by Rick Bragg
“He was just happy to play,” says Jerry Lee. “He taught me. I’d sit beside him, and say, ‘Mr. Paul, can you show me exactly how you do that?’” recalls Jerry Lee, in one of those moments when he was not himself, when bravado sloughs away and you see the ghost of a desperate, searching young man. “Mr. Paul was good to me.”
To Paul Whitehead, dull music was just one more place to sit in the dark. “He’d wedge that violin in place with two pieces of pasteboard,” so it would hold still as he tried to saw it in two, and Jerry Lee beat the drums or the piano like it stole something, and they made people stomp and howl. Some nights it seemed like Mr. Paul, his scarred and clouded eyes hidden by round tortoiseshell sunglasses, was wired into their very bones, and he would play hotter and quicker to make people move faster, faster, and stomp the boards harder, harder. He could tell when it happened through the soles of his shoes. What power, in a man who had to be led to the bathroom and back out again. “And I liked his style,” says Jerry Lee.
“Looka here,” Mr. Paul would say, then run his thumb all the way down the keyboard, in that waterfall sound, and play Hoagy Carmichael in a redneck bar.
Ah, but that was long ago.
Now my consolation is in the stardust of a song.
“Then he’d say, ‘Let’s do “Jealous Heart.”’ I mean, we covered everything.”
Some people, numbskulled, thought he was deaf and would yell a request into his ear. He always recoiled, as if they had shouted into his ear through an electric bullhorn. Some people would say that was myth, too, that a blind man’s other senses are not so heightened, but then Mr. Paul could tell you how high the cotton was from the rising dust, the far-off drone of crop dusters, or the lingering bite of cotton poison. He could tell if a club owner shorted him, too, by the feel of the fabric of the bills—people try to pull a lot of things on a blind man. “I told him once, ‘Mr. Paul, I hear you used to be pretty tough in a fight,” says Jerry Lee. “He told me, ‘Yeah, but I’ve tried to forget those days.’ They say he swung at where he thought they was. ‘But I don’t do that fightin’ no more,’ he told me. ‘Those days are gone. I just play, now.’”
Jerry Lee beat the drums and spelled Mr. Paul on piano when he played trumpet or accordion, and never missed a thing. He spent every minute he could with the older man, and over time he became protective of him. Once a man named O. Z. Maples led Paul to the bathroom and came back without him. “Where’s Paul?” Jerry Lee asked.
“I left him in there,” the man said.
Jerry Lee told him to go back and get him, now.
“Oh, he’s all right in there,” O. Z. said. “I asked him if he wanted me to turn the light on for him.”
“Gonna be kinda hard for me to play piano around this place, after hearing you,” he told Jerry Lee. “You tickle that ivory real nice, son.”
Once, in that odd calm after a blistering set, he said quietly: “You gonna be a big star, Mister Jerry.”
“He didn’t have a jealous bone in his body,” says Jerry Lee now. “He was my true friend.” He was a witness, night by night, as the boy’s talent tumbled into alignment, as old music was remade in those hot, heaving little clubs. It was like waiting for a storm to build, but slower, over months, then years, but he heard it coming. He never claimed he showed the boy a thing, but he always, always reminded the boy that big things were coming, ’cause he heard the lightning building and heard it better than anyone.
It is romantic to believe that Mr. Paul really did somehow foresee it all, really did see Jerry Lee’s future and the future of rock and roll entwined. Jerry Lee only knows what he was told. Mr. Paul told the boy he was a natural-born blues crier and a genuine honky-tonk man, and that was just the start of things. He said he would have loved to have seen him, just once, seen that golden hair and ferocious face the people talked about, the women crowded up close, to touch. But in a way he did see it, every time Jerry Lee cut loose with the blues and out poured something raw and wild.
But it was his piano that moved Paul Whitehead the most. He knew the boy had been playing in front of crowds since he was nine, and there was a lot of church in the boy’s music still; some bar owners did not want a piano player whose songs made your wedding ring glow hot on your hand as you danced with a waitress. Mr. Paul heard the genius in it and told the boy to “go ’head on, son.” Most right-handed piano men really just played one-handed, keeping rhythm with the left hand while finding the melody with the right, but Jerry Lee had mastered that kid stuff on a thousand late nights on his old upright and moved on to something different. His left hand was sure and deft, and his right hand was controlled chaos, wildly searching for new sounds across the keys till it almost seemed he could play two melodies at once, like there was someone or something else there beside him on that piano bench, something spooky. To Mr. Paul, who was pretty good himself, who knew the limits of the instrument, it was lovely. He knew Beethoven and Brahms, and three-fingered juke men, and every piano man living or dead who ever drifted down from an antenna, and in that boy’s piano he heard it all and none of it. The boy was a species unto himself, and he was still learning.
By summer of ’52, Jerry Lee had given up on the straight world completely. He had tried manual labor again, tried to shovel gravel and push a wheelbarrow in Ferriday. “I told the boss man, Mr. Durant, to put me on the sand pile or on the rock pile. . . . I was just a kid, trying to pour that cement, pushing them wheelbarrows beside them big men. Then I told Mr. Durant I didn’t want to do that no more. He told me, ‘Well, if you ain’t gonna be no bull, you shouldn’t have bellowed.’ I told him, ‘Well, you won’t see me no more around here,’ and they cut me my check for half a day’s work—half a day—and I went to the house.”
He cast around for anything he could. “I tried construction, tried driving a truck, tried being a carpenter’s helper . . . didn’t last at that too long.” The bald, hard truth is, the things a body was supposed to do and expected to do and required to do in this life, if you were anybody else in this universe besides him, had never lined up exactly tongue-in-groove with the way he went about living. The thing is, he tried, till he did not try anymore. His daddy had been a great carpenter and fine farmer, yet he dreamed the whole time of singing “Mexicali Rose” at the Grand Ole Opry. Jerry Lee saw no reason to labor in a long life of that, on a treadmill of hoping, dreaming, wanting, and not to cut right to the dream. “I couldn’t,” he says.
The churches of home had acknowledged and welcomed his gift. But the churches and revivals and camp meetings did not pay well; mostly did not pay at all. He was like a tick on a leather sofa; it feels like home, but there just isn’t much profit in it. His cousin Jimmy had devoted himself full-time to the Lord. He had seen a red-eyed demon outside his trailer and was flung into the ministry like a human cannonball, but Jerry Lee was not called that way.
That pretty much left the beer joints. Week after week, six days a week, he played with bands that tore up the night, serenading the fallen, the drunken, and the lonely, and a growing number of people who were just on fire with this new music, this music that did not even have a name. “Singing and piano playing . . . and women. That’s all I ever needed,” he says. Some nights, some glorious nights, he made a hundred, even two hundred, from the tip jar, but most nights he made walking-around money, hamburger money, and even on the fattest nights, he was still stuck fast in small time.
He remembers, on one long-ago gig, an empty tip jar.
“Not a resounding success,” said his beloved Aunt Stella, worried for the boy.
“Not resounding,” Jerry Lee said.
But even as a boy he knew, if you were ever going to be hit by lightning, you had to stand under a tree. The Wagon Wheel and places like it scattered around the South were where the music was in great disturbance, right here in his own dirt. Why, Memphis itself was a fast car ride away, and Memphis was where the whole world was changing, even if it seemed a distant universe. In the small clubs, people wanted
that hillbilly music, and the old, raw, bloody blues, and they wanted it shouted loud, to make the hot divorcée in the corner forget her sorry husband and shake something. Jerry Lee was born to do it. He had heard it all before, had heard it all at Haney’s, and he was out from under the table now. “Wasn’t nobody gonna throw me out.”
She roll her belly
Like she roll her biscuit dough
But instead of parroting a black bluesman, he almost yodeled on the higher, bleaker notes, in a rolling, keening exultation of pain and suffering and lust, something from the other side of town or way out in the lonesome pines, but a place as rough, hard, and mean. His people pulled the cotton sack, too, and walked a chain gang, and sat in the hot dark of the federal prison in New Orleans. To understand it, to see the way it was, you have to think of it in the box it came in, the smoke and cave dark, for discretion, where a hundred people jammed jaw to jaw to medicate themselves, overalls and bow ties and strapless dresses lined up at the bar, all there to fight and cuss and rave and cheat, and some to just get lost in the liquor and the rhythms for a few hours; no one was asking for anything more. But they got Paul, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his benign face unchanging, the accordion around his neck and the trumpet at his lips and the fiddle at his right hand, and no one would know, as he sipped his milk, if it was a good day or the deepest, darkest night of his soul. And they got Jerry Lee, whip thin, hair in his eyes, intent on the music, the keyboard. He was not the showman then he would become in just a few years. The hard shell of the Pentecostals had not shattered, but it was beginning to vibrate, and if you listened close enough you could hear it crack. More and more he was replacing Mr. Paul on piano now, and he played rough with it and howled the blues. But for now, he did it all sitting down. Like Mr. Paul, he was unconcerned with the louts and loud talkers, the knife fighters and dustups and drunken husbands. “People was always pullin’ guns and knives,” he says. “Didn’t amount to nothin’ . . . I carried a pistol myself,” in case a blind-drunk farm boy got crazy over his girlfriend’s wandering gaze.
He played from late in the evening until two, three, even four in the morning, sometimes till the last drunk had tumbled to the floor. He never got tired, or at least his body never told his mind that it was running on fumes. The truck drivers tipped him with Benzedrine. “They’d give me a whole bag of ’em, if I’d play ’em a song. I’d flip one into my mouth and just keep on playin’,” he says, “and never even miss a lick.” And the crowd ate it up like peach ice cream.
It didn’t hurt that he was tall and handsome and had eyes like the sun shining through a jar of dark honey, and that he carried himself like the King of England. And then there was that hair. “That hair, it used to be just waves, just lay in waves,” said Doris Poole, who was born in ’34 and lived in Ferriday when Jerry Lee was a boy. “He looked so good.” And when it fell into his face, it made the women like him some good bit better, so of course he shook it and made it do that right off.
He did not have to act dangerous; he was. He did not have to act a little bit crazy; he was. He did not have to act like he would steal your wives and daughters; he would, in front of you, because he had a good taste for it now and it was like trying to keep a bull out of the dairy lot when the fence was down. He might have been a little rough, a little coarse, but he could get smooth if he ever wanted to, and the smooth guys would never have the grit and the menace of Jerry Lee. And no matter how many women say to their husbands and other nice men that they want no part of such a man, the truth is . . . well, the truth.
He was getting a name, a persona, in the flat country and the piney woods. “I went up and played the Atlas Bar in Monroe. They let me play a few tunes, put a jar up there for tips. Before I knew it, I was making two hundred dollars a week, playing my piano, singing my songs.” But the good money never lasted. Since the days when he’d played the talent shows and car lots and played on the back of his daddy’s truck, people had been talking about how he would hit it big someday—just never the right people. Someday seemed to stretch on forever, like those endless brown fields that surrounded him. To sustain this life—and, more important, to survive it and push beyond it—he knew he had to have a record, and if it was to carry him out of here, it had to be a big one. “I knew once I had my record, I was off to the races . . . knew there wouldn’t be stoppin’ me. It all tied together. I noticed the girls right off, knew they liked my playin’ and singin’, knew they liked me . . . that they looked at me and they saw something different.” But the record men up north hadn’t yet noticed, did not yet seem to care.
This life was not what Mamie had dreamed of for their son. But she and Elmo came to see him, and dreamed still.
“You sweat too much,” Mamie told him.
Well, let me tell ya somethin’—what I’m talkin’ ’bout.
When Elmo walked into the smoke-filled room the first time, he knew that he was home, here with the music and the dancing and the pretty women and the smell of legal whiskey in the air.
I’ll bet my bottom dollar, ain’t a cherry in this house.
Mamie stood with her purse in front of her like a shield.
“Why you sweatin’ so much?” his mama asked.
She had never refused him anything, but this. . .
“You gonna have a heart attack,” she warned.
Mamie worried, yes, but she also knew that the world is hard and it’s harder if you’re broke, so she told him she was with him, as she would always be with him, and made sure he had an ironed shirt. The young girls, these new brides, forgot such as that sometimes. If you’re going to toil in Sodom, be neat about it.
In ’53, on a late-night trip to Natchez radio station WNAT, Jerry Lee met another lovely brunette—he was developing a taste for them—named Jane Mitcham, and when a protesting boyfriend told him to “Hold on now, hoss, that’s my girlfriend,” he answered with a line he would use all his life.
“Naw,” Jerry Lee said, “she used to be your girlfriend.”
Jane was seventeen and different. She was not a trembling flower. She would also soon be pregnant. Jerry Lee told her he would like to do the right thing, but he was still married to Dorothy, who was currently residing in Monroe. Jane went home to Natchez and told her family about her situation and about Jerry Lee’s refusal to wed. Not long after that, the male members of Jane’s family showed up in Ferriday with horsewhips and pistols and a duck gun. Jerry Lee did not think much of the marriage law, but he did not think much of threatening relatives either. He downplays any actual danger to his person, but people here still say, only half joking, that it all came down to whether the boy wanted to be a bigamist or a dead man. Not all of Jane’s family wanted her to marry; some just wanted him to be dead, and it is believed his Uncle Lee Calhoun stepped in to negotiate. The result was that Jerry Lee did not die but instead got two wives, though because one of those wives was in far-off Monroe, this was acceptable. He married Jane two weeks before he was divorced from Dorothy. “I was bad to get married,” he says. “Never let it be said that Jerry Lee Lewis turned a lady down.” But Jerry Lee secretly knew he had won. He had lied on his first marriage license, claiming to be a twenty-year-old farmer, and his second was null and void because of the preexisting marriage. “So, see, if you think about it, I ain’t never really been married,” he says, at least to that point.
Jane believed she was married, and she expected Jerry Lee to act like he was, too. In the span of a year, Jerry Lee went from a preacher-in-training who was acting single to a man with a baby on the way and a wife who hollered at him and could curse like a man and who insisted he give up his dreams and those Natchez clubs and go make a living. They fought, and fought hard and ugly. “Man, Jane could fight. She hit like a man. She knocked me down the stairs, one time.”
They moved into a garage apartment on Louisiana Avenue, and people would marvel at the hail of projectiles that would follow Jerry Lee as he emerged, hollering, from the apartment door, and at how the p
rojectiles—some of which looked like Santa Claus figurines—rained down on him as he descended the steps and flew in great arcs at him as he slid behind the wheel of his car or jumped into the car of someone giving him a ride to work, cars that sometimes barely slowed down because you never knew when something heavy would come winging out of the dark.
“She loved them Santa Claus figurines,” says Jerry Lee, but not as much as she hated him, in the moment.
Once he was getting into his car when a bottle shattered against the windshield.
“You gonna regret you did that,” he hollered at her, but she didn’t.
“That woman was hard on a windshield,” he says.
He half wished things would calm down, half wished they wouldn’t.
“We fought every night. Why? Because it was somethin’ to do.”
They had almost no money. He rode to work in a 1940 Plymouth, “six cylinders, but only hittin’ on five. Used oil. Used a lot of oil.” He drove it till it slung a rod, then found another car, another windshield for Jane to go at with a claw hammer or a high-heeled shoe.
“It was like living in the Twilight Zone,” he says.
But the storm abated in November 1953, when Jerry Lee Lewis Jr. was born. Jerry Lee held him and just looked at him for a long time, and saw his own face. He was born into a people who didn’t believe a family had to be perfect. Families fought, men drank, women hollered, and in the middle of it all, babies got born and held and marveled over, and on and on it went, until the grave. “I was raised to believe it, that if a man ain’t got a family, then he ain’t got nothin’.” So he held his son, between storms. “I loved my boy. He was the apple of my eye. So you see, somethin’ good came out of all that.”