by Rick Bragg
He showed up for the beginning of the seventh grade, only to find out he was not in it. He decided to take a seat anyway. He had already figured out that a person, if they were special enough, if they had something uncommon to offer, could live by a set of rules separate from those set down for dull, regular people. The way to accomplish this was to make it too much effort for people to try to bend him to their regular-people rules. “So I picked me out a seat . . . think I took Bill Herron’s seat, and I sat down,” he said. “Mr. Lancaster was the teacher and the football coach. He told me I had failed my class and said I had to go back to the sixth grade. I told him, ‘Look, if you want me to go to school, I’m going to school in the seventh grade. This is my seat right here.’ I told him. He told me to shut up, and nobody tells me to shut up. I couldn’t take that. He was a big man, and picked me up out of that seat, and we commenced to fightin’.”
Mr. Lancaster had it in his mind that he would just bodily carry Jerry Lee to the sixth grade, but it was hard to get a good grip on the boy. Jerry Lee was bobbing and weaving and gouging and twisting as the other students watched in amazement, because nothing this exciting had happened in homeroom since a boy named Otto soiled himself during a too-long assembly in second grade and had to be sent home in a secondhand sailor suit.
The coach, red-faced and muttering, finally got a grip on him, and that’s when Jerry Lee saw the man’s necktie flutter past his face. He grabbed it with both hands and just pulled.
“I was hangin’ him,” he says. “I had him, boy. I was swinging on that necktie, and I was choking him to death.”
Mr. Lancaster gave a single, mighty gasp and began to stagger around the room, Jerry Lee swinging from the necktie like a clapper on a bell. The man’s face went bloodred and his breath was coming in tiny little wheeeees; some of the little girls began to whimper and scrunch their faces up, about to bawl. “Then two of his football players come in,” says Jerry Lee, “and drug me off him.”
He was transported, still kicking, to the principal’s office and deposited in a chair.
Another boy, Cecil Harrelson, sat across the room, looking glum.
“What you in for?” Jerry Lee asked him.
“I’s fightin’ Mr. Dickie French,” the boy told him.
That impressed Jerry Lee. Mr. French, who taught history, was a navy man.
“Then Mr. Bateman, the principal, come in, and asked me what had happened, and I told him,” and he even managed to make himself seem almost noble. “I said, ‘Mr. Bateman, they tried to make me go back to the sixth grade but I didn’t want to go back to the sixth grade and I wanted to stay in the seventh grade,’ and he said, ‘Son, I don’t blame you a bit, but I got to suspend you for two weeks, because we can’t have you killing teachers.’” Jerry told him, “Well, okay,” but what he was thinking was more like, Please, Mr. Fox, don’t throw me in that briar patch.
“I think he give Cecil two weeks, too.”
The two boys walked together through the gate.
“Well,” said Cecil, as they turned to go their separate ways, “see ya later, Killer.”
“And I been the Killer ever since,” says Jerry Lee. Most people think he got the nickname because of his wild stage show or his reputation offstage or worse, but it had nothing to do with any of that.
“I named him. I did,” recalled Cecil Harrelson, who would go on to be Jerry Lee’s road manager and his friend through good and awful times, who would hold men while Jerry Lee hit them, as they played and fought their way across the country and back again. “It’s funny. You pass through this life and you wake up one morning, and it’s about all behind you,” Cecil said shortly before his death, “but you never forget that about being boys. It’s the first thing you think of.”
Jerry Lee continued to educate himself, one genre and influence at a time. Sometimes a hit song came over him like a fever, and he quit whatever he was doing, left people standing slack-jawed, to go and play it himself and adapt it, in a matter of minutes, to his style. One day, it happened to him while he was on a date at the Arcade Theater. “I’d go see Gene Autry,” he recalls, “and just before the movie come on they’d take fifteen minutes and play Al Jolson songs on those 78 records. I was sittin’ there and I was listenin’. I had a girlfriend with me.”
Then something happened that got his attention. “Al Jolson come on, and he’s singin’ this song—I think it was ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye.’ And back then I could listen to a song an’, if I liked it, automatically I adapted that song into my mind. . . . I knew it word for word, melody for melody. I knew it. And I told my girlfriend, I says, ‘I gotta go use the restroom. I’ll be right back.’ And I left. I got on my bicycle and went home.
“I sat down at the piano and played that song—played it for two, three times, got it just like I wanted. I got back on my bicycle, went back to the theater, parked my bike, went inside, set down by Faye—her name was Faye, Faye Bryant. And she said, ‘You . . . you was gone quite a while, wasn’t you?’ I said, ‘Naw, I just went to use the restroom. Picked up some popcorn.’
“It’s unbelievable. But it happened.”
Other musical lessons took longer to sink in. It was about this time that Jerry Lee Lewis first heard the words and music of a painfully thin, sallow, brilliant man from the great state of Alabama. His mama loved Hank Williams, this man they called the Hillbilly Shakespeare, because he sang straight at her, the way he did every man and woman who had ever gone to bed unsure of what the new morning would bring.
Jerry Lee did not actually know it was genius, not quite yet. “I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t particularly care for him myself,” he says. “I didn’t think he could sing that good.” But in time, he began to listen closer, “and I was really wrong about that. It flowed out, that real stylist talent,” and suddenly it was like the man was singing right at him, too, even when the radio was off or when he was out of nickels at the jukebox and only static hissed from the spinning record.
He had practically been weaned on Jimmie Rodgers, but when he heard Hank Williams wail for his attention—really heard him—it was like he was hearing his own future sung to him. Williams had started singing on WSFA in Montgomery, with a voice that was so forlorn, it seemed trapped halfway between this and the other side. He had written songs on café napkins and scrap paper about the things that mattered—about women who did not love you back, and sons who called another man Daddy, and being so lonesome in the night that you wished you would die—and it wasn’t so awful somehow, to those cotton mill workers, pulpwooders, coal miners, sharecroppers, sweatshop workers, and the women who wiped the tables in the truck stops, when he sang their pain on the air. Then he made them laugh out loud, singing about wooden Indians that never got a kiss, and a beer bucket with a hole in it, and how that little dog better scoot on over because the big dog’s movin’ in. He could not read music or think of a song in notes but never had to, being a genius. He drank and took morphine and gobbled painkillers to smother the agony in a twisted back and a pressing darkness; he sang drunk onstage and sometimes did not show up at all, and people loved him anyway, because he belonged to them, broken whiskey bottles and littered pill bottles and needles and all, because when he sang, you could forget for a while the stabbing, slashing machines that took their fingers, and the rich man’s courts that sent them to rot in Atmore, Parchman, and Brushy Mountain.
Like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank was not afraid to yodel, even though the moneymen had told him that a yodel record would not sell in the modern age of American music, and certainly not sell outside the peckerwoods. He told them to go to hell. After a few smaller records he wrote himself, he finally found the song that would carry him to glory. “I can throw my hat onto the stage after I sing ‘Lovesick Blues,’” he said, “and my hat will get three encores.” And he was right.
Hank Williams did not write “Lovesick Blues”—it was an old Tin Pan Alley song, written in ’22 by Clifford Friend and Irving Mills—but he made it hi
s song forever, made his voice and his sound the only ones that would matter, forever and ever. That was what being a stylist was all about. When the Opry put him on the big stage at the Ryman Auditorium to sing it, the song rocketed outward from Nashville across the entire country. Fishermen in the Pacific Northwest heard. . .
I got a feeling called the blu-ues, oh Lawd,
Since my baby said good-bye
. . . and liked it.
But the man from Alabama led an uneasy life, and soon his career and his ways were locked in near-constant battle. The men who dominated the bluegrass and commercial country music broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium, some of them about as country as a subway if you knocked the cowboy hats off their heads, were fearful of this young man with the dark circles under his eyes. WSFA fired him for habitual drunkenness, and before long the Opry wouldn’t have him either. When Jerry Lee first heard him, it was by way of Shreveport, just 180 miles away from Ferriday, on the Louisiana Hayride, the weekly radio show he played when the Opry wouldn’t have him.
After “Lovesick Blues,” the wayward yodeler followed up with a string of hits he wrote himself—“I Can’t Help It,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”—and Jerry Lee loved them all. But that was not the only reason he cleaved to Hank Williams. As much as anything, it was the fact that Hank was also a man raised in faith but pulled and torn by sin, a man who lived with one foot hot and one foot cool, straddling the worlds of sacred music and secular music with a kind of tortured beauty. He would have the crowds tapping their toes in the auditoriums to some hillbilly swing, then mumble, “Neighbors, we’ve got a little sacred song y’all might want to hear, a little song I wrote. . . .”
I wandered so aimless, my life filled with sin
I wouldn’t let my dear Savior in
Jerry Lee knew he was bound to this man somehow. “I think me and Mr. Williams were a lot alike,” he says now. He leaned on the jukebox and listened to “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” He studied the words to “You Win Again” and sensed the unbearable humiliation there.
“I felt something when I listened to that man,” he says. “I felt something different.”
He rarely calls him Hank. It is “Mr. Williams.”
“I listened to Mr. Williams, and I listened real close. I listened to hear a sharp note, or a flat note. And you know what? I’m still listening.”
There was no television, no video, so he could not really see what the man looked like, how he moved or carried himself. There were only the records to go by, and the occasional poster or flyer of an almost emaciated young man who stood a little knock-kneed onstage, but elegant, somehow, in his white suits and big white Stetson; he was elegant to the end, even after Nashville got to him and he started wearing buckskin fringe and big musical notes on his suits and lined his coat sleeves and pants legs with rhinestones and glitter and whatnot, like a dime store blew up all over him. The Opry hired him back and fired him again, but he always reappeared somewhere, saying, “Neighbors, I’m so happy to be back, and I got a purty little song. . . .”
Jerry Lee played the songs over and over. He did the same with other songs, like Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You” and a hundred more, but there was just something different in Mr. Williams’s music, the way some paintings are more vivid, more real than others, and he dreamed about meeting the man and telling him how much he liked his songs. But there was no rush. Jerry Lee was just barely a teenager, and Hank Williams was only in his late twenties, and he’d promised, over the radio, that if the Lord was willing and the creek stayed level he’d be in his town real soon.
It was about this time that Jerry Lee first started to challenge Elmo’s supremacy in the home. Elmo could abide most things, but not sass, and Jerry Lee was born to sass. He came off the bottle smarting off, and as he became a teenager, he figured he could stand up to his father, could defy his orders as a man would defy another man. It was funny when he was a boy, but when he was big enough, he knew he would have to back it up with his fists. “I figured I would try it one day,” he says. He can’t recall exactly what sparked it—maybe the old man had finally gotten old after all—but inevitably that one day came.
“He reached his hand around my head and picked me up by the nape of my neck, and I was looking right into his face.” The last time that had happened he had been a little boy, in Haney’s Big House. This was different. His daddy’s eyes were calm, flat.
He remembers one blow, maybe two, then his mother’s voice.
“Don’t hit him again! Don’t hit my baby again.”
“I remember he picked me up like I was a straw, and I knew that I had been conquered.”
The year 1948 began with a crime wave in Concordia Parish, or at least as close to such as anyone there could recall. All kinds of things were turning up missing, including some items that left police bewildered as to why anyone would want them. It was just Jerry Lee and his cousin Jimmy, who had temporarily backslid, creeping around at night, stealing scrap iron from their Uncle Lee and selling it back to him the next morning, and breaking into warehouses that held things most people would not take on a scavenger hunt. Jimmy, in his own biography, wrote that the cousins stole a roll of barbed wire; they did not need a roll of barbed wire, and Jerry Lee was against taking it, but Jimmy figured if they were going so far as to break and enter, they dang sure were going to leave with something. He left carrying a roll of wire, but it got heavy, so he threw it in a ditch. The boys had better luck with stores, and by the summer of ’48 they had a nice pile of loot. “It’s a whole gang,” said Chief Swaggart, when asked about the rash of thefts, but the crime wave mysteriously flattened to nothing when Jimmy rededicated himself to the Lord and Jerry Lee, his family, and his piano vanished on the two-lane to Angola, where Elmo had found construction work on a hospital for the infamous prison there.
Home to some of the worst human-rights abuses in American penal history, Angola was a for-profit prison in its beginning, where men and women could be leased from the state, whipped and worked to death, then replaced like parts on a car. They worked the cotton fields and endured systematic torture, rape, and murder. The state took it over in the twentieth century, but not much changed, and inmates just vanished, buried in unmarked graves or sunk into the river, which formed a great crescent around the prison. In that year of 1948, Governor Jimmie Davis promised to make Angola humane, and his reforms created the new construction that brought Elmo and his family here. But it was not his reforms that got Davis elected; one does not get elected in the South by promising to make prison nicer. Davis, a country singer in the Jimmie Rodgers vein, had had a country hit a few years before with a song called “You Are My Sunshine,” and he sent out campaign trucks rigged with loudspeakers, blasting the song even in places where only the armadillos were likely to hear it. Sometimes, surreally, the speaker trucks would get stuck behind the truck carrying the state’s electric chair, which was hauled around the state so people could execute their condemned right close by. And the trucks rolled on, in a macabre caravan.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
You make me happy, when skies are gray.
In this haunted place, Jerry Lee fell in love, or something like it. The Lewis family moved into a workers’ camp outside the prison, and Jerry Lee went to the public school. He even went to class, because he had discovered football. He was skinny but fast, and he could catch a football and run like a water bug, and he made the girls act all gushy when he pulled off his helmet and slicked back his hair, which he knew to do a lot. But then a tackler the size of an International Harvester combine hit him low and separated his thighbone from the rest of his body, leaving him in a cast from his navel to his big toe. So he went back to being a piano player.
The girls, he quickly discovered, liked a good-lookin’ piano player even more than a football hero. He started caring about his clothes, hair, and the kind of car he could get to date in, though he was still o
nly thirteen. Driver’s licenses, like most other forms of government interference, had nothing to do with him, and he had already discovered that many people were foolish enough to leave keys in their cars, so they could be borrowed.
As for girls, “I could take ’em or leave ’em,” he says. “Take ’em, mostly.”
Then he saw her.
She had a lovely name, a name from the Bible.
“Ruth,” says Jerry Lee.
She was slim, with dark brown hair, and prettier than string music.
“I think about her, a good bit.”
The problem with being Jerry Lee Lewis is all the sharp edges on things in his memories. In the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the domineering family patriarch describes his own life in similar terms: “All of my life I been like a doubled-up fist. . . . Poundin’, smashin’, drivin’!” You leave a lot of splintered and broken things, a lot of jagged things, in a life like that.
“But sometimes,” Jerry Lee says, “there ain’t no sharp edges.” It is that way, just like that, when he thinks about Ruth. This was back when only Cecil Harrelson called him the Killer, not yet the whole wide world. He was not a gentle boy and never had been but was gentler around her then, and as he thinks about her now. Not even Jerry Lee Lewis could be a driving fist all the time.
“Now I’m going to loosen these doubled-up hands,” Tennessee Williams also wrote, “and touch things easy with them.”
He already had one girlfriend, of course—a lovely girl back in Ferriday named Elizabeth. “A brunette doll,” he says. “I thought I loved her, a little bit. I loved the way she walked, the way she talked. Took her to her prom in a ’49 Chevrolet. A doll. Her ol’ mama stood on the porch and just watched us, watched us leave and watched us come in, and I didn’t care, I kissed her anyway. But then we moved out to Angola, and I got with Ruth.”