Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(69)

Jerry Lee played the show, but he didn’t play by the rules. “They didn’t want me to do it like I do it, but I did it out loud, and I didn’t skim over nothin’,” he says. “I did it all.”

It was about then that Sam Phillips gave him his first big royalty check for “Shakin’.”

It read: $40,000.

Jerry Lee wasn’t sure for a while if that meant four thousand or forty thousand, and he was just about as happy either way. He put it in his pocket and just carried it around with him, for weeks, months, till the ink faded and it was so creased, it was almost cut in two. He went to Taylor’s Restaurant and had some steak and gravy and black-eyed peas and turnip greens, and he might have even had some beets, though he didn’t even really like beets, and, man, it was good, and as a goof he tried to pay with his forty-thousand-dollar check.

“Uh, I don’t think we can cash this,” the waitress told him.

He went home and went about the business of keeping his promises. He bought his mama a nice new house in Ferriday, not a mansion on a hill but a good, clean house with hot and cold running water and wiring that didn’t glow red in the walls and burn the place down, with lights that didn’t flicker when the refrigerator clicked on. He bought his daddy some land, a farm, because a man was nothing without land, just a borrower.

“I bought Mama a new Fleetwood Cadillac,” he said. “And I bought her a new one every year, and she got to expecting it. If I didn’t, she’d just take one of mine. She drove off one time in a white one with red leather interior. I had to call her and say, ‘Mama, you got my car?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I got it.’ She got to where, if I saw her walking around one in the yard, I knew she was gonna take it.”

He bought his daddy a big Lincoln. He gave his sisters a thousand dollars at a time, for shopping sprees. If other kin had a crisis and needed help, they came to him, and he dug in his pocket and gave them cash.

“They accepted it, and they wanted it,” says Jerry Lee, and they deserved it, for the faith they had in him, so early and for so long. If he ever had any doubts about that, all he had to do was shut his eyes and imagine that piano on back of his daddy’s old truck as it got bigger and bigger coming down that dirt road, till it was so big in his mind and his eyes that it was all he could really see, for years and years.

Elmo grabbed hold of the rock-and-roll dream with both big hands, and Jerry Lee loved every minute of it, seeing his daddy’s dreams come true through him. A more traditional family, one from a Norman Rockwell painting, might have dreamed it differently, might have hoped to see their child go off to college and come home a doctor or a lawyer or a captain of industry, but what Jerry Lee’s people had stirring in their blood was music, and when you make it in music, their kind of music, no one hands you a sheepskin and one of those funny flat hats. So Jerry Lee handed his daddy the keys to a new Lincoln, and Elmo got drunk not long after that and drove it into something that did not move, and so Jerry Lee bought him another one, because he loved him, and because that piano tilted the world.

He tells how he bought Elmo a brand-new Cadillac, and how his daddy, flying drunk through Mississippi, “just didn’t make a curve, and turned it over about three times, and he just got out and took off walking. ‘Where’s your car, Daddy?’ I asked him, and he looked at me and said, ‘Son, I have no idea.’ Well, that day I bought him one just like it, red with white leather—I mean, a sharp car—and parked it in his driveway. And he just come out the door and got in it and drove off, like he never had a wreck. I don’t think he even knew the difference. I don’t think he ever did. I said to him, ‘Looks like your car’s goin’ good, Daddy,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, son, it’s going all right.’

“In California, I bought him a new Harley. He drove it all the way back, and he was going a hundred and ten in Greenville, Mississippi, when they finally run him down. The phone rang, and it was the police chief, and he said, ‘Is this Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis?’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, it depends.’ And he said, ‘I’ve got a fellow here who says he’s your daddy, and he’s coming through here doing a hunnert-ten, and said he’s had just one beer.’ And I heard Daddy in the background, saying, ‘Honest to God, son, just one beer.’ And I said to the police chief, ‘Yeah, that’s him.’ I asked if he could let him go, and he said to me, ‘Tell him to slow down.’

“Them was good days, too,” says Jerry Lee.

In the studio, as he searched for another hit, there was time to record some more fine old music, the kind he’d heard as a boy. One day, he says, “Jack Clement caught me at the right time, in the right mood,” and he sat down at the piano alone and cut a version of “That Lucky Old Sun,” a number one hit by Frankie Laine in 1949. The song was one of those pieces of music that just ride easy in your head, and Jerry Lee’s piano gave it a barroom, blue-collar undertone. In a voice that was smooth and easy—in great contrast to the shakin’ and shoutin’ music he became famous for—he sang about a workingman, burned and wrinkled by the sun, sweating for his wife and children.

While that lucky ol’ sun ain’t got nothin’ to do

But roll around heaven all day.



“That’d make the hair stand up on the back of your neck,” says Jerry Lee.