Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(49)

Well, I said shake, baby, shake.



“It was meant for me,” says Jerry Lee. “It was written for me.”

I said shake, baby, shake now.



He did not have to write the lyrics down. The ones he forgot, he replaced with others he just made up. It wasn’t Tennyson. But the rhythm, the feel, bored into him.

“It was stamped on my mind, right then.”

I said shake it, baby, shake it.



“No, it was burned,” he says.

We ain’t fakin’.

Whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on.



It ended in a roar.

He walked up to the bandstand, like a boy with a stolen comic book stuffed down his pants.

“You a little bit late, ain’t you?” said Littlejohn, when he approached the stage.

“No,” Jerry Lee said, “I’m right on time.”


“And I took that song home with me.”

It played through his pillow, and hummed in his ear.

The next night, he asked—no, he insisted—that Littlejohn let him sing it.

He knew every word, every gesture the singer had made.

“I done it just like Johnny done it,” he said. “Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.”

Mr. Paul moved to his squeezebox, without ego, just changing gears.

Come on over, baby.



But it was not the same. He rewrote the lyrics in his head as he went along and felt like shouting them, and was shouting before he was through, till it was no longer Curlee Williams’s song or Roy Hall’s song or Johnny Littlejohn’s song but his, just his. It was stronger, rawer, more dangerous. There was a buck-naked joy in it as he pumped the piano hard from the first lick, beat it sore, and the crowd knew it.

But mostly, of course, Jerry Lee noticed the women, moving in their seats at the tables, gyrating at the bar. “They looked at me different, and I looked at them different,” he says, “than I ever had before.” They pushed up to that rickety rail and heaved and squirmed and “just moved, man,” moved everything but their eyes. He can’t really explain it, even now, but they just looked different. “They looked better.”

They did not all look back at him in exactly the same way—that only happens in the movies and the funny papers and maybe in some really good dreams—but the ones who crowded to the front of that little stage, right up to that deadly coil of extension cords, did. They left their men standing open-fisted, and their eyes drilled at him, offered him everything. “They took their dresses in their hands, and swung them around,” like they wanted to do more, needed to do more, right then and there. “And I knew,” he says now, “I was doing somethin’ different.”

It was a dancing song, and the women who didn’t crowd the stage dragged their men out on the floor with them—drillers and wrench slingers and insurance men, men who thought dancing was a Texas two-step or a sock hop or a vague, grandma-haunted memory of a Virginia reel. Now they just hung onto their partners’ hips with both hands, and if they had possessed any sense, they would have seen that the blond-haired boy was doing them a favor.

The song even had a little talking part in the middle, the way these boys played it, a place where the singer could cheer the dancers on; it was the kind of thing piano players had been doing since Pine Top Smith made the very first boogie-woogie record in 1928. But in Jerry Lee’s hands it became something else entirely.

“Johnnie Littlejohn did a little bit of the talkin’ part, and that’s where I picked it up. But I redone it. Rewrote it all,” in his head.

“Easy now,” he told the boys, lowering his hand.

Shake it! Ahhhhhhhh, shake it, babe!

Yeah, shake it one time for me.



“I saw my Aunt Eva out there dancin’ with some young man, so I knew she was gettin’ on with it.”

Now let’s get real low one time.

Shake, baby, shake.

Shake, baby, shake.



Then he slowly raised one hand up high, where he and the crowd could see it.

All you got to do is stand in one spot



He pointed one finger and rotated it in the air.

And wiggle it around just a little bit.

That’s when you got something.



The young girls screamed.

He had heard them scream during a raw, nasty blues number, but not like that.

The boys and the husbands, some of them, got to lookin’ mean.

He liked that, too.

“It was wonderful.”

Now’s let’s go one time. . . .



Mr. Paul pumped his squeezebox, and he knew.

It was the beginning and the end of everything.


Jerry Lee left the Natchez clubs not long after that night. He did not take that song right then and ride it like a rocket, though that would have made a fine movie or a very fine lie. Instead, he tucked it away in his vast catalog of songs, the way a gambler slides a jack or a queen up his sleeve to pull out when he needed it, when the time seemed right, or when he was down to his last scrap of luck. But he could feel it. He knew he had his missing piece. “I knew exactly what it would be,” he says, fifty-seven years after that night. “I knew it was on its way to the moon,” and someday he would ride it into the stars. It may sound like fiction, but he knew it was one of those forever songs, knew that someone a hundred years from now would pluck it off a wireless signal or a moonbeam, shout “Shake it, baby, shake it,” and dance in their socks.