Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(51)
Elmo stood in the rising dust, thinking. From a distance, seeing the two men there in the field, their heads bowed, it might have looked like they were praying. After a while, they came up with the answer.
“We went out in the henhouse and we gathered eggs, and we saved ’em up, day by day, and it took us a while to do it, but we eventually gathered up thirty-nine dozen. We took ’em to town and sold ’em to Nelson’s Supermarket. And then we took that money and we headed to Memphis in a ’56 Ford.”
Jerry Lee spun the radio as they drove, looking for gold. As they passed into northern Mississippi, he found WHBQ from Memphis, found a young man named Dewey Phillips, who sounded wired on speed and certainly was, a kind of hillbilly hepcat who did not care what color the music was as long as it cooked. He played Hank Williams and Muddy Waters cheek by jowl, and Hank Snow next to Elmore James. He played Sister Rosetta Tharpe, picking on that white electric guitar and swinging her hips around, singing how “there’s strange things happenin’ every day.” Then Wynonie Harris did “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” the Soul Stirrers sang “Jesus Gave Me Water,” and Piano Red shouted, “If you can’t boogie, I’ll show you how.” And of course, he played Elvis, who stitched it all together, whose music was so far beyond category that Dewey had to ask him where he went to school so that everyone in segregated Memphis would pick up that he was a white boy who only sang colored. Dewey was sponsored by Champagne Velvet beer—“Yes, sir, CV for you and CV for me”—and yakked crazily even in the middle of the songs about a letter from his grandma, hollering, “Does anybody wanna buy a mule?” He exhorted musicians on the records to play faster, hotter, like they were sitting there in the studio with him, shouting “Awwwwww, sit on it, boy. If you can’t sit on it, play it,” to invisible piano players. You were nobody in Memphis music till Dewey Phillips played your records on the radio, and as Jerry Lee and Elmo neared the bright lights, he talked them in, frantically piecing together a patchwork quilt of blues, country, and gospel for an audience that had come to reject dull, bland music the way people in New Orleans would not eat bad food.
Jerry Lee looked out the window at the city and felt like a bird on a wire, felt like his old self. He could fly anywhere from here. “And I knew we didn’t sell them thirty-nine dozen for nothin’.”
“We got us a hotel, right close to Sun Studios,” he says. “The hotel had a sink in it, with running water. First time we’d been in a place like that.” They just stood for a minute and looked at it.
Before he started his own record company, Sam Phillips had been recording the voices of southern men and women, in moments of ecstasy and agony, for nearly a decade. He recorded big band music, but also church and funeral services, a thousand long good-byes: if you wanted your bereavement preserved, he would rig a microphone right in the eucalyptus at Idlewild Presbyterian and catch every sob. He would do the same with a big wedding in Chickasaw Gardens, an inauguration, or a speech to the Junior League, anything with sound. It was all part of his Memphis Recording Service, a little operation housed at 706 Union Avenue, hard against an upholstery shop.
His real calling, he would tell anyone who listened, was to record music—especially the voices of the blues singers of the Delta region, seasoned performers like John Estes and Howlin’ Wolf, and younger men like Junior Parker, Ike Turner, and others who would go on to mean something in the blues. In 1952, after a few of the recordings he made for other companies became solid regional hits, he launched his own label. He called it Sun Records, and turned on the big neon sign in his window, and let the world know he was open for business. He wore good, dark suits with good ties and a gold tie clip, and he had a thick, full head of dark hair and good teeth—a respectable-looking man, the kind who could sell you the shoes you came in with and leave you feeling grateful. But his love for music was a real, consuming passion, and the kind he loved the most did not even really exist yet, at least not exactly as he dreamed it.
Sam Phillips was self-made if ever anyone has been. Like many of the musicians he would record, black and white, his people worked the land—tenant farmers, in his case, near Florence, Alabama. He was a white man who loved black music, and had since he picked cotton beside his mama and daddy and listened to the music in the fields. He wanted to be a big-shot criminal lawyer, but when his daddy died during the Depression, it left his family hurting for money, so he went to work in a grocery store, then a funeral parlor, and finally as a disc jockey at WLAY in Muscle Shoals, spinning both white and black records, like Dewey Phillips, who was no relation but a kindred spirit. Later he landed in Memphis, at WREC, broadcasting shows from the swank Peabody Hotel, where big bands played dance music for some of the richest people in the South. Sam was exposed to all kinds of music—swing, gospel, hillbilly—but there was just something about that blues, man, that lit him up. He would say blues was about how hard life was but it was also about why people bothered to go on living, and that made it a kind of perfect form. He would say that if he could ever find a white singer with a black soul, he would conquer the world or get rich trying. What he was hoping for was rock and roll.
His Sun Records would become a portal for it, built on a bedrock of blues. People in rock and roll are always going on about the birth of this or that, but if you had walked into the little studio on Union Avenue on March 3, 1951, you would have heard history being laid down, heard what many music historians consider the first rock-and-roll record ever pressed.