Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(58)

With that piddling amount of money, Sam Phillips bought a little patience from a consummately impatient man, not just then but for years and years to come. In that moment, $300 meant the world to Jerry Lee. He could take it and show his mama and daddy and his people that he had hit the big time at last. The money to come, checks with so many zeroes he could barely comprehend, would, in an odd sort of way, mean less.

He drove home the hero, with Dewey Phillips shouting in his ear and spinning his record.

“Did I turn it up?” he says. “Of course I did.”

The car rode low on its springs down 61, from all that Christmas shopping. “I spent one hundred and fifty dollars just on groceries, on turkeys, on all kinds of stuff. I bought presents. I bought the girls something pretty. I bought Daddy something, and Mama. Mama was glad to see me.” The family drew names to buy each other presents, but it was rock-and-roll money that bought them. His mama took a breath, for the first time in a long time where her boy was concerned. He was somebody, and he had proved it. He was earning a living—not in a tabernacle, but not in Sodom, either—and so she took a breath. She could live with auditoriums, with VFWs, and American Legions, much easier than she could live with beer joints and honky-tonks. Her boy had sung with Elvis, and showed him how to play a piano, properly.

His daddy shook his hand and held it.

“I never was the man you are. I only wanted to be,” he told his son.

Jerry Lee just looked away. “No, Daddy, I never will be the man you are.”

Decades later, as he talks of dirty dealings and unreleased records and unpaid royalties, he is disarmed a bit by the memory of that measly wad of twenty-dollar bills pressed into his palm by a man he needed to trust.

He could spend money, but he had no interest in counting it. “It’s expected,” Jerry Lee says of the record business, “to be cheated a little bit.”

Phillips failed him later, he believes, but he did not fail him then.

“December twenty-second, nineteen fifty-six,” he says now, “the best investment in the history of rock and roll,” with the possible exception of his daddy’s purchase of a secondhand upright piano.

“I loved ol’ Sam. He was my friend.”

Years later, Sam Phillips would say that he and only he ever really understood Jerry Lee.

“I could look in that boy’s eyes,” he said, “and see his soul.”


Jerry Lee discovered that much had happened while he was gone. Frankie Jean, who had turned twelve, was getting married. A few relatives said it was a bit early for the child to be wed, but others said it was nothing new, nothing even out of the ordinary in the family history or in the traditions and practices of the community, so the wedding was eventually blessed all around, and everyone went and had some turkey and cornbread dressing, and hot biscuits, and mashed potatoes running with butter, and when they prayed, they thanked God for the good fortune that had found their boy, who had sense enough to know that if you’re going to be hit by a train, you have to go stand on the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Amen.


In 1957, Elvis, with a two-year head start, was playing the last of three shows on his fifty-thousand-dollar Ed Sullivan contract. Jerry Lee went on the road, chasing, always chasing. Sometimes he played package tours in front of a few thousand paid customers; sometimes he played gigs not much bigger than the clubs he had played at home. He played auditoriums, true, but also played an electronics store, and a tomato festival, and in bars where the take-home was less than a hundred a night for the whole band. Success was coming, but it was taking its time. He played Little Rock, Monroe, Jackson, Odessa, Texas, and Sheffield, Alabama. In late spring he played the venerated Big D Jamboree in front of six thousand people in the Sportatorium in Dallas, playing with Sid King and the Five Strings. It was his biggest show so far, to a crowd mostly accustomed to Hank Snow, Webb Pierce, Janis Martin and the Marteens, and Leon Payne and His Lone Star Buddies. Billy Walker played there, wore a mask like the Lone Ranger and called himself the Traveling Texan. But radio station KRLD, with fifty thousand watts, carried the show live, and the CBS radio network broadcast it nationwide. Elvis had played here, as did Johnny and Carl and other, less traditional artists. He would be called back for another Saturday night, and then a third, and people reached out to grab his hand as he tried to leave the stage to tell him how ol’ Ray Price didn’t do that “Crazy Arms” nothin’ like he did, how even Hank would have been proud to hear his music sung so well.

Between gigs, he returned again and again to the studio to find a follow-up record that could be his breakthrough hit. He tried old, old American standards, songs he had played as a child like “Silver Threads Among the Gold” and country ballads like “I’m Throwing Rice,” “I Love You So Much It Hurts,” and “I Love You Because.” He ran through a few country blues tunes, like “The Crawdad Song,” “Deep Elem Blues,” and Joe Turner’s Kansas City rhythm-and-blues hit “Honey, Hush.” He did the dark folk ballad “Goodnight, Irene,” Western swing tunes like “Shame on You,” and the R&B ballad “Tomorrow Night.” He did “Dixie.” He did the “Marines’ Hymn.” He went back to Gene Autry for “My Old Pal of Yesterday” and to Hank Williams for “I Can’t Help It” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” He even cut a couple of attempts at a theme song—a misfire called “Pumpin’ Piano Rock,” and a simpler, more powerful song he called the “Lewis Boogie”: