Elvis, at the Opry, didn’t even get any applause. Elvis wasn’t ready.”

Jerry Lee auditioned at RCA, thinking maybe the record men would have a more open mind.

“Son,” the man told him, “you need to pick a guitar.”

Jerry Lee was even beginning to hate the word, the way they said it. GIT-tar.

He took work at a club in downtown Nashville owned by Roy Hall, a piano player himself. At Hall’s club, Jerry Lee played for some of the Opry’s greats, who came there to unwind—people like Webb Pierce, Red Foley, and others—but none of them reached out to him or offered to help in any way. He played sometimes till dawn, till the people at the tables were too drunk to stand.

“Roy Acuff walked up to the bandstand one night. He told me, ‘Son, I don’t know who you are, or when, or how, but one day you’re gonna be a big star.’ And I said, ‘Well, here I am, wide open to it . . . but I could sure use a little help.’ But he just passed on by. Him and others said later on that didn’t happen, but it did. Said they sure didn’t remember me, but they did.”

The one Opry regular who was good to him was a piano player herself, a Nashville native named Del Wood—her real name was Adelaide Hazelwood, but that was too big a mouthful for most people—who had a big hit on both the country and pop charts with an instrumental called “Down Yonder,” which sold more than a million copies. She played, too, with a raw, thumping style, almost lusty, and she saw a kind of kinship in the young man from Louisiana. She did her best to help him, introduced him to some of the stars, told them he could play, but no one was willing to give the boy a try, even then. “She was the one who was good to me,” he says now. “She was a fine lady, and I never forgot that—and what a piano player.” He swore then that if he ever made it big, he would try to pay her back somehow.

“Nashville is good at country,” he says, thinking back to those days, trying to be charitable, “and my stuff went either way. But it was daylight and dark.” In the end, he came to see those rhinestone suits as hard, empty shells with no real life in them. He was making ten dollars a night at Hall’s bar then, and as soon as he saved up enough for a car, he bought a ’39 Ford and pointed it toward Concordia Parish. “Nawwwwww, never did like it much,” he says of Nashville now. “I did some good country records. Some I’m real proud of. But they were the kind of songs that Hank Williams might have made, or Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers was a straight-up man. . . . Hank Williams was a man.” They were flesh and blood, flawed and human, and that was what made them great, as much as any lyric, any melody, he believes. But Nashville was selling proper, well-behaved Middle Americans a myth of what country was.

When he got home, in a dark mood, he coaxed a few lines out of his memory and wrote himself a rare song.

The way is dark

The night is long

I don’t care if I never get home

I’m waitin’ at the end of the road



By the fall of ’55, when he was going on twenty, he was still playing five and six nights a week in clubs, raising a family on wadded-up one-dollar bills and a few fives and tens. But even then, he swears now, he knew. “I knew I was going to be the greatest thing. . . . I just needed a song.”

On the radio, he heard what that one perfect song could do to a musician’s life, how it could lift a man out of the dust itself.

“I think it was maybe about then. I went to get Daddy from work. . . . He was workin’ on Ferriday High School. A song come on the radio, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.’ Elvis. I said, ‘What do you think about that, Daddy? Looks like somebody done opened the door.’ And Daddy said, ‘Well, I hope they shut it quick.’ Daddy didn’t think much of it.”

But his son heard the promise in it, the promise in Elvis and maybe even himself.

He heard it elsewhere that year, too: In Fats Domino, the great New Orleans piano man, and in the magnificent screamer Little Richard, and in the first strains of the song that lifted Charles Edward Anderson Berry from club gigs to the lip of rock-and-roll stardom, to number 1 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues chart in ’55: “Oh, Maybellene, why can’t you be true . . . ?” In Berry, as with other great musicians he studied then, he heard what he could be, “heard it on the radio, and knew I could beat it.”