Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(48)

But Chuck, Fats, Richard—even that new boy, Elvis—had what he needed.

“A hit.”


“I was running late that night.”

Things at home were not good, had never been, really. Jane was still throwing St. Nicholas at him every other night. She had a better arm than most people would have believed and a seemingly endless supply—he had not known there were that many Santa Clauses in the whole world—and they hurt a good bit if she caught him flush. She was also prone to go at him with a high-heeled shoe. But she could not keep him out of the clubs no matter what weapon she employed. He pulled into the sanctuary of the Wagon Wheel parking lot just as a mindless series of twangs and chirps spilled from the joint. The boys were coming back from a break, finding a chord, tuning up. Must be a new song, thought Jerry Lee.

The new music had a name now. It was burning up the airwaves in Memphis and even down here in Natchez, like fire leaping from treetop to treetop in a pine barren. The black man had been doing it for years, of course, but the harsh and irrefutable truth was, it took a little touch of hillbilly to make it slide down easy for most white audiences, like a chunk of busted-up peppermint in a glass of home brew. You fooled children that way, in the Deep South, to get them to take their cough medicine, and you could fool the whole world just that easy and give them their rock and roll.

It was about this time that Jerry Lee and Paul Whitehead came together in a new band with a Johnny Littlejohn, a slim, razor-sharp young man who played bass and worked days as a disc jockey at WNAT. People said he was a better disc jockey than he was a singer, but he bought his clothes at Lansky’s in Memphis, the same place Elvis shopped, and wore black-and-white, two-tone shoes. The girls loved it, the way he dressed, the way he carried himself, and Jerry Lee studied that, too. As he played the bass, he swung that thing around in a rhythmic arc, and acted like he was somebody. “Johnny Littlejohn was a good-lookin’ man, tall, dark, had his hair slicked back good,” says Jerry Lee. “He had a thing. I was jealous of him, a little bit. Had a nice wife, too.”

Jerry Lee was still searching for his last element. The other boy, the one from Tupelo, had found his, and now he lived on the air. He drove to work in a ’51 Ford, one hand on the radio dial, spinning, spinning, looking for Chuck Berry, for Little Richard going wild, for the Platters, Fats Domino, and he would find this boy Elvis on the colored stations, too, crossing over the other way. The white citizens’ councils would quake and fret and condemn it all as miscegenation, but in the clubs of Natchez, it was hardly any revolution at all; the crowds there had been digging juke music along with cowboy tunes since before the Korean War. Even under the white sheets—the Klan was big here on both sides of the Mississippi—you might catch some redneck peckerwood tapping his toe.


“I walked in the door,” says Jerry Lee, “just as they kicked it off.”

Paul Whitehead was playing that electrified upright like he was whacking a bell, on a tune that had all the subtleties of a dog bite.

“Man,” he said to himself, “I like that lick. I like it.”

Then Johnny Littlejohn jumped in.

Come on over, baby.

Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.



That quick, he knew.

“That’s my song.”

Yeah, I said come on over, baby.

Baby, you can’t go wrong.

We ain’t fakin’.

Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.



“I got to have that song.”

I said come on over, baby.

We got chicken in the barn.

Come on over, baby.

We got the bull by the horns.



Littlejohn was singing his heart out, because if you did not sing tough on this song, did not sing wild, it would sound silly, sound like a prissy man trying to act tough in a cowboy bar. The song—written at a fish camp on Lake Okeechobee, some say, in between milking rattlesnakes, drunk—required that. This was a song without a speck of nice in it.

Yeah, we ain’t fakin’.

Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.



The origin of the song is cloudy at best. Roy Hall, the Nashville musician and bar owner who briefly employed Jerry Lee, later said he wrote the song with a black musician named Dave “Curlee” Williams while they were in the Florida swamps milking poisonous snakes and drinking heavily, two things that do not usually mix well. But Williams said he wrote the song himself, leading some to wonder if Hall perhaps bought a piece of the song, as was common then.

Hall recorded the song for Decca—that record lists Williams alone as the songwriter—but it had never been a hit for him, nor for Big Maybelle, who cut the first version, with Quincy Jones leading the band, nor for anyone else who ever tried. But no matter its credits, it does seem to have been born in a state of blissful sorriness, a thing not blues and not hillbilly but with all the baser elements of both, not as raunchy as some dirty songs but maybe just raunchy enough to thrill people and still, if the preachers weren’t listening too closely, get played on the radio, trembling somewhere between glorious entertainment and a greased rail straight to hell.

Jerry Lee knew nothing about any of that, not yet, and if he had, he would not have cared even a little bit. He was already singing it in his head, his fingers already twitching in the air. His gaze was fixed on the stage, but from the corners of his eyes he could see the women start to sway and move, even the ones sitting down. “They didn’t even know what they were tappin’ up to,” he says. Then Littlejohn launched into the part that seemed taken straight from under the circus tent at a hootchie coo, from the strip clubs in downtown Atlanta, from the watered-down, two-drink minimum, broken backroom promises of Bourbon Street.