by Rick Bragg
The cost of the war—and of the local economic recovery—would not be known for some time, when the first casualties started appearing in the newspaper. “We had kin lost in the war,” Jerry Lee recalls. “Paul Batey got killed. A sniper got him,” in the Pacific. “My Aunt Viola never got over that. The war took a whole lot of people from here.” But for the children, safe in the low country, the war was a thing of adventure, where Germans could be killed with slingshots and Japanese fell from paper planes. The river was said to be a thing of great strategic importance, as it had since the Yankees took Vicksburg, but now it was said to be a target for sabotage, because of the freight it carried for the war effort. So the boys watched from the bank for saboteurs and submarines. It was what he did instead of going to school; it was a patriotic duty.
“Mama and Daddy seen their kid had school,” he says, but he did not always make it inside the door. He would walk off in that direction, till he was out of sight, then just go wandering, to fish or swim or throw rocks or sit and listen to an old man whup a guitar, because it was so hard to sit there in those little bitty desks and try to learn about fractions and what made the sky blue and the names of all those men in puffy pantaloons, when there was great time wasting to be done, pool halls to sneak into, barbershops to linger by. And so he just did not go often to Ferriday Elementary and hoped the teachers would just pass him through, something teachers have done since the advent of chalk. His daddy made the mistake of buying him an old motor scooter, which only increased his range. “It was a great time,” he says. “Every now and then a plane would fly over, and we’d go hide under the bridge.”
It was about this time, in the thin shadow of that distant war, he decided his own world was just too small.
“I don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to go.”
He looks as if he is searching for some kind of understanding of that, which is rare for him.
“Sometimes you just need to go.”
He had hitchhiked the dirt roads and blacktop in Concordia Parish and parishes up and down the river since he was old enough to realize what his thumb was for, sometimes just to see where the roads ended, the same way he wondered how deep the Blue Hole was, that place in the backwater where cold-blooded killers were said to dump the bodies of their victims, wired to a truck part or a cinder block. The world was wide and mysterious and rich and dangerous, and he lived in only a little bitty corner of it. The river only went north and south but roads went everywhere. He had made it as far as Vicksburg, across the dull, flat green and rolling land, had some ice cream and a candy bar, then, his head humming with sugar, hitchhiked home. One day, without a sack lunch or change of clothes or a dime in his pocket, he walked down the road till he was out of sight of his mama and daddy’s house, sprinted for the highway, and stuck out his thumb.
“Mama,” he says, “would have had a heart attack.”
The first car to stop was a ’41 Ford. The old man inside looked him up and down.
“How far you goin’, boy?”
“New Orleans,” he told him.
He made up a plausible, heart-tugging story as to why; it evades him now, but he knows it must have been a good one or he never would have gotten out of Concordia Parish. A few hours and stories later he was standing on Decatur Street, with the Crescent City hunkering at his feet. He looked at the curve of the river, crowded with ferries and tugboats and big freighters, so many vessels he could almost walk from the French Quarter to Algiers, but it was the same brown river he had at home, so he did not waste much time on the docks. He wanted to see a city, see a real one, and all that it implied. “I wanted to go somewhere big,” he says, “and New Orleans was the biggest place I could think of.”
He walked the traffic-choked, narrow streets in wonder. This was the New Orleans of Tennessee Williams, dark and rich and dangerous. He saw the old iron streetcar, rumbling and clanking and spitting sparks, crowded with people rich and poor. Ladies, some half-dressed, reclined on the balconies, just languidly wasting the day. He passed the grand hotels and the tap dancers who banged against the old bricks with bottle caps on the soles of their shoes, and the mule-drawn carriages with their velvet-fringed rooftops, and a great, cream-colored church, the one the Catholics called the cathedral of St. Louis. He peeked into cafés where the rich smell of coffee drifted down the streets till it bowed to the stronger scent of a hundred kinds of liquor, pouring from bars already going strong in the stark light of day.
“Well,” he said to himself, “this is a place.”
But he was also hungry, and beginning to think, at least a little, about the commotion that would arise when suppertime came and his mama and daddy noticed he was gone.
“I wound up in front of this Italian grocery,” he says. “I guess I looked lonesome.”
The grocer, his accent so thick Jerry Lee could barely understand him, asked the boy who he was and what he was doing there, standing around. He did not look like a New Orleans street urchin; he looked lost.
“I have been kidnapped,” Jerry Lee said.
The man just looked at him, sternly.
“And I’m hungry,” Jerry Lee said.
He may not be buying this, he thought.
Then a thickset, middle-aged woman came out of the grocery, apparently the man’s wife, and said something in Italian that seemed to be laced with smoke and fire, then in English that he could understand told the man that he should be ashamed of himself for leaving this baby to stand in the street. “Give this bambino something to eat right now,” she said. He ate enough bologna to kill a normal man.
Around one o’clock in the morning, he found himself sitting on a straight-back chair in a New Orleans police station, or perhaps Juvenile Hall; he cannot really say. A police officer, calling every place in Ferriday with a telephone, had finally gotten somebody to fetch Elmo to a phone, so the officer could tell him to, please, sir, come and get his boy, because New Orleans had enough trouble as it was.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with that boy,” Elmo told him.
Mamie was saying “Thank you, Jesus” in the background.
“I don’t know, either, sir,” the officer said.
“I mean, I got him a motor scooter,” Elmo said.
“Just please come and get him, sir,” the officer said.
Elmo drove into the night. It was no pleasure trip in those days, on those roads. When he finally got there, he just looked at his son for a moment, his face cloudy with fury, and sighed.
Jerry Lee said he would have been home sooner, but, “Daddy, it’s hard for a little boy to get home.”
Elmo sighed again and drove his son back to Ferriday.
“There stood Mama,” he says, remembering.
She ran to the car and grabbed his shoulders. “Boy,” she said, “I should kill you.” Then she snatched him to her chest. “I love you so. Come here, baby.”
He knew then that he would get away with just about anything.
“They loved their boy,” he says, again. “They were just glad to get him back.”
He is not certain, anymore, exactly why he left.
“I just knew that a motor scooter was not what I was looking for.”
Elmo had long since decided the boy was special and not always in a good way. He knew quickly that he was never going to be a farmer or a carpenter; he refused to pull his own weight around the house and might have been the sorriest cotton picker who ever put on a sack. He not only came in light, he came in almost empty, and he could tear up a tractor in no time, just disappear with it down a road, plowing up the asphalt. And he had accepted that the boy was no scholar. He had hoped, at least, to keep his son out of reform school or prison, but even that was looking grim. Before he was able to see over the dashboard, he had stolen Elmo’s Ford and gone joyriding down the roads of Ferriday and Black River, whooping. The first time it happened, Elmo had looked up to see his car rolling out of the driveway, ran up to see who was driving. It appeared to be nobody. Then
he caught a brief flash of just the top of a blond head, and cursed, and considered praying. The car went sliding out of the driveway wide-open and roaring down the dirt road, and Elmo watched and listened for the sound of great tragedy. All he heard was the roar of the engine, roaring, roaring. There was something wrong. It finally hit him. “Oh Lord,” he said, “the boy ain’t changing gears.” Jerry Lee must have been pulling about four thousand RPM, the engine smoking, before he finally turned around and headed home.
When he pulled up in the driveway and killed the motor, his daddy was standing there aghast, his big hands on his hips. He could smell gaskets melting, metal smoking.
Jerry Lee decided to act like he was supposed to drive.
They stood there looking at each other.
“Well,” Elmo finally asked, “how’d you do, son?”
“I did pretty good, Daddy,” said Jerry Lee, “but I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of low gear.”
Elmo knew he should lock the boy in a pen, but he was one of those animals who would kill himself against the wire.
“Well,” he said in defeat, “maybe I better show you.”
By the fall of ’43, he was becoming more enamored of music, so that a song on the radio, or at a clothesline, or in the fields, could freeze him midstep. Music, black and white, blues and hillbilly, swirled around him, and as he sang it back, his own voice grew richer, till he sounded less like a freckle-faced kid. He knew something about the purity of music, the unvarnished beauty of it. It was among the first sounds he heard as a baby, even before Elmo Jr. was sent to heaven and Elmo Sr. was sent to New Orleans, and it would never desert him. “It was beautiful,” he says, “when Mama and Daddy sang their duets. They sang ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ and ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’ and ‘Old Rugged Cross,’ and they sang ‘Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?’” And sometimes when they sang, it looked like their hearts were breaking, but to Jerry Lee then it just sounded like the soul of music itself was laid bare, when he heard them sing the songs from church. “You simply,” he says, “cannot beat them old songs.”
He would never improve on that beauty; never wanted to sing with more heart. He just wanted to make it move faster, harder, and for that he needed an engine, but the only pianos in his world all belonged to someone else. His daddy had a guitar and encouraged him to play it, but there was just a limit to the thing—he had always despised limits—and it seemed like the strings were designed to hold him, not set him free. “I learned to play guitar, could play it pretty good,” he says, but “a guitar just has six strings.” He says it like a man would say his dog just has three legs, with dejection and pity. In church he heard the future on those old pianos, battle-scarred from all those crusades against the devil one big tent at a time. But only the rich people had one in their house, or at least, people richer than they were.
He was playing in the yard when he saw his father’s old truck lumbering up to their house on Tyler Road. The better times, the carpentry work and cotton prices, had allowed Elmo a little breathing room, and for the first time in his life he had purchased his own land. It was the first dirt he had ever put his name on.
“He had a piano on his truck,” he says, “and my eyes almost fell out of my head.”
He started hopping, like old man Herron used to hop when Elmo lifted him over a fence.
“I found out later he mortgaged his farm to buy it for me,” he says. “I tol’ you. I had the best mama and daddy in the world.”
Elmo backed the truck up to the porch and undid the ropes. Together, they lifted it into the house.
“There it is,” Elmo said. “Now play it.”
It was an upright, paneled in dark wood, manufactured by the P. A. Starck Piano Co., of Chicago, Illinois—a unique manufacture, according to the advertisements, with a bent acoustic rim that gave it a fuller, richer tone, more like a grand piano—and “well adapted for concert use.”
His daddy bought it in Monroe, Louisiana, for how much he cannot recall.
It was used, certainly. “It looked new to me,” he says now.
He let his fingers run down the keys.
“Thank you, Daddy,” he said.
Mamie stood in the doorway. She had never completely forgiven him for going to prison that second time, leaving her alone with the boys and her grief. Women can be hard on a man that way.
“You done good,” she told him.
“And it wasn’t long,” he says. “I was playin’ piano about as good as I play now.”
You have to forgive him for dismissing a lifetime of influence, of adaptation, of study—not in any traditional sense, like paid-for lessons, but in the way he learned his art, by simply listening, always listening. He will always believe that, while he did learn, did soak up the music from the outside world, the great bulk of his genius came from within, where God placed it.
The piano would come to be called the wisest investment in the history of rock and roll.
“It’s sittin’ in there,” he says now of his first piano, motioning beyond the door to where the old upright leans tiredly against the wall in the darkened hallway. “I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.”
The boy played, played every moment he was not obligated to be somewhere else, and stopped only to bathe and sleep; sometimes he even ate at the thing, chewing on a sandwich, thinking about melodies, rhythms, songs. It is not like he had anything better to do. He had never seen a great deal of value in school, at least before he discovered girls, and now knew it was totally unnecessary. Now, in the cursed classroom, he would stare at the top of his desk in abject misery and itch to be set free of this foolishness. “I was sittin’ on Ready,” he says, “and pumpin’ on Go.” There was no bell at Ferriday Elementary to mark the end of the school day, but “the band started practicing at three o’clock sharp,” and that meant the last period was finally over. He almost turned his desk over getting out, cleared the front steps in one leap, snatched up his bicycle and pedaled home, where he banged through the door and slid onto the piano seat like he was sliding in at home. He played “Blessed Jesus, Hold My Hand” and “He Was Nailed to the Cross for Me” and every other hymn he could think of, all of it by ear; the notes meant nothing to him, and the sheet music and hymnals just a waste of a good tree.
I will be a soldier brave and true and firmly take a stand
As I onward go and meet the foe, blessed Jesus, hold my hand
He disappeared into the piano just as surely as if he had crawled into the cabinet and closed the lid. His cousins came for him, but mostly now he sent them away. This was important. Nothing else was.
Elmo and Mamie encouraged his obsession, but there was a limit.
“Son,” Elmo would say, as the hour struck ten, or sometimes eleven, or later. “Son, we got to get some sleep.”
“Ten more minutes, Daddy,” he said.
“No.”
“Five more minutes?”
“No.”
Mamie would come in, rubbing her eyes. “Put the lid down, son, and go to bed.”
Even though he was a born piano player, he still had to practice and practice to master the more complicated songs. Elmo knew music, knew the science of it, despite his lack of schooling, and sometimes, in the beginning, he would correct his son.
“You missed a minor chord, son,” he said, once.
“So I missed one, big deal,” he said, then, more sheepish: “What is a minor chord?”
“And then Daddy would sit down and show me,” he said, thinking back.
But Elmo had never seen someone so quickly master the instrument, any instrument, or master the nuances of songs.
He would call out a song, “and I’d sit down and play it,” says Jerry Lee. Some of those songs would stay with him—and in his stage shows—for a lifetime, like “Waiting for a Train” by Jimmie Rodgers, the story of a penniless man just trying to get home, but thrown off the train by a railroad bull. “Songs that told a story,” he says. Others jus
t made you feel good. He played “Mexicali Rose” by Gene Autry—that one made Elmo whoop and grin—and “My Blue Heaven” by Gene Austin, and “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller. He did not know what swing music was, completely, but he knew the feeling even before his feet reached from the piano bench to the floor. He would play “Alabama Jubilee,” a song from 1915, and “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” an even older song his mama loved. And there were other songs of a newly popular piano style called boogie-woogie—songs like “Down the Road a Piece” and, later, “The House of Blue Lights.” He cannot remember where he heard them all, but he knows how he learned to play them. “I just had to hear ’em,” sometimes just once.
And yet there was always a difference between a boy and his father. One day, as Jerry Lee was laboring to learn one of the new songs, Elmo sat down at the old piano and played it through himself. But he played it beautifully, flawlessly, and it was so lovely, so impossibly beautiful, that the boy started to cry, in despair. And, seeing that, Elmo never played another song on the piano in front of his boy again. “Can you imagine that?” Jerry Lee says. “Lovin’ a kid that much,” to stay away from the piano for a lifetime?
The shocking thing was how quickly he could learn a song, and adapt it into something new. Elmo wired the house for electricity, and got his boy a radio so he could snag what was drifting through the air. He listened to the radio like a man sifting for gold. Some stations came in maddeningly faint, wafting down from Chicago or some other big city, but the best music in the world was being played almost next door, anyway. The Jesuits at Loyola University had fifty thousand watts pushing big band and Dixieland up from New Orleans, and you could hear Sharkey Bonano like he was standing in the hall. In Natchez, WMIS played the blues almost nonstop, from the rusty piano shuffle of Champion Jack Dupree to the citified jump bands of Louis Jordan and Amos Milburn. WSMB in New Orleans piped in hillbilly music from Nashville, and before long KWKH started bringing the Louisiana Hayride in from Shreveport, on a signal that would change his life. He bought records every time a little money came his way, boogie and hillbilly and pop hits, sounds that were obscure only to people with a tin ear, and eavesdropped endlessly in Ferriday’s black section to hear the most lowdown blues he could find drifting from the flung-open doorways, always collecting, absorbing. In time, he only had to hear a song once to store it inside his head. Then he would match the words to the rows of black and white, anything from country tunes like “You Are My Sunshine” to the old New Orleans song “Margie” to blues songs and drinking ditties.