Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(53)

There’s a storm brewin’ in this heart of mine



His daddy closed his eyes.

He’s dreamed of this, of doing what I’m doing, Jerry Lee thought.

“I just took one take on it, just playin’ around, you know.” He says now that he was never nervous about playing in the studio in front of the engineer, but he was nervous playing in front of Elmo. “I was a little afraid Daddy would say, right in the middle, ‘You missed a minor chord there, son.’ But I played it perfect, and I made that song my own.”

This ain’t no crazy dream, I know that it’s real

You’re someone else’s love now, you’re not mine



He hit the last key and looked up. “And all Daddy said was, ‘Well, we got to go pretty quick.’”

But not before Clement made him a promise: “Well, I’ll see, Jerry Lee, that he hears it.”

Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he returned.

“Who is this cat?” Phillips said. “Get him down here.”


“It was about then that J. W. Brown walked up to me down in Ferriday and introduced himself as my cousin,” says Jerry Lee, who did not know the man that well. J. W. was the child of Elmo’s sister, Jane, but had not grown up with Jerry Lee and the Ferriday cousins. He would later say that Jane had been forced to marry an outsider, a man from Franklin Parish named Henry Brown, because the world had temporarily run out of eligible Gilleys and Swaggarts.

J. W. used to work days as a lineman for the electric company, but he’d recently been shocked off a tall pole by a naked wire, and he was in no hurry to handle blue lightning again. Instead he thought he would like to try his hand at being a musician, which is why he came looking for Jerry Lee. He was pushing thirty, with a wife and two children at home in Coro Lake, in northern Mississippi, but he had tried the music business once before and had never gotten that sweet promise out of his mouth. In the early 1950s, he’d spent some time picking guitar with the owner of a bar in Mangham named Big Red. Once, while they were onstage, a boy with no etiquette whatsoever walked up to the jukebox and punched in a song. Red shot his own jukebox with a .45, and the boy went back and quietly finished his beer.

Figuring he needed a better ending for his musical story than that, J. W. ordered a Silvertone guitar from Sears and Roebuck and went looking for the cousin he had heard so much about. His timing was dead-on. Jerry Lee was waiting for Sam Phillips to call him back to Memphis anyway. “J. W. said, ‘You got to come to my house,’” and invited Jerry Lee to stay with him and his family at Coro Lake, where he could be close to 706 Union Avenue and close to his dreams. He had seen the boy play piano like a crazy genius on the stage and in church, and in a world of strummers and pretenders who could sing through their nose and even shake their leg a little bit, Cousin Jerry Lee seemed something else entirely. He took Jerry Lee and introduced him to his wife, Lois, and son, Rusty, who was just a toddler then, and to his lovely twelve-year-old daughter, Myra. It was not, as some have said, love at first sight. “I did notice,” Jerry Lee says now, “that she wadn’t no kid.” Jerry Lee bunked on the couch, and with his pretty twelve-year-old cousin flouncing around, prepared to conquer the world.


His first real recording session—the first one with an eye toward cutting a real record—came on November 14, 1956. He was playing with true recording professionals, with drummer J. M. “Jimmy” Van Eaton and guitarist Roland Janes, two musicians who would be as much a part of Sun in its early days as the ugly green paint and nicotine-stained acoustic tiles and the slapback echo that appeared, almost like a ghost, on the studio’s early records.

Janes and Van Eaton never went on to illustrious careers, at least as far as money and marquees go, but they are synonymous with Sun and with Memphis music and so are at the very nut of rock and roll. They were extraordinary musicians; people who really love the music can pick their styles out of the crowds of lesser ones who played before and after. Not just anyone could keep up with Jerry Lee Lewis; he has kicked musicians off the stage who could not stay with his tempo, could not blend in with his sound. Roland and Jimmy did that and more.

Janes was a marine during the Korean war, the son of a Pentecostal preacher and lumberman from Clay County, Arkansas. He could play mountain mandolin and had grown up with gospel; he had a light, sinuous tone that made itself known around the edges of a song just as much as it did during one of his indelible solos. He would go on to be an engineer and producer and part of the Memphis sound for another fifty years. Sometimes when people realized that the man they were talking to had been the guitarist on those great early hits, they would hand him a guitar and ask to hear him play. He would tell them simply, they done had. Jerry Lee gives him only the highest praise you can give a guitar man: “He could pick.”

Van Eaton was just a kid then, but like Janes he would leave his mark on an entire genre. His beat was subtler that that of most of the early rock-and-roll drummers, influenced by swing, adding crisp punctuation to the swampy Sun sound. He had grown up with Dewey Phillips and Memphis radio, and in the ’50s he became the creative drummer in Memphis, as Jerry Lee would say.

Jerry Lee respected both men, and enjoyed playing with them, but he would not form the bonds with them that he later would with his road bands, who fought drunks with him and chased women with him and survived each trip as though it was some kind of tour of duty. Roland and Jimmy tried that, but not for long. “They played with me just a very little bit. . . . I don’t think they liked being away from their spouses,” he says, and laughs. “We had a little problem with that.” (Van Eaton would say he did not mind jumping off a roof into a swimming pool now and then, but that touring with Jerry Lee was downright life-threatening.)