by Rick Bragg
It was a grand time in American music, when field hands laid the bedrock of rock and roll, elegant orchestras held sway in hotel ballrooms in New Orleans, jump blues combos toured the South continuously, and country music was maturing from fiddle tunes and cornpone to something a soldier returning from the war could cleave to, drink to, even dance to, with his baby. New music was busting out all over, but the old music still shined. He feasted on the new, but also listened for Al Jolson, who had never truly gone out of style, and Hoagy Carmichael:
Now he’s poppin’ the piano just to raise the price
Of a ticket to the land of the free
Well they say his home’s in Frisco where they ship the rice
But it’s really in Tennessee
On Saturday nights he sat by the radio like it was something he could see into. He listened to the Grand Ole Opry, even bore up to Roy Acuff, who was “the worst singer I ever heard.”
“What do you mean you don’t like Roy Acuff?” asked his mama.
“Well,” he and his daddy would say, almost in concert, “he ain’t no Jimmie Rodgers.”
The Singing Brakeman lived in their house now the way he had bunked with Elmo in New Orleans. His daddy played his boy the music on the Victrola, and he heard the genius in it, heard the train whistle across the tortured land and heard the blues bleed into this white man’s music, the way he heard it in the fields of the parish. Rodgers was the father of country music, but he was also “a natural born blues singer,” Jerry Lee says. “I loved his blues.” In no time he was singing and playing about hopping freights and getting drunk and the perils of no-account women, and if he was ten years old, it wasn’t by much.
Oh, my pocketbook is empty and my heart is full of pain
I’m a thousand miles away from home, just waitin’ for a train
Mamie frowned at that, at the little boy singing such raw, secular music, but there was no containing it now. “Mama supported my music” from the beginning, he says, even if she blanched at the words. When he was fourteen or so, he was moved by a song called “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” which a rhythm-and-blues singer named Stick McGhee had adapted from a nastier, profanity-laced chant he’d learned in the army. Mamie’s son worked up a slightly cleaner version of his own, so that she wouldn’t faint or fall to praying for his soul or pinch a plug out of his arm, and boogie would echo down Tyler Road. . .
Way down in New Orleans where everything’s fine
All them cats is just a-drinkin’ that wine
Drinkin’ that mess is pure delight
When they get sloppy drunk they sing all night
Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee, drinkin’ wine
Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee, drinkin’ wine
Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee
Won’t you pass that bottle to me
. . . then he would do another hymn. His cousins Jimmy and Mickey had also fallen in love with the piano at about the same time, and they would play together, sometimes, the three of them, and the people of the town would wonder at such talent in one bloodline, even if it was dad-gum impossible to figure exactly which lines ran in what direction. “All three played,” he recalls. “Me and Jimmy would play together, and you could hear it for three blocks.” But there was never any doubt about who was leading that trio. “You think Mickey and Jimmy could have cut it like me, could have cut that Al Jolson like me?” he says, as if daring someone to disagree.
But he did not, even as a child, hear anyone playing exactly like he wanted to play, no one singing precisely as he wanted to sing. Most of the standout artists were guitar men; the piano players still seemed mostly in the background, trapped in one genre or another.
Then he heard a man who defied any one label, a man who looked like a country-and-western piano man and played next to men in rhine-stones and big hats but who played jazz, too, and blues, and anything he damn well pleased, from Cab Calloway to Texas swing. Some people called his music Western swing, others said hillbilly boogie. Jerry Lee just knew it sounded good, like something he could do.
Yeah I’m an ol’ pipeliner an’ I lay my line all day
I got four or five women, waitin’ to draw my pay
Moon Mullican’s musical talent had germinated in the church, like his. Mullican learned first on an organ, but he was drawn to the sounds he heard drifting from the fields and chain gangs in Polk County, Texas. His daddy put a strap to him, but it was hard to stop the boy from listening to what drifted in on the Texas wind. He was Scots-Irish and as white as white could get—his grandfather fought for the South at Shiloh—but he would mix blues and big-city jazz into his stage shows between tear-soaked country ballads. The people who paid good money to hear him sometimes didn’t know what to think, with him playing that colored music so loud, and disc jockeys didn’t know where to play him, and record producers did not know what to do with him, but Jerry Lee listened to him closely, very closely, and heard in the music some of the first heartbeats of what he would one day know as rock and roll. “Moon Mullican knew what to do with a piano.” And Jerry Lee was playing it in no time.
He sat at the old piano and mixed and matched and experimented. In a way, it was like the piano was the heart of the old Lewis house, always pumping, pumping. “When it would flood, and Ferriday was under water, Daddy would put my piano on the back of the truck, and haul it out” to safety. It was not a hard decision, what to save and what to leave: the piano was the one good piece of furniture they owned. Then, when the water receded and the house dried out, he would fetch it back, and Mamie would breathe a sigh of relief.
“We gathered around the piano every night, back then, me and her and Daddy,” says Jerry Lee. It had always been that way for them, through poverty and misery and death, and now, again, in hope. It was clear that their boy was going places. It was all a matter of direction.
Mamie laid out his white shirt and bow tie. That was how you knew in the Lewis house that a great day was at hand. They rode to church in Elmo’s Ford and parked among the other ragged cars. Here and there, a backslid husband made himself comfortable across a seat, to wait out the preaching and singing and the altar call. Even Lee Calhoun drove up in a battered Chevrolet for the same reason a good poker player never flashed his wad. He had had the house of worship built on blocks, to prevent flooding, but blocks were dear, so it could not be much of a flood. There was electricity wired in the walls but no plumbing beneath the plain wood floors—an outhouse had been dug out back—and there was no stained glass in the windows to filter and soften the Louisiana sun. A rusted potbellied stove, the only heat in winter, sat in a corner. But inside, on a Sunday morning, there was no question whose house this was, and it was not Lee Calhoun’s.
It was a hothouse in summer; it seems it was always summer. The parishioners threw open the windows and installed two massive box fans on opposite sides of the building to draw the rising heat and expel it outdoors. It drew with it the sounds of the church, and created a phenomenon on Texas Avenue that people could not recall seeing anywhere else. The Assembly of God was an all-white church, but black neighbors would come by on Sundays and sit under trees to hear the music that poured from the place. People parked their cars and rolled down windows or opened doors to listen. The austerity of the Pentecostal sect did not extend to its music, even before Jerry Lee Lewis and the other boys put their stamp on it, and you could hear the piano on Main Street. Elmo whupped guitar, Mamie sang, Son Swaggart sawed his fiddle and the rest of the family joined in. In time, there would be drums, steel guitar, bass, accordion, and more, the place literally shaking. “It was lively,” says Gay Bradford, who was born in 1931 and went to church with Jerry Lee.
This Sunday his kin filed in a carload at a time—they were almost all kin, in here—and took seats in the simple, dark-wood pews: tall, angular Swaggarts, the smaller, good-looking Gilleys, the fiery Herrons, the wild Beatty boys, his pretty Aunt Stella and his rumpled Uncle Lee, and all the rest. Mamie and Elmo had a baby da
ughter now: Frankie Jean, born on October 27, 1944. She would be an annoyance for her brother but an ally in the long life to come. Mamie held the child in her arms, rocking her gently in the pew as the service began. The congregation prayed for strength, for the courage to be a warrior for Christ, for deliverance from all sin, and for life everlasting at the foot of His throne. Then there was a song. Here, pure genetics made the place different. There was no robed choir. The whole place, front to back, was choir.
Then Jerry Lee, his hair slicked down with hair oil, slid out of the rough pew and walked to the front of the church. It was not a long walk, so why did it seem like he was walking through a vast cathedral? He faced the congregation, about forty people that Sunday, but it looked like a lot more then. They waited politely for him to begin . . . and waited, and waited.
Jerry Lee took a deep breath, spun on his heel and walked, a hundred miles at least, back to his family’s pew.
“Mama,” he whispered.
“Yes, son,” Mamie said.
“What song was it I’s supposed to play?”
“‘What Will My Answer Be?’” she said.
He nodded.
“People just busted out laughin’.”
He marched back to the front of the church.
What will my answer be, what can I say
When Jesus beckons me home?
“It was the first song I ever sang in church.”
Everything he has sung or played since rests on the pillars of that day, that church, and that song. He sees no irony in it, asks no questions, abides none: “The music comes from God.”
Other styles of music would augment and color and shade his development, but it was all built on the grace and beauty and meaning in that old church music, no matter how far he may have strayed from the stories they told. Without it, he believes, all the other styles and achievements would have been somehow less than they were, as if they had been built on sand. He concedes that he did shake that foundation all he could, as did—to a lesser degree—Jimmy and Mickey and other piano players in the family. “If I’m not mistaken,” recalls Gay Bradford, “they had to call someone and put some new ivory on the keys.”
If there was one thing he was serious about, it was the piano, and he committed himself to it single-mindedly—but that didn’t mean he listened to anyone else about it.
“I had a piano lesson just once, just one time, when I was twelve years old. It was Mr. Griffin. He wanted to teach me how to play by note, from this little ol’ book he had, stuff for kids. But I played it the way I wanted to play it—played it that boogie-woogie style.” The teacher slapped him. “He popped my jaws a little bit, yeah. ‘You’ll never do that again,’ he told me,” and Jerry Lee smiles at that.
What he was lacking was a piano-playing role model, a performer of the kind he envisioned himself becoming onstage. Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers were guitar players. Moon Mullican, pasty and round-faced, could play it all, but he was nobody’s idea of a commanding personality—and Jerry Lee never saw him onstage, anyway. To find one, he had to look only as far as Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in his own family.
Carl Everett Glasscock McVoy was a cousin, the son of Aunt Fannie Sue Herron Glasscock and a few years older than Jerry Lee, Jimmy Lee, and Mickey. In cousin Carl’s good looks and in his piano style, Jerry Lee saw everything he wanted to be, or at least the beginning of things. Carl’s father was an evangelist who traveled the country, and on a stay in New York, Carl was exposed to big-city boogie-woogie piano, and he showed Jerry Lee some licks when he came to visit relatives in Concordia Parish. “He was a genius,” says Jerry Lee. “I saw him playin’ piano at Uncle Son and Aunt Minnie’s place, Jimmy’s mama and daddy. He played the piano and sang, and I said, ‘Man!’ And he was such a good-lookin’ guy. Aw, he was handsome. And I said, ‘Boy, if I could do what he’s doin’, that’d be something else.’”
McVoy wasn’t a star, of course. He worked construction in the daylight and played piano at night. Years later, after his nephew had made it big, he made some records, too, including a swinging version of “You Are My Sunshine” that became the first single on Hi Records. His small stardom did not swell or last, but in his charismatic looks and thumping piano style, he had already given Jerry Lee a taste of the future.
Still, Elmo’s boy knew his music wasn’t everything it could be, not yet. “Something was missin’,” he says, something that went beyond style—some element of edge, or grit. Even as a boy he knew that the music around him, that gospel and country and old-time music, wasn’t digging far enough into the deep blue state of man.
For that, he would have to put aside his hymnal and follow another kind of tumult and shouting all the way across town.
3
THE BIG HOUSE
Ferriday
1945
The church ladies walked faster in the 500 block of Fourth Street. They did not want the sun to set on them there. The conflict, as old as Eden, had been burning on the black side of Ferriday since the first guitar man jumped from a freight and played for his liquor between Maryland and Carolina avenues. Now and then, a few brave preachers, washed in the blood and bulletproof, would set up near the nightclubs and hold church in the twilight. They warned that Satan lurked in the drink and lewdness and would come among them, to sift them as if wheat. But the pull of sin was strong, and people swarmed to Fourth Street after dark. They stepped out in spats and pearls from big Packards and rattling Model As, or stumbled from a Trailways bus, searching for this one place where the brimstone smelled a lot like good barbecue, where the shrieking and wailing had a rhythm to it, and a wild kind of joy. Here, young men played the blues with tiny bags of graveyard dirt tucked into the bodies of their guitars, and fine women moved in a way the human backbone should not allow. The best of the clubs here, or the worst, depending on your affiliation, was a place called Haney’s Big House, one of the biggest venues for blues and R&B between Memphis and New Orleans, and when preachers railed against the devil’s music, this was precisely what they were talking about.
But Haney’s was no mean little juke with a tub of iced-down beer and a few Mason jars of home brew. This was a place where four hundred people squeezed in on weekend nights—the entire population of Ferriday was less than four thousand—to dance, drink, gamble, fight, and cut, all of it washing onto a dirt street where a rattling old tour bus idled in the weeds. Slot machines spat out a hundred nickels at a time, and floorwalkers kept the peace with brass knuckles, clubbing a pistol out of a man’s hand or cracking his head before he did something stupid and violent enough to bring in the white police. It was a club where roofing knives routinely shook loose on the dance floor and women toted straight razors in their underwear, so it was for good reason that the boss tried to keep things as calm as possible.
The big man here was no flashy kingpin but a serious-minded African American businessman named Will Haney, who reigned over not only this den of iniquity but also a motel, laundry, and a modest fortune in rented shotgun houses and even sold insurance on the side. He was said to be a decent man and slow to anger, despite being in league with the devil. But Haney knew rough music was money, knew the power of the blues the same way the sponsors of the Grand Ole Opry understood the appeal of lovelorn ballads and cheatin’ songs—knew how the blues could bite down hard on people like a big snapping turtle and not turn loose till lightning burned the earth.
“It’s where I got my juice,” says Jerry Lee, and he has to think back almost seven decades to taste that first night again, to find the guitar slingers and harp blowers and piano men, young scorchers and scarred old relics in rumpled, sweat-stained, pin-striped suits and two-tone patent-leather shoes, playing boogie like it was their last night on earth. They played in the styles of Kansas City, St. Louis, New York, and the Oakland clubs, though he did not know them then. Their names are lost to him now, too, if he ever knew them at all; nor can he recall any one piano player, any one style or trick that he tried to emulate, sp
ecifically. It was more the feel of it, the rawness, the pounding rhythm that struck him, slapped him, as if the music there had blown open a rift into a whole other dimension. “I fell right in,” he says.
The white people called it Bucktown. “They said if you were ever black for one night down there, that you would never want to be white no more,” said Doris Poole, who worked the counter at the dime store on Saturday nights back then. “Women used to come in there and buy those slate knives, those knives that would fold . . . put it down in their bosoms before they went out on Saturday night.” One thing is sure. The first time little Jerry Lee climbed to the window to look inside, to see what the shouting was about, he knew he belonged there too, no matter how golden his hair, and he would never really make it back to the other side.
You can take me, pretty mama,
Jump me in your big brass bed.
He is asked, again, about the luck of it. Would his music have had the gut and grit and power if he had been born someplace else, someplace more peaceful, instead of smack-dab in the convergence of these two cultures living in uneasy and brittle peace, where people, black and white, all had someone’s boot on their neck. Would he have been the musician he became? “If is the biggest word in the English language,” he says, and his pride will not let him concede that his light might not have shone out the same way from any place, any time. Still, there was a reason he shuffled down Fourth Street so often as a boy, humming church music and cowboy songs, while on the other side of a thin wooden wall, the greatest names in blues were waiting for him to figure a way in. There was no pretense here. Here big-city blues stalwarts like Big Joe Turner or rising stars like young Riley King would check their pomade in a backstage mirror and go on to shout the blues.