Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(57)

Well, Lordy, I shall not be

(I shall not be moved)

I shall not be

(Well, I shall not be—mmmm . . .)

Just like a tree that’s growing in the meadow

(down by the water!)

I shall not be moved

(Yeeeeahhhh . . .)



Jerry Lee was not bashful or deferential; by the end of the song he had taken the lead, exuberant with the thrill of the moment. They went on to do “Just a Little Talk with Jesus,” and “Walk That Lonesome Valley,” and “Farther Along.” The reporter, Johnson, who had failed to notice Phillips and Clement changing the thirty-minute tape in the control room, expressed the obvious: “If Sam Phillips had been on his toes,” he wrote, “he’d have turned the recorder on when that very unrehearsed but talented bunch got to cutting up. That quartet could sell a million,” and that is how Elvis’s visit came to be known as the Million Dollar Quartet session.

In one of the breaks between songs, Johnson asked Elvis what he thought of Jerry Lee.

“That boy can go,” Elvis replied. “I think he has a great future ahead of him. He has a different style, and the way he plays piano just gets inside me.”

“He was nice to me,” says Jerry Lee now. “I was impressed.”

Word trickled out onto Union Avenue that something special was going on at Sun, and people came by all afternoon, joining in, fading out. After an hour or so, Johnny Cash left to go shopping with his wife, without ever getting on tape, and Carl drifted away a little later.

Soon it was just him and Elvis there on the piano bench, “singing all them songs we had sung as little boys,” even the ones they’d learned from the picture show, when Gene Autry was the biggest thing around. Jerry Lee would play a memory, and Elvis would join in or just listen:

You’re the only star in my blue heaven,

And you’re shining just for me.



“That’s why I hate to get started in these jam sessions,” Elvis told Jerry Lee. “I’m always the last to leave.”

Jerry Lee was in no hurry either. He ran through both sides of his first record, “Crazy Arms” and “End of the Road,” and improvised a little boogie that someone would later label “Black Bottom Stomp,” though they could have called it anything and been right.

“Jerry Lee, it was good to have met you,” Elvis finally told him. “You got to come out to the house.”

Jerry said he would do that, and for just a second the two young men just looked at each other. Maybe it was nothing, but Jerry Lee saw the future in it, or at least what might come to be. “Sometimes I think he was a little afraid of me,” says Jerry Lee. “I mean, he was number one. He was sitting right in the throne I was headed for. And I thought, I might have to go through him. I think he knew that, somehow. And I did a pretty good job going through him.”

It would have been against his nature to walk away from that day feeling any other way.

“I’m a Lewis,” he said, repeating a mantra he returns to often, “and if you want something, you take it. You can ask for it first, but you take it.”


“It was comin’ together,” says Jerry Lee. “I sang in the clubs and cut my records. I cut ’em like I felt ’em. And it was all comin’ together the way it was supposed to. There was some hard work still I had to do. Sure I did. But I think all of ’em—Beethoven, and Brahms, and all of ’em—felt it when it was comin’ together.”

Billboard, in its reviews of new country music, seemed to agree, calling his new “Crazy Arms” single “exceptionally strong” and “flavor-packed,” with “a powerful feeling for country blues.” The song he wrote himself, “End of the Road,” was “another honey, right in the rhythm groove and abetted by the same piano beat. Distinctly smart wax.” It is a senseless thing to ask him if he is ever surprised by any of it. He finds such a thing to be a questioning of his abilities, and mildly insulting. “Yeah, I thought it would happen. I think I always knew it would happen. That was my goal, to be on top of the world.”

The day the Billboard review came out, just before Christmas, Jerry Lee sauntered over to Sun to see Sam Phillips. He had a good car, and some good rock-and-roll clothes to play in, but no big money yet. He had no intention of letting another Christmas pass him by as a poor man. “I just wanted to show my family a nice Christmas,” he says.

“Sally,” he told the secretary, “I need to talk to Sam.”

“What about?” she asked.

“I need to borrow three hundred dollars,” he said.

“No, no,” she said. “Don’t do that. He’ll have a heart attack.”

“Sam was tight as bark on a tree,” recalls Jerry Lee.

He finally cornered the man in his office. “I think you can afford to loan me three hundred dollars,” he told him, “so I can go home for Christmas.”

Phillips looked at him a moment and nodded his head. He would later say he understood Jerry Lee better than most people. But he certainly knew, if you promise a boy like Jerry Lee you are going to make him a star, you had better do it quickly or at least be willing to advance him $300 on the future you predicted. “Sam knew,” says Jerry Lee. “He knew I was a money-making venture.”