by Rick Bragg
Most people have to wait years and years before they can even guess at their purpose in this life; some never do. In 1940, when he was not yet five years old, Jerry Lee found his reason for being born. “I was walkin’ through my Aunt Stella’s house. I saw it, and I just stopped, cold.”
He cannot remember wanting to touch anything so bad. He had studied pianos for quite some time, but only at a distance. He had looked on them in great curiosity, these big wooden boxes so heavy you needed a truck to haul them around, so complicated that if they went out of tune it took a mad scientist to make them right again. He did not even fully understand how they worked, that you tapped a thin key of ivory to make a tiny steel hammer strike a steel wire, sharp and clean, eliciting a sound so sweet and pure and resonant it seemed more magic than machine. He studied them in thrown-together churches and tent revivals where silver-haired old women, hair buns so high and tight it looked like a B-movie spaceship had landed on the top of their heads, banged out “Victory in Jesus” like they were mad at it, stiff fingers jerking, marching across the ivory. He watched fat men in loud suits and dime-store diamond rings slap ham-handed at the ivory as they hollered a jingle for liver tonic or cough medicine that was 90 percent alcohol, till it was clear, from the way they played, they had been having some liver trouble themselves. And he had spied them, just a flash, through the doors of the jukes on Fifth Street, as sharp-dressed black men with cigarillos in their lips pumped the pedals like they were kicking at the devil himself rising up from beneath their feet, hands moving and crossing in the shadows. What a wonderful box, to hold so much. But you almost never saw one like this, unattended.
That day, he and Elmo and Mamie had come to visit his Uncle Lee and Aunt Stella, to talk of crops and children and other unimportant things, leaving him unsupervised, to roam the big house. “I just kept lookin’ at it,” he recalls. “I just had to get at it. It was just an ol’ upright piano, but I had to get at it.”
His fingers closed and unclosed and he made baby steps, sidling and creeping.
“I wasn’t hardly even walkin’ around too good—I was just a baby,” he says. Still, “I kept gettin’ closer and closer.”
Funny that he did not think he would try and play it.
“I knew I had to play it.”
In those days, a child, even a treasured and somewhat spoiled one, did not just jump onto a piano in another person’s house and play it, any more than he would take out the fine china and start spinning it on a stick. He waited till he could not stand it anymore, as the grow-nups just kept yapping.
“And I reached up and, for one reason or ’nother, it just come to me.”
He touched a single key, pushed it sharply down.
Cool fire.
He has always had a hard time describing what happened that day, in that moment, as he heard that music come out of him. He does not want to make too much of it, but at the same time he is not sure he can exaggerate it, any more than a man could exaggerate standing under a skinny tree in a lightning storm, at the precise moment the world around him turned a smoking blue.
“I don’t know what happened. Somethin’ strange. I felt it in my whole body. I felt it.”
Musicians, great ones, often claim that when they touched an instrument their hands knew where to go. The sound of the first key leaped into his head, ringing, ringing, and told his fingers which key to hit next, and it just kept happening, a cascade, and before he even knew what he was doing he had played a song, or at least a part of one.
Silent night, holy night
“Can you believe that?” he says now. “For a four-year-old kid, to walk by and just reach up and play it?
“Now I know what it was,” he says.
“It was deliverance.”
He laughs at himself then, a little self-consciously, at talking this way. “A talent e-merged,” he says, his words exaggerated, “and not a bad lookin’ kid, either,” as if it is too important to him to take seriously for long. But it was the day that changed everything, the day he knew what he had to be. He still remembers, after so much time, how his Aunt Stella looked at him, so oddly. She had always been a smart woman.
“She knew,” Jerry Lee believes.
Mamie almost fell out as she heard her son play. She brought her hands together and praised God.
“Oh, Elmo,” she said, “we’ve got ourselves a natural-born pianist.”
“Well, Mamie,” Elmo said, “we might have a piano player.”
Jerry Lee smiles at that. “Like there was a difference,” he says now.
“He’s a prodigy,” Mamie said. Such words had rarely even been used.
“Probably is, Mamie,” Stella said, that look still on her face. “Probably is.”
It must have seemed to Elmo and Mamie like answered prayers. They had lost one prodigy; the good son slept safe in the high ground. But now they had seen delivered unto them another one—more or less.
The wild son, seven or eight years old now, barefoot, dirty faced, and grinning, climbed the iron girders of the Mississippi River bridge till he stood swaying in the hot wind at the height of the span, then walked it like a circus rope, one step, two steps, more, as the little boys below, cousins and such, stood slack-jawed and trembling at the rail. Jerry Lee had scared them to death, again, and if the yellow-haired imp fell to his doom in the river below, surely their mamas and daddies would find a way to blame all of them and beat them unconscious. He waved at them, taunting, as the wind sucked at his shirt and almost lifted him off the iron beam as the tugboats and great barges passed beneath his feet, as the drivers of the passing cars wondered which asylum had let that boy slip out. He walked the span over and over, skinny arms akimbo, like a crow on a wire, not even looking at his feet but leering, jeering at the boys below and mightily pleased with his little self.
“Are you conquered?” he shouted.
“Please, Jerry Lee,” they begged, in a chorus, Jimmy, Mickey, Cecil Harrelson, David Batey, others. “Please get down.”
He laughed in their upturned faces.
“Get down!” they wailed.
“Come and get me,” he said.
It had started that morning as all mornings started then along the dirt streets of Ferriday, in an ever-swelling migration of scamps and urchins and ne’er-do-wells, aimed at no place in particular but intent on doing no good when they got there. One of their favorite games was called Conquer, which was basically a game of double-dog dares. One boy would do something dangerous or asinine, anything as long as there was at least some chance of bloodletting or broken bones or bug-eating, and the other boys had to do the same or admit they were just big fat sissies and sing out, “I’m conquered.” It might be anything from jumping off a railroad trestle into a murky creek to taking a punch to hollering at a big girl, and nobody—nobody—conquered Jerry Lee. “I never was afraid. . . . I don’t know why. I just never was scared of nothin’,” he said, which is an easy thing to say but hard to live. But his cousins would stand in amazement at the things he did. Cousin Mickey would say he believed most geniuses were crazy, and his cousin was a genius for sure. But the stunt on the bridge, 150 feet above the big river, was off the scale.
“Are you conquered, or not?” Jerry Lee asked.
The boys looked at the river below. They shook their heads.
“Are you conquered?” he shouted again.
They nodded.
“Say it!” he shouted.
“We’re conquered! We’re conquered!”
Jerry Lee leaped up, grabbed a crossbeam, and hung there, laughing.
“Oh,” he says now, “they begged me to come down, but I didn’t pay ’em no mind. I guess I could’ve fell, but I didn’t.”
He remembers coming back to earth in triumph.
The little boys crossed their hearts and swore not to tell.
“But somebody told,” he says.
His mama had a good cry and wondered what she had done to have God punish her this way.
> “I’m gonna have to kill you, boy,” Elmo said, then just walked off, shaking his head. Mamie would not let him whip the boy.
The bridge incident was hard to eclipse, but sometime later he tried. One day, as the cadre of boys stood on an overpass, a long freight train appeared in the distance.
“I’m gonna jump on it,” Jerry Lee said.
“No you ain’t,” they said.
“Yes I am,” he said.
Jerry Lee climbed up on the rail and crouched there, like a hawk. The train had seemed to be lumbering along, but now, so close, it shook and clanked and rumbled, and the steel wheels moved in a blur. But he’d said he would do it. He picked a boxcar, one with a flat roof.
Well, he thought, you’ll probably make it.
He leaped into space.
He landed, slid, and came to a stop.
Hah.
Most boys would have let it go at that. But in the cowboy matinees, he had seen the heroes and bad men jump from one boxcar to another on a moving train, and he decided to give that a whirl. Besides, he was not altogether sure where this train was headed or when it might get there, and he might have to jump all the way to the engine, to tell the engineer to Please, sir, my name is Jerry Lee Lewis, and will you please stop this thing and let me off. It already looked like he was halfway to Baton Rouge. The other boys just stood in the far distance, wondering if they would ever see him again, and half hoping the train did not stop till it got to Canada. But then things would sure be dull around here, without Jerry Lee.
He walked to the edge of the boxcar and looked down at the coupling, at the crossties going by faster than he could count. Then he walked to the other end, got a running start, leaped and made the gap, easy, sliding on his belly. But this car had a more rounded roof. It occurred to him, in one sickening second, that there was nothing to hold on to. “I just slid off.”
He hit the big gravel at the trackside with an awful oomph, and the sound of rending clothes. The other little boys, watching in the distance, ran for home.
“They just left me there, the others, left me laying there like an old shoe,” he says. He was bruised all over, and skinned alive, but not broken, at least not that he could see. “I dragged myself up to the road and got a ride home with this rich guy.” The man looked him over.
“I slid,” Jerry Lee said.
“Oh,” the man said.
Mamie was without words. Elmo breathed fire and threatened, but there was nothing he could do. It was Elmo, in that deep backwater, who had taught the boy not to let fear own him. But this boy had no limits. Southern men like to think of people, sometimes, as machines so they can understand them, and they know that most small engines, like lawnmowers, have a tiny mechanism on them called a governor, a kind of safety device that keeps them from running wide open all the time and burning up. In people, it’s fear or common sense that serves as the mechanism. This boy, Elmo quickly figured out, didn’t have one. He was buck wild and strutting and had been since he was walking around good, determined to get away with as many transgressions as hours in the day would allow; he would not read a book on a bet and ogled all the pretty girls on the big yellow school bus and pretty women in town when he didn’t even know what he was looking at. He put one of his cousins in a cardboard box and set him in the middle of the road, and walked the parish with a perpetual smirk, like he knew even as a boy that he was the stud duck around here and people might as well get used to it.
They might have done more to rein the child in if they had not heard him play and sing.
The first time he really sang, when he was not yet even in school, it struck Elmo and Mamie hard in their hearts, because it was like their lost boy was not lost at all, like he was singing through this second son. Jerry Lee was not the good son, yet he could—if he did not fall to his death or drown in the Blue Hole or disappear on a freight car or get remanded to reform school—be a great one. He might be the one. But while this boy loved singing and, more important, noticed music, he was not yet a devotee of it, as his brother had been. There was too much of the other life out there to taste and conquer. He was a student of mischief, and even a lifetime later he relishes it almost as much as he relishes the early music, relishes any discomfort or awkwardness or devilment he took part in, the way he remembers the taste of his mama’s tomato gravy. Some men outgrow their boyish devilment. Others only polish it.
“Mama would wake me at seven thirty in the morning; school started at eight thirty. And I’d always say, ‘All I need is just one more minute, Mama,’ always just one more minute. She would come back in with a cup of cocoa and some vanilla wafers, and I’d eat it there in the bed and she’d sit with me. That was my favorite, that or tomato gravy and biscuits and a Coca-Cola. She was the angel in my life, my mama was. I had the best mama and daddy in the world, and I know everybody says that, but I believe it to be true. I know it is.”
The war raged, far off. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the one Uncle Lee Calhoun considered a sack of hot wind and a socialist, came on the radio after the double-dealing Japanese bushwhacked the sailors at Pearl Harbor, and he vowed, in that highbrow Yankee accent, that there would be a world of hurt in store. The next thing the poor people of Concordia knew, they were at war with Germans; if only Jerry Lee and the boys had paid attention in history, maybe that would have made some sense. But even before the war had reached the boys of Concordia Parish, people were beginning to feel it in their pocketbooks, as work bloomed in munitions plants and even in the fields, as parish cotton was suddenly worth something again.
Uncle Lee Calhoun had so many rental houses he could not collect for all of them in a single day and would have killed a good horse doing it. He made collections now in a raggedy prewar Chevrolet pickup and took off the driver’s-side door to save time on collection days. People here laugh about the time he ran a red light and crashed his truck into a man’s big Cadillac, how he stood there in his sweat-stained work khakis and told the man, a stranger passing through, how that ol’ truck was the only thing he owned in this sorry world and if he had to pay to get the man’s car fixed he would be ruined and maybe even have to go to prison, because when he failed to pay the damages and fine, the cold-blooded police would sock him in jail and his poor family would starve. The other man, almost in tears, patted him a little bit and drove away, his ruined car limping slowly along, happy that he had spared a poor man even more pain. The new prosperity made Lee no more generous with his own workers. One day, he promised workers in his fields some fish for lunch, and they worked all morning with their mouths watering, thinking about fried catfish, till Lee Calhoun showed up at noon with a sack full of sardines and some loose dry crackers.
Other members of the clan began to find a small prosperity of their own. Willie Harry Swaggart, the one called Pa, became chief of police. He was a craggy old man with steel-colored eyes who did not carry a gun, did not need to, because Pa had made his living in Ferriday in the swamps, trapping things that bit. But it was handy, for Jerry Lee and his cousins, to have an inside man in the department. The Gilleys opened small cafés, and others in the extended family put their names on doors and store windows. Elmo and Mamie found work in the war effort as carpentry took off again; munitions plants sprang up, other jobs appeared, and they had a grip on the here and now for the first time in their lives. “Mama sent me to the store,” Jerry Lee says, “with money.”
For working people, the boom did not extend to new houses or cars; Detroit had stopped producing cars, anyway, to use their assembly lines for planes and tanks. For the people who had been picking cotton or cutting timber, it came in the form of new overalls and food on the table at dinner and supper. His mama had the means, for the first time, to work true magic in the kitchen. “There has never been such a cook,” he says, “as my mama. Pork chops and gravy, beans and cornbread, beef, biscuits and gravy, cornbread dressing, okra, squash, tomatoes . . .” It was nothing they hadn’t had before, from the ground or the stores, but even such simpl
e things had become so dear in the Depression. “We had hog killings, and we had fresh ham, and those pork chops, and cracklin’s.” There was money for new records, and for batteries so his mama’s radio could keep bringing in those songs by Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb.
There was even money left over for the matinee. The Arcade Theater was a place of such importance in Ferriday that the movies showed even during great floods, and men rowed their sweethearts to the entrance in canoes and bateaux, to see the outside world flash across the screen. It gave Jerry Lee’s imagination a place to grow, and he wondered, sometimes, what lurked in the dark woods on nights he walked home by himself from the double feature at the Arcade, after he watched Lon Chaney turn into The Wolfman one clump of hair at a time. He was not scared, just almost scared, “but then my imagination had been whipped up quite a bit.” But nothing drew Jerry Lee to the Arcade so relentlessly as a new Western, and no Western pulled him like those of the singing cowboy, Gene Autry. The actor had taken a sabbatical from shooting cap pistols out of outlaws’ hands to go fight the real war, in the army air corps, flying the Hump between Burma and China over the dangerous Himalayas. But he had already made so many black-and-white horse operas that there were enough to make do in the war years, and “if Gene Autry was at the Arcade Theater, then Jerry Lee Lewis was the first one in line. I liked the way he fought and I liked the way he shot, but mostly I liked the way he sang.”
One day, his cousin Jimmy approached his father and asked if he could take in a movie with his cousins. His father and mother began to cry, in disappointment. The movie theaters, they believed, were the devil’s playground, and while Jimmy went into the theater that day, he came right back out again, sobbing, convinced of their wickedness. Jerry Lee did not understand how a man in a white hat, who rarely even kissed the damsel in distress, who championed orphans and puppies, could drag a boy into the depths of hell. So, while Jimmy knelt and asked for forgiveness, Jerry Lee just ate some popcorn and sang yippy-ti-yi-yay.