by Rick Bragg
“She was a good girl, a pure girl,” he says. In a way, she was just too good. One night, about two months after they said “I do,” he came out the front door of the house at Black River wearing a white sport coat.
“Where you going?” she asked.
“Me and Cecil Harrelson’s goin’ coon hunting.”
He had no ready explanation as to why anyone would go coon hunting in a white sport coat.
Mamie liked Dorothy and, like all smart mamas, had feared this.
“You ain’t going nowhere,” she told him.
He talked back, and she slapped him. “Boy,” she told him, “you married this girl. You come here and take care of her.”
He walked into the yard with his wife calling to him, and his mother’s anger cutting at his back.
“I love you,” Dorothy cried. “Please don’t go.”
He headed out with Cecil, and left his wife with his mama.
He and Cecil were going to a bar, to hear music and play music and perhaps consort with women; his reluctance to do such outside the conventions of the church was breaking down. “It seemed like women fell out of the trees,” he says, women his age and older, all beautiful, all willing. Across the river in the honky-tonks, they waited for him in great variety. “Playing in the clubs . . . you just do it. They just lay it on you. It was just about impossible to resist. And I just had to pick one out. It just kind of seemed like a dream. It just seemed like ‘The Impossible Dream,’ as Elvis would say. I’d see these girls walking by the bandstand, mouthing ‘I love you,’ and I’m sixteen, seventeen, and I see these girls, and I just try to turn my head and do my songs and get off the stage,” but he did not try all that hard. “And, son, it was good. As long as I wanted them.”
After a while, Dorothy went home to Monroe, heartbroken. “And me and Cecil went to New Orleans.”
Once, if you really wanted to hear a piano ring, you went to Storyville, where the ladies of the evening waved languidly from the balconies, half-stoned, sugar cubes in their teeth and absinthe on their breath. Jelly Roll Morton worked here, and King Oliver, playing in the brothels while the gentlemen waited or made up their minds. A music called jazz took hold here, between the hot pillow joints and vaudeville acts and streetcars on the Desire line, but by the early 1950s the whorehouses had moved more deeply into the constant shadows of New Orleans, and the noise had shifted to Bourbon Street. Here the sidewalks throbbed with light, liquor, sex, and music, with more than fifty burlesque shows, striptease acts, and other distractions between Canal Street and Esplanade, most of them clustered in about five city blocks. Vice had a grandeur to it then. The nightclubs featured everything from the dance of the seven veils to slapstick to a man who could scratch the top of his head with his big toe, all to live music, one band bleeding onto the street and into another band, and another, and so on, till it was all just a kind of mad cacophony. Here, men lined up for a city block outside the Casino Royale, Sho Bar, and 500 Club to see Wildcat Frenchie, Lilly Christine the Cat Girl, Alouette LeBlanc the Tassel Twirler, Kalantan the Heavenly Body, Linda Brigette the Cupid Doll, Tee Tee Red, Blaze Starr (who kept company with the somewhat peculiar Governor Earl Long), and Evangeline the Oyster Girl, who rose from a shell the size of a sedan and danced with a strategically placed giant pearl. Soldiers hooted, bouncers slapped them silly, and the Mob took a little piece of every dollar. The liquor was overpriced and watered down and the pimps and the pickpockets and dope addicts moved through the cigarette smoke like wolves, and ten hard-earned dollars would not buy you a meal at Galatoire’s but might be just enough to get you killed. And it was all kind of wonderful, in a way, if all you were doing was passing through on the way to someplace that still made a little bit of sense.
Jerry Lee Lewis and Cecil Harrelson, sixteen years old, walked unafraid. Cecil, though smaller than Jerry Lee, was the perfect accomplice for such an adventure. He was tough and quick and capable, and he knew how to talk to people, how to sell his friend’s talent. They had become fast friends since that day when they both tried to murder their homeroom teachers at Ferriday High School. “Cecil was bad to use a knife,” said Jerry Lee. “He was the Killer.”
They walked past the barkers and painted girls till they saw a place that looked likely, and ducked inside. They never had to worry about being underage; unless you were pushed inside in a pram, the New Orleans bartenders would serve you liquor here, and tell you where to buy some dope, and let you see a woman dance with a snake.
“I seen things I never seen,” Cecil recalled, actually giggling.
“We never bought a drink,” says Jerry.
Cecil would ask to see “the boss man of this here establishment.” When the man arrived, Cecil made his simple pitch. “I got a boy here,” he said, “who can play the piano better’n anybody you ever saw, and I was wondering if you’d let him play a tune.”
“And some of them just looked at me like I was crazy,” said Cecil, thinking back. “But once they heard him play, even a little bit, that was all it took.”
Jerry Lee sat down and did a hillbilly jump tune called the “Hadacol Boogie,” named for a booze-laden tonic—played it hot—and in the chorus the drunken throng sang it with him like they’d all gotten together that morning and planned it out.
Standin’ on the corner with the bottle in my hand
And up steps my mama with the Hadacol man
She done the Hadacol boogie
“They were pouring us liquor, double shots, just like in the movies. And we just moved on down Bourbon Street, club to club. They even started hearing about me, started hearing about that wild boy that played the boogie-woogies on the piano. And the more we went the drunker we got. . . . By the time the night was over, we was so drunk we couldn’t see. Caked in vomit. Couldn’t stand up. My first real drunk.” They were fortunate to get out of the Crescent City alive, he realizes now. But he had tasted the apple, and he liked it.
He’d been needing to cut loose a little bit, needed it for some time; he was starting to understand that a man just has to cut loose now and then, unless he’s scared of the world or scared of his woman. Still, somewhere during that debauched trip to New Orleans, he managed to create some musical history. At the J&M studio, where Fats Domino had been making hits for a few years now, he cut what is believed to be his first recording. Two songs: a Lefty Frizzell ballad called “Don’t Stay Away (Till Love Grows Cold),” which he sang high and plaintive, and a stomping boogie that showed off all he knew. Cecil would hold on to that record into his old age.
He was done with marriage, he knew that much, and through with Dorothy. He told himself he was single in his own mind, and that should have been enough, but the State of Louisiana insisted on paperwork or resolutions or such as that. He had always hated forms and formality, hated tedium, hated the rules the other people lived by, so he did nothing, just kept on living within the rules he laid down for himself. A lot of rich men do that, and it’s easy to pull off if you’re a Kennedy or Lee Calhoun, but it takes guts to try it if you’re a poor man. “I just done what I wanted,” he says. He says it a lot.
It is why, when he walked past a car lot after closing time and saw a good-looking automobile, he saw no reason not to borrow the car for a little while, at least until morning. In the rules of regular people, that was called grand theft auto, and a felony. In such a small town, though, security on the lots was lax. “I guarantee you, if I walked by a car lot and saw one with the keys in it back then, I was gone. I just said, ‘Well, looka here.’ I drove it all over the country. But I took it back. I always took ’em back. I got all kinds of car, and parked ’em right where I had borrowed ’em from. Last one was a ’50 Chevrolet.” In a way, he treated some people that same way. He rarely speaks with regret about anyone, but he does when he talks about Dorothy. “Dorothy told me I was the only man she had ever been with, and I know that was true. . . . I left her cryin’ on my mama’s doorstep. ‘Son, you’re wrong,’ she told me. I’m ashamed i
t happened. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have done it.”
He made one more attempt at a holy life, in part because he wanted to ease his mother’s mind. Or at least he went to a place where doing right was the general idea. He might have even made it—probably not, but maybe—if someone had just had the good sense to lock up the piano.
The student body waited respectfully in the pews, not one painted fingernail or undone button among them, some five hundred souls humming, but quietly so, with school spirit, and alight in the love of the true gospel. The male students at Southwestern Bible Institute wore coats and ties and starched shirts to class, and the women wore long skirts and did not cut their hair, some for so long that it swung against the backs of their legs when they walked across campus in their flat-heeled shoes. Makeup was forbidden; lipstick was contraband. The young women were required to wear stockings at all times, but fall came late to East Texas that season and it was too hot to breathe, so some of the coeds drew a line down the back of their bare legs with black shoe polish, for relief. That was the year the editor of the yearbook cropped the pictures of the students so tightly that all you could see was a circle of their faces, because some of the young women had sinned against God and styled their hair. When one of the boys, Billy Paul Branham, went walking through campus after dark one evening, eating an ice cream cone and lustily singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” the dean of men gave him ten demerits.
It was not a place that rewarded individuality. “Apparently not,” says Jerry Lee.
The school offered courses in church business, missionary organization, Bible study, and of course, Pentecostal history and prophets. But there was not a lot of shouting here in the chapel on Sunday mornings, in a sanctuary sealed tight in stained glass, and no one got happy, very much, in the middle of a song. Just off campus, Victorian mansions and gingerbread architecture fronted clean, quiet streets, with not a mudhole or a black racer or an armadillo anywhere in sight. Here in this unforgiving place, Jerry Lee sat at his piano, looked over the student body, and decided it was time for a change.
The boy had always had the power to win people over, had a personality like an industrial magnet. He would be a formidable evangelist. Still married to a young woman he had no intention of keeping, he finally bowed to his mother’s wishes and decided to use his God-given talents as a singer and piano player to bring people to the Lord. He enrolled at a place called Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas. The name of the town means “cow creek” or “buffalo creek” or “fat wildcat,” depending on which linguist you believe. Waxahachie was a 380-mile, dusty bus ride from Ferriday. He chose the school there in part because it had a junior college division that was content to overlook small matters such as prerequisites and even high school diplomas. Aunt Stella and Uncle Lee helped with the tuition and bus fare, thinking he might make a preacher after all but certain he needed to get out of Ferriday before a jealous boyfriend or irate daddy caught him from behind with a pine knot or a pipe wrench—or before some car dealer had him arrested or shot him from the dark. Mamie kissed him good-bye and told him she was so proud of him, and cried a little. Elmo shook his hand like a man, and as the big Trailways pulled out from Ferriday, it carried a whole busload of unreasonable expectation.
“I really could preach,” he says, and he did plan on giving the place a solid try, at least at first. Almost immediately, however, he was stultified. The classes were as dull and irrelevant to his life as the ones he had dodged before. He did not see the point, in a school in which he was purportedly readying himself to be a preacher, of immersing himself in a library of thick, dusty books. The Bible was the Word of God, the Rock, the Great Speckled Bird, and a man preached from it, period. The Bible was all a man needs to know, he says even now. The rest was just fluttering paper and wind.
So he dodged these classes too, and crawled from his window late at night to go carouse. But the problem with playing hooky from Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, was that when you got over the wall you were still in Waxahachie, Texas. So he caught a ride to Dallas, a half hour or so up the road. Dallas, with its bars and big-haired women, was a whole other temptation, and he even found some boogie-woogie there. But he almost always made it to supper in the college dining hall, and he became popular at the school, especially with young women, who liked the haystack of wavy blond hair on his head and liked the way he could sing and how he was not afraid to sing anytime he felt like it, whether it was sanctioned by the school or not, as though demerits just rolled off his back. After singing in the Blue Cat Club, where men went after each other with the jagged ends of broken beer bottles, a demerit did not exactly send him aquiver.
“Me and Joey Walden and two or three other guys, we’d just start singing together,” a cappella in the dinner line, says Jerry Lee. “We done it all the time,” so often that it became a ritual for the students in the cafeteria.
“We all tried to get there in the dining hall when they got there because we enjoyed their singing,” said Pearry Lee Green, who started at Southwestern the same year as Jerry Lee and would go on to be the pastor of the Tucson Tabernacle. “They sang hymns. You didn’t sing anything that wasn’t a hymn, then.” To Jerry Lee, it was just natural; in the Assembly of God you were supposed to sing and sing loud, and send the ascending devil skulking and beaten back down into the netherworld with the power and exultation of your voice. Jerry Lee also made sure that the trio sang as the young ladies descended a double stairway into the dining hall, so he could get a good look at them. “Dorothy came to see me up there,” he says, “and that did not go over well.” He was still married to her but had long since stopped acting like he was.
He was three months into his fall semester when the Institute put on a “singspiration,” a kind of assembly and talent show that gathered the school’s musicians and singers for a night of religion-themed entertainment. The emcee would be Pearry Lee Green, who led a prayer group for postwar Japan, was business manager of the college yearbook, a member of the student council, president of the Texas Club, and president of the Governor’s Club, and had a loose affiliation with the Future Business Leaders of America. Jerry Lee was invited to play a piano solo. One of the students who had heard him play, who knew Jerry Lee’s style on the piano, warned Pearry Lee that the boy was “different,” maybe even “too different.”
“Look,” Jerry Lee told them all when they voiced their concerns, “you want this to go over right, don’t you?”
As Pearry Lee remembers, Coleman McDuff, who would go on to become a stalwart singer in the Assembly of God ministries, opened the program by singing “The Lord’s Prayer” in a lilting tenor. Some of the students had tears in their eyes. “I mean, Coleman was a singer,” said Green. “He could break a glass with his voice.”
Then he walked out to introduce Jerry Lee Lewis of Ferriday, Louisiana, who would perform the Assembly of God standard, “My God Is Real.”
“I understand,” he told the crowd, “we’re going to have a change in tempo.”
Jerry Lee looked out over the student body, still in the peaceful glow of Coleman McDuff.
He stabbed one key, drove it home like a claw hammer coming down on a bell, and launched into “My God Is Real.” It was so hot and fast, Green thought it was “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
“It was up-tempo, a little bit,” concedes Jerry Lee.
It was rolling, thumping, rollicking. So much so that at first the young people, all raised in the church but not in the church on Texas Street, did not know what to think. Even the ones from the smaller, rawer, more distant Assembly of God churches, where people spoke in tongues and wept and danced in the pews, had never seen it done like this, because it had never been done like this. Only the words were familiar.
My God is real, He’s real in my soul.
For He has washed and made me whole.
“People were shocked,” said Pearry Lee.
It would only get better, or worse, de
pending on your affiliation.
“Up-tempo, spiritual,” is how Jerry Lee describes it now.
Then he unleashed the boogie. He was true to the song, but he was also true to what was in his heart in that moment, and that ripped and roared through the chapel. He stuck that leg out toward the audience and shifted around so he could see them twitch and suffer, and all that hair tumbled into his eyes as he hammered out:
His love for me, His precious love, is like pure gold.
My God is real, for I can feel him in my soul.
The students, the ones who were not paralyzed by this point, started to move. They started rocking in their seats, and tapping their feet in time, and then some of them even started waving their arms in the air. A few of them came up out of their seats and even did a little dance, right there in the pews. Now we’re gettin’ somewheres, Jerry Lee thought, and he pushed it harder. He raked the keys like he was wringing out the last bit of boogie they had in them, and by the time he was done, he was sweating. “I always knew when I started sweatin’,” he says, “I had it knocked.”
But the crowd was still moving.
“They were screaming, howling,” he says.
The applause boomed inside the chapel, went on and on. It was the most applause, the loudest, he had ever had.
“It scared me, a little bit,” he says. “I said, What’s going on here?”
They wanted more.
He was willing but saw the dean coming toward him.
“He crooked his finger at me,” he remembers. “He was a little bit upset.”
“Do you see what you’ve done to all these young people? You’ve driven these young people crazy.” He said the word crazy like he was dragging it down a cabbage grater.