by Rick Bragg
She was working behind the counter in a little store. “I was still thirteen, and she was sixteen, a good-lookin’ girl, and filled out, reasonably well. I said, ‘How much is this candy bar?’ and she just gave it to me. Next thing I knew, we was laying in the sun on the banks of the ol’ Mississippi.”
Jerry Lee knew about romance. He had heard it in songs. But he could have been smoother, he concedes now. They lay by the river for hours at a time, just talking.
“Look at those clouds,” she would say. “Are they telling you something?”
“Naw,” he said. “You can make anything out of clouds you want.”
She found all manner of things there, ships and houses and islands in the sky.
“I don’t know,” said Jerry Lee. “They just look like clouds to me.”
He lets his mind drift a bit, quiet for a while.
“She was a sweet girl.”
He was still in his cast when they first started seeing each other. When he was finally free of it, he and Ruth danced in her room to the record player. “We danced, and we cut up. One day her daddy caught us, but we wasn’t doin’ nothing. He whipped her pretty good. We just kept right on. Then she heard me play on the piano, and it was just over. She was in love.
“I had been a man for quite some time,” he says, by way of explanation. “Been driving since I was nine.”
She seemed content to just curl up with him, in the shade, by the river, or on a couch when her mama and daddy were away. “But I never was much of a cuddler,” he says. One day, they found a secluded spot on the bank and put out a blanket. “Right there on the sandy banks of Little Creek. Couldn’t have been a more perfect spot. . . . You know, you spend a lot of time in your life seeking some kind of perfection, but we’re a long way from gettin’ there. But this seemed like it, that there. I had spent a lot of time, thinking about things like this.”
They kissed, and Jerry Lee started asking.
“No,” she said.
He asked some more.
“No,” she said, but weaker.
He talked her into it; he had talked himself into it, he believed, already.
“I had been fighting it for a while,” he says, because of his raising. But he kept on. “I finally talked her into it—gettin’ on with the program, so to speak.”
Then there she was, naked, and it was as perfect, that moment, as he thought it might be.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“And, uh, we got down to the nitty-gritty,” he says, thinking back. “And . . . I slowly approached the situation.”
But at the last second, he hesitated.
He could hear Scripture in the air.
He heard his mama.
He looked up at the sky, for lightning, for the accusation.
“Help me, Lord.”
Ruth looked at him, puzzled.
She waited.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“I won’t.”
“It was you,” she reminded him, “got me naked.”
“I thought I was willing,” Jerry Lee told her.
“You mean you got me like this, and you ain’t . . .? You can’t do this to me, baby. You know what I want, and I know what you want. You ain’t foolin’ me.”
“No,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
She was hurt, and mad, and embarrassed, and mightily confused.
“I was wanting to . . . but I just wasn’t taught this way. I’m doing you a favor,” said Jerry Lee, and pulled on his clothes.
“I was scared to,” he says, so many years later. “I heard the sermon, and I was scared to death. I heard my mama. I thought there would be lightning flashing and everything else, and I just knew that it was wrong. And I never went with a woman, till I got married.”
He knew, even then, what was at stake. “It wouldn’t have worked. I wanted to be a star. I wanted to play that piano. Sometimes you have to pick, and I picked the dream. I was not gonna let that dream go by. I hear she married a nice man. Probably had a whole stack of kids. They moved away. But I do think about her, quite a bit. Put that in there, in the book. I want her to know that.”
The work ran out in Angola, and the family moved home to Concordia Parish, to a house in Black River. He looked up Elizabeth, but pretty girls do not linger for long in small Southern towns; they slip away, quickly, lightly. But then women were not his first love, anyway.
He had been dreaming since he was nine of being a real musician, and though he knew a hundred songs, no one had ever paid him a dime to sing one till the summer of ’49. It was the year Ford Motor Co., in Detroit, Michigan, made a car that will always be beautiful to Jerry Lee, because it was there, against those bulbous fenders, that his future began to take shape. The Ford cost only $1,624, and it had a flathead V8 and three on the tree, and a hood ornament fashioned from a seventeenth-century European crest of lions or something; it was hard to tell. But that flathead was about the meanest thing on the blacktop in ’49, and the bootleggers bought a lot of them. Unfortunately, so did the government, so the whiskey men and G-men were in a dead heat. But regardless of your affiliation, you could get your hands on one at Babin-Paul Ford Motor Co. in Ferriday that summer, and people came to see it, and hear a hillbilly band play “Walking the Floor Over You” from a stage hammered together from plywood and two-by-fours.
By afternoon a small crowd had gathered—farmers, barbers, store clerks, insurance men, and tired women dragging children around by sticky hands—to peer under the hood and to hear Loy Gordon and his Pleasant Valley Boys play “Wildwood Flower.”
Elmo, Mamie, Jerry Lee, and his Aunt Eva were looking on, listening to the free show. “My boy can do better’n that,” Elmo suddenly said, and took off for the stage, with purpose, and told the organizers of this hootenanny that the real talent was standing down there in the crowd popping his bubblegum. The car dealers did not see what harm it would do, and Jerry Lee was welcomed onstage to polite applause. People thought it was cute, letting this boy sit in, and the piano player relinquished his old upright. Jerry Lee took a breath. They were expecting something country, something gospel, and he looked out across the crowd and hollered “Wine Spo-dee-o-dee!” so loud it made Mamie blanch and Elmo grin like a loon.
Now I got a nickel if you got a dime.
Let’s get together and buy some wine.
Wine over here, wine over there,
Drinkin’ that mess everywhere
The crowd at first did not know what to think about this kid banging that piano like a crazy man and hollering that “nigra music.” But the sunburned men tapped their Lehigh work boots in time to Stick McGhee, and people were grinning and looking downright foolish.
“The boy’s doing pretty good,” said Aunt Eva. “Maybe we ought to take up a collection.”
“Money makes the mare trot,” Mamie said.
They passed a hat. When it came back around, it sagged with silver.
“I think I made about fourteen dollars,” says Jerry Lee.
He was a professional at last.
“I was paid to sing and play the piano.”
He walked in the clouds for a little bit after that. He quit school, just saw no future in it. He and Elmo heaved the piano on back of the Ford, and they went on the road, making a little money here and there, Jerry Lee singing and playing gospel and hillbilly and blues and even that Al Jolson, and in time he was taking home trophies from talent shows and doing regular spots on nearby radio stations. “I had my own show,” a fifteen-minute spot on WNAT out of Natchez sponsored by a Ferriday grocery store. “People started to hear about me, started to say, ‘Hey, who is this kid down there?’” It was mostly gospel, and some country; he couldn’t cut loose—not yet—and do the kind of music he wanted.
His cousins did similar gigs, spreading their own talent through the bottomland, though Jimmy still worried that singing and playing boogie-woogie was sending them all to hell on a handcar
. Jerry Lee sometimes worried the same—every Sunday in church reminded him of the danger of such intense secular pleasure—but not as deeply or as often. “I wanted to be a star. Knew I could be, if . . .” If the starmakers in Memphis or Nashville would listen to him, really listen, and hear in his piano and voice that he was the only one like him in the ever-lovin’ world.
Impatient as he was, he knew his music was wasted if the people couldn’t hear it, and for that he needed a bigger stage. What he wanted was a honky-tonk, and that troubled his mama. Mamie would have loved to see her son in the ministry, would have loved to see him onstage in a white suit singing only sacred songs, but to say that she castigated her boy for his secular music would be to exaggerate things, her son says. “Mama didn’t like some of it,” said Jerry Lee, “but Mama was with me,” no matter what came, and he knew it then, and he believes it now.
He tested that tolerance and allegiance across the river in Natchez. The rough nightclubs there were the only place he knew in his small world where musicians could make a living, or at least a little piece of one. But ten dollars or so a night was more than he would make picking cotton, which he wasn’t going to do anyway, even at gunpoint. So while he was still living under his daddy’s roof, he snuck off to the clubs in Natchez to ask for steady work. The no-nonsense club owners, men who had seen it all, started to smile when the boy walked in. The smile slipped off their faces when they heard him play the boogie and the hillbilly music and even Gene Autry. He told them he was looking for work as a piano man, mostly, but could beat the drums, too, if there was cash money in it.
“I was thirteen the first time I left home to play, soon as I was big enough,” he remembers. “I was sittin’ on a piano stool where my feet weren’t even touchin’ the floor. That’s how young I was. This was the Blue Cat Club, down Under-the-Hill, the old Natchez,” a riverfront neighborhood that had been a warren of iniquity and villainy for more than two hundred years but a gold mine for musical style. Here a musician had to know everything. A request was not always a suggestion, not from a man who cut pulpwood for a living and drank his whiskey by the shot. Jerry Lee played hillbilly. He played “Release Me,” and “Goodnight, Irene,” and even Glenn Miller. “I learned to play everything as long as I could get a tip out of it”—and learned to get down low when the bottles started flying. After a while, he says, “I’d get homesick and tell ’em, ‘I got to go home and see Mama.’” But he kept coming back.
At those clubs in Natchez Under-the-Hill, he played with six or seven watches dangling from each skinny arm, put there by customers who figured they’d be safe on the arms of a boy if there happened to be a raid—which happened frequently at the Blue Cat Club. “The owner’s name was Charlie. He says, ‘Now, if the cops come by and ask you how old you are, you tell ’em you’re twenty-one.’ I said, ‘Oh, sure.’”
The police, at least, had a sense of humor.
“How old are you, boy?” they always asked.
“I’m twenty-one,” he lied.
“Well,” they always said, laughing, “that sounds about right.”
“I have been twenty-one,” said Jerry Lee, unwilling to let a good lie go, “for some time.”
For the next few years, the clubs would nurture Jerry Lee’s music, as much as any place can when the owner walks around with a big .44 sagging his slacks and women routinely have their wigs slapped off their heads by other women. He walked to his car past whorehouses and heroin fiends. Nellie Jackson ran a famous cathouse in Natchez in those days, where you might run into a high official with his suspenders down, but Jerry Lee says he was not a customer. “I walked up to the front door one time, and I turned around and left,” he says. He had no business there.
His mama worried and would stay up all night sometimes, till she heard her son’s car pull up in the yard, sometimes in the dawn. It went on and on, night after night, till he was fourteen, fifteen, and there were moments of great doubt, moments when, looking at her tired face, he wondered if he could somehow have it all, if he could tame that boogie and bend it to the Lord, tame his lusts and get himself a white suit and a tent and use his burgeoning talents for the church. But he was surviving by playing music. By fall of ’51, he was going on sixteen, “and was already a man and acted like one,” and past ready to find a wife and marry, at least by the standards of his people. But he worked in a bar, and he knew that a man—a smart one, anyway—does not find a wife in a bar. Such a union is well and truly doomed, built in the quicksands of sin. A man, a wise man, found his wife in church.
He saw the girl and made a covenant with his eyes. “I was playing ‘Peace in the Valley’ when I saw her. She was sitting in the front row. What a beauty. A woman, really. And I really blew my cool, man. I got it right between the eyes.”
It was 1951. Her name was Dorothy, and she was seventeen. Her father was the Reverend Jewell Barton, a traveling evangelist from up around Monroe who came to Ferriday to save the wicked and brought his beautiful daughter with him. He was not worried about exposing her to the sin of this place, to the temptations of the road. Dorothy, whose hair fell in dark, lustrous waves, was a devout girl, and the reverend knew he had to go into the wilderness to do his job, had to venture to places like this railroad town of Ferriday, which had been drawing men like him since its beginning. He was a warrior for Christ and needed weapons. He hired Jerry Lee to play piano, to pack ’em in. The boy’s reputation as a piano player had spread. It was a good revival, with good preaching and singing and music, but Jerry Lee did not see or hear much of it, truthfully, after he saw the dark-haired girl. He was fixed on her.
“I’d just turned sixteen, and she set my world afire. I mean, I was in a fever. That’s right, a fever. And I knew I would do anything, promise anything, anything I had to do.”
He even shared his dreams, told her he wanted to hear his songs on the radio, maybe even be a big star someday. “She told me, ‘Maybe you can have your name on one of those records with the big hole in the middle,’ and I said, ‘You’re crazy, a record has a little-bitty hole in it.’ I thought she was making fun of me. But she was just talkin’ about a 45.”
They started dating, and “smooching in the car,” in ’51. He knows it was ’51 because he had a ’41 Ford, and like many Southerners, he keeps track of time and events through the lineage of his cars. “Uncle Lee had loaned me the money” for the car, he recalls. “I had to go through my Aunt Stella to get him to do it, but he left me a check laying on the table. It was white, with whitewall tires and fender skirts. John Frank Edward wrecked it, in 1958.” They spent long, frustrating hours in that car, he and Dorothy, parked in the pines.
“We both believed it was sin, to do anything more,” he says now, but after three torturous months, he wanted more, needed more, and used all his charm to get it. She told him he could just stop it right there, till he walked her down the aisle or at least through the courthouse door.
They were in love, Jerry Lee told her. They had professed it.
“But I’m saving myself for my husband,” she said.
“Well,” said Jerry Lee, “that ain’t no problem at all.”
It was not the most romantic proposal, but it got the job done.
“She was a fine woman, a fine and beautiful woman,” he says, but his mama and daddy knew the boy was a long way from being ready to start a family; sometimes they were just grateful he was not yet in Angola. “If I had just listened to mama and daddy, . . .” he laments. “But I insisted on gettin’ married. Daddy said, ‘Mamie, you know how hard headed the boy is,’ and then he threw the car keys at me and said, ‘Here, go on, and learn for yourself.’”
They set the wedding for February of ’52. “Uncle Lee got us the license,” says Jerry Lee, who did not then and would never see much need for paperwork when he was in a marrying mood. He wrote on the form that he was a twenty-year-old farmer. The family members who came to the small ceremony said they could not remember a time when two such beautiful people, one fa
ir and one dark, had found each other and were joined in the light of the true gospel, and how lovely their children would be. A photographer came from the Concordia Sentinel and took their picture for the social page. Their honeymoon was one night in a hotel on Main Street in Ferriday, across from the Ford dealership where Jerry Lee had first squeezed silver from the crowd. “It’s an old folks’ home now,” he says, and smiles.
He had dreamed of that night, daydreamed of it, and schemed for it. They were both bashful, though, and for hours they just sat and talked, till she asked him if they should make love and Jerry Lee, smooth, said he thought that was why they had gotten married in the first place, “wasn’t it?” and by the light of the Babin-Paul Ford Motor Co., consummated their marriage in the sanctity of their faith. But after all that denial and all that conflict with the faith he had been raised within, “It wasn’t what I thought it should be. I thought it should be more.” He woke up the next morning and sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. He looked over at the beautiful girl, sleeping.
This is not right.
“It took me about thirty minutes to figure out I had made a mistake, that I had got married too young,” for the most dirt-common reason people do such a thing. “Man, I told myself, I have fouled up. It had nothin’ to do with her. She kept her end of the bargain.” What was missing was missing from within him.
In that special hell reserved for young people who marry in the heat of a moment, Dorothy started to plan their life together just as he started to scheme for their life apart. “She didn’t think there was anything happening that wasn’t supposed to be happening. She was in love.” He had only whatever you have when love burns quickly out, and no plan at all for how to live it out. She moved in with the Lewis family as though there was still some future there. For about two months, Jerry Lee tried to be a dutiful husband, at least on the outside, working as a truck driver and a carpenter’s helper, playing his piano in the service of the Lord. He even tried to preach. Two months of that nonstop goodness almost killed him.