Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(75)

Sam Phillips stood behind the glass that day and looked like he was about to cry. He had grown up with Hank Williams, like Jerry Lee but even more so. Hank Williams might have belonged to the world then, or to the Lord, but he began in Alabama.

I’m sorry for your victim now

’Cause soon his head, like mine, will bow



Jerry Lee closed his eyes, sometimes, when he played Mr. Williams. Usually, he didn’t even know he was doing it. When it was over, when it was a take, he saw Sam standing in the studio.

“You knocked me out,” he said, and walked away.

That side of the record was a hit, too, even in London. It augmented Jerry Lee’s legend and proved that he hadn’t forgotten his roots even as he made them scream for the rock and roll. But more important, he believes that somewhere Hank Williams looked down and tapped the toe of one boot. “I want to think so,” he says.

To not believe in heaven, in salvation, is to not believe in second chances, but the haunting question is in the tally of a man’s sin, the cost. Can all of a man’s sins be washed away? Can they if he has led the people away from Him in song? “That’s the big deal that me and Sam had that argument about. Well, we’ll know one day. That’s what worries me.”


Jerry Lee would continue to live in a kind of purgatory. Back home, his cousin Jimmy Lee had more and more come to see Jerry Lee not just as a lost soul but a kind of Pied Piper for the Devil himself, and he preached on it hard, on the wages of sin, railing against the bald wickedness of secular music, and not in some vague way but naming his cousin directly. He would make it a lifetime crusade, beating Jerry Lee like a tin drum, over decades. Then, when they met back in Ferriday, they would share some fried chicken, maybe even play a little piano together like they had as boys, as if it had never happened. It had always been an odd family that way, in its ability to turn the other cheek when kin were involved, but then they were descended from men who could take a long, hard pull of corn whiskey and, wobbling, preach the gospel until they passed out, two spirits in one body. If a man like that could live with himself, then surely cousins could live with cousins.

But as ’57 passed into ’58, the two men’s lives took such drastically different paths that Jerry Lee believes his success ate at Jimmy’s mind. While Jerry Lee was driving Cadillacs and all, their cousin Mickey Gilley was over in Texas trying to get a hit as a country singer, Jimmy was sitting in Louisiana in a wore-out Plymouth, twisting the starter and praying for Jesus to heal his car. He desperately needed the car to get to his revivals, but the valves were burned up, and it was finished. But he prayed and prayed, and suddenly the starter caught and the engine purred, and when he sold it later to a mechanic, the man told him the valves had in fact been healed, and Jimmy knew this was a sign.

Later, after preaching at a revival in Ferriday, Jimmy was invited by Elmo and Mamie back to the new house Jerry Lee had bought them, to have some supper and spend the night. He pulled up to the house to see a driveway covered in Lincolns and Cadillacs, to be told by Mamie that Jerry Lee liked to drive a different one every now and then. He went back into a guest room to take off his suit—he just had the one—to find a closet full of expensive suits that belonged to his famous cousin. He reached into his pocket to find the offering for that evening’s crusade, a single dollar bill and about a dollar fifty in change, and spread the money out on the bed. “Where are you, O Lord,” he asked aloud, and he felt God’s presence explode all around him, and he rededicated himself to the Lord right there next to Jerry Lee’s closet, saying that even if he had to put pasteboard in his shoes, he would walk a righteous path and not be tempted by the mammon that had brought his cousin low.

“At first, I think Jimmy was scared for me . . . really scared for me,” says Jerry Lee. “He saw the cars and the clothes, and he didn’t dig that.” But even as Jimmy’s fame and fortune as a minister grew—and it would grow, hugely—it seemed as though his identity as a man of God remained bound to his wilder cousin.


There was only one other person in the world who halfway understood what was happening to Jerry Lee. “Elvis knew,” he says, because he had lived it, too. They spent some evenings together at Graceland, Jerry Lee playing the piano. Sometimes he would play all night, Elvis just standing there by the piano, sometimes singing, sometimes lost in the past, lost in thought. He looked, Jerry Lee says now, like he was dreaming standing up. Like a lot of people who had all they thought they would ever want, he had to travel back to a time when he didn’t have it, didn’t have any of it, to be happy. One night, Elvis asked him to play a song called “Come What May.” Elvis “loved that song,” Jerry Lee says:

I am yours, you are mine, come what may.

Love like ours remains divine, come what may.



Jerry Lee would finish, and Elvis would ask him to play it again and again, till the night passed into morning, like a tape stuck on a loop. “Over and over and over,” says Jerry Lee, “I just kept playing.”

He came to see Elvis as one of the loneliest and most insecure people he had ever known, at least among the famous people he had met. “He was just kinda damaged,” Jerry Lee says now. It seemed to Jerry Lee like he was acting out a script written for him by people like Colonel Parker, playing the rock-and-roll idol, when all he really had to do was be one. “He was a good person,” Jerry Lee says, but he was trying to please everybody, and that wore him down.