Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  “I walked in the door,” says Jerry Lee, “just as they kicked it off.”

  Paul Whitehead was playing that electrified upright like he was whacking a bell, on a tune that had all the subtleties of a dog bite.

  “Man,” he said to himself, “I like that lick. I like it.”

  Then Johnny Littlejohn jumped in.

  Come on over, baby.

  Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

  That quick, he knew.

  “That’s my song.”

  Yeah, I said come on over, baby.

  Baby, you can’t go wrong.

  We ain’t fakin’.

  Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

  “I got to have that song.”

  I said come on over, baby.

  We got chicken in the barn.

  Come on over, baby.

  We got the bull by the horns.

  Littlejohn was singing his heart out, because if you did not sing tough on this song, did not sing wild, it would sound silly, sound like a prissy man trying to act tough in a cowboy bar. The song—written at a fish camp on Lake Okeechobee, some say, in between milking rattlesnakes, drunk—required that. This was a song without a speck of nice in it.

  Yeah, we ain’t fakin’.

  Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

  The origin of the song is cloudy at best. Roy Hall, the Nashville musician and bar owner who briefly employed Jerry Lee, later said he wrote the song with a black musician named Dave “Curlee” Williams while they were in the Florida swamps milking poisonous snakes and drinking heavily, two things that do not usually mix well. But Williams said he wrote the song himself, leading some to wonder if Hall perhaps bought a piece of the song, as was common then.

  Hall recorded the song for Decca—that record lists Williams alone as the songwriter—but it had never been a hit for him, nor for Big Maybelle, who cut the first version, with Quincy Jones leading the band, nor for anyone else who ever tried. But no matter its credits, it does seem to have been born in a state of blissful sorriness, a thing not blues and not hillbilly but with all the baser elements of both, not as raunchy as some dirty songs but maybe just raunchy enough to thrill people and still, if the preachers weren’t listening too closely, get played on the radio, trembling somewhere between glorious entertainment and a greased rail straight to hell.

  Jerry Lee knew nothing about any of that, not yet, and if he had, he would not have cared even a little bit. He was already singing it in his head, his fingers already twitching in the air. His gaze was fixed on the stage, but from the corners of his eyes he could see the women start to sway and move, even the ones sitting down. “They didn’t even know what they were tappin’ up to,” he says. Then Littlejohn launched into the part that seemed taken straight from under the circus tent at a hootchie coo, from the strip clubs in downtown Atlanta, from the watered-down, two-drink minimum, broken backroom promises of Bourbon Street.

  Well, I said shake, baby, shake.

  “It was meant for me,” says Jerry Lee. “It was written for me.”

  I said shake, baby, shake now.

  He did not have to write the lyrics down. The ones he forgot, he replaced with others he just made up. It wasn’t Tennyson. But the rhythm, the feel, bored into him.

  “It was stamped on my mind, right then.”

  I said shake it, baby, shake it.

  “No, it was burned,” he says.

  We ain’t fakin’.

  Whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on.

  It ended in a roar.

  He walked up to the bandstand, like a boy with a stolen comic book stuffed down his pants.

  “You a little bit late, ain’t you?” said Littlejohn, when he approached the stage.

  “No,” Jerry Lee said, “I’m right on time.”

  “And I took that song home with me.”

  It played through his pillow, and hummed in his ear.

  The next night, he asked—no, he insisted—that Littlejohn let him sing it.

  He knew every word, every gesture the singer had made.

  “I done it just like Johnny done it,” he said. “Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.”

  Mr. Paul moved to his squeezebox, without ego, just changing gears.

  Come on over, baby.

  But it was not the same. He rewrote the lyrics in his head as he went along and felt like shouting them, and was shouting before he was through, till it was no longer Curlee Williams’s song or Roy Hall’s song or Johnny Littlejohn’s song but his, just his. It was stronger, rawer, more dangerous. There was a buck-naked joy in it as he pumped the piano hard from the first lick, beat it sore, and the crowd knew it.

  But mostly, of course, Jerry Lee noticed the women, moving in their seats at the tables, gyrating at the bar. “They looked at me different, and I looked at them different,” he says, “than I ever had before.” They pushed up to that rickety rail and heaved and squirmed and “just moved, man,” moved everything but their eyes. He can’t really explain it, even now, but they just looked different. “They looked better.”

  They did not all look back at him in exactly the same way—that only happens in the movies and the funny papers and maybe in some really good dreams—but the ones who crowded to the front of that little stage, right up to that deadly coil of extension cords, did. They left their men standing open-fisted, and their eyes drilled at him, offered him everything. “They took their dresses in their hands, and swung them around,” like they wanted to do more, needed to do more, right then and there. “And I knew,” he says now, “I was doing somethin’ different.”

  It was a dancing song, and the women who didn’t crowd the stage dragged their men out on the floor with them—drillers and wrench slingers and insurance men, men who thought dancing was a Texas two-step or a sock hop or a vague, grandma-haunted memory of a Virginia reel. Now they just hung onto their partners’ hips with both hands, and if they had possessed any sense, they would have seen that the blond-haired boy was doing them a favor.

  The song even had a little talking part in the middle, the way these boys played it, a place where the singer could cheer the dancers on; it was the kind of thing piano players had been doing since Pine Top Smith made the very first boogie-woogie record in 1928. But in Jerry Lee’s hands it became something else entirely.

  “Johnnie Littlejohn did a little bit of the talkin’ part, and that’s where I picked it up. But I redone it. Rewrote it all,” in his head.

  “Easy now,” he told the boys, lowering his hand.

  Shake it! Ahhhhhhhh, shake it, babe!

  Yeah, shake it one time for me.

  “I saw my Aunt Eva out there dancin’ with some young man, so I knew she was gettin’ on with it.”

  Now let’s get real low one time.

  Shake, baby, shake.

  Shake, baby, shake.

  Then he slowly raised one hand up high, where he and the crowd could see it.

  All you got to do is stand in one spot

  He pointed one finger and rotated it in the air.

  And wiggle it around just a little bit.

  That’s when you got something.

  The young girls screamed.

  He had heard them scream during a raw, nasty blues number, but not like that.

  The boys and the husbands, some of them, got to lookin’ mean.

  He liked that, too.

  “It was wonderful.”

  Now’s let’s go one time. . . .

  Mr. Paul pumped his squeezebox, and he knew.

  It was the beginning and the end of everything.

  Jerry Lee left the Natchez clubs not long after that night. He did not take that song right then and ride it like a rocket, though that would have made a fine movie or a very fine lie. Instead, he tucked it away in his vast catalog of songs, the way a gambler slides a jack or a queen up his sleeve to pull out when he needed it, when the time seemed right, or when he was down to his last scrap of luck. But he could feel it. He knew he had his m
issing piece. “I knew exactly what it would be,” he says, fifty-seven years after that night. “I knew it was on its way to the moon,” and someday he would ride it into the stars. It may sound like fiction, but he knew it was one of those forever songs, knew that someone a hundred years from now would pluck it off a wireless signal or a moonbeam, shout “Shake it, baby, shake it,” and dance in their socks.

  “They say radio waves bounce,” he says. “Well, I reckon so.”

  It pleases him, as an old man, to think of it like that, out there in space, looping through the universe between the stars, never ending.

  And it makes him a little sad.

  The song is forever.

  Mr. Paul played the clubs for years. He lived long enough to see country music become so banal and plastic he could not feel it in his heart. He saw the blues go out of style, saw it replaced on the airwaves by something called disco and then slip deeper, further into a kind of empty posturing known as hip-hop, which did not seem like something, any of it, that a grown man would do. The few old men who remember him recall a genuine music man in a great, glorious time. Sometimes people leave this world just when they should.

  Mr. Paul’s sound mostly died with him. The Wagon Wheel closed and returned to the weeds. The blind man never made a commercially viable record of his own, as far as anyone knows. But there is, if you look for it, a ghost of his piano still. After Jerry Lee left for Sun Studio, Mr. Paul’s old bandmate, the guitar picker Gray Montgomery, tried to sell Sam Phillips a song called “Right Now.” It was a swinging little guitar-driven song that was rich with rockabilly and featured a lovely piano solo by Paul Whitehead. Phillips said he liked the song fine, but he wanted to replace the piano with a saxophone. Saxophones were getting to be pretty big in redneck music. Besides, he had already locked up the most sensational, wildly wicked piano man in the whole known universe, maybe the most wild and wicked who had ever been, and he needed another piano record like he needed a cement lawn monkey. Montgomery, unwilling to change it, walked away and took the song to a small label instead. The song got jukebox play in and around Natchez, but it faded and all but vanished, as even some good songs are destined to do. But if you search for it on the new lightning of the Internet, on a little label called Beagle Records, you can find it, still, find Paul Whitehead, his piano solo ringing out so lovely, lovelier than can be described with black ink on white paper. It lasts just a few seconds, but it will be forever, too.

  5

  SUN

  Highway 61

  1956

  The blacktop runs straight as a hypodermic across the great, flat, brown nothing, stabbing through the heart of the Delta for 323 miles, dreams and failed ambition piled like old bones in the ditches on either side. What waited on the other end of Highway 61, past the crossroad where Robert Johnson cut his deal with the devil and past a huge graveyard of lesser bargains, was the solution Jerry Lee Lewis was looking for. But he knew in his guts that his chances were running out. He stood in the middle of a cornfield near his mama and daddy’s house in Louisiana and watched his daddy work, watched him move like a machine down rows of dead stalks and knew he did not want to travel that haunted road to Memphis alone.

  It was one of the few times in his life he felt that way, he concedes now. “I wanted my daddy with me,” he says. “I wasn’t going to Memphis on my own. That road, man, it got a lot of ’em, got a lot of us. . . . It ain’t just I wanted Daddy with me, I insisted.”

  But it took some doing. “I was pulling corn with Daddy,” he remembers. “He did four rows to every two I did.” It was shell corn, late in the season, the ears gone hard on the stalk. It would be feed for cattle and hogs or ground up for meal or soaked in lye to slough away the hull for hominy. The husks were paper-dry and rustling and the silk as brittle as a dead man’s beard. The dust off the stalks and husks was stifling, floating in the sunlight, stirred up as the two men crashed through the crop. His heart was not in pulling corn any more than it was in chopping cotton or pushing a wheelbarrow, but he had a favor to ask his daddy and it was hard to catch the old man when he was just sitting in the shade, and it is insulting, in a way that is hard to explain, for one Southern man to watch another one work.

  “Daddy,” he said, when he met Elmo coming the other way through the corn, “I been readin’ in this magazine about this man in Memphis named Sam Phillips. This magazine told about how he helped Elvis be a star.”

  “Uh-huh,” his daddy said, and kept pulling.

  “I want to go to Memphis. I want to show them what I can do.”

  His daddy straightened up.

  “Well, I don’t blame you son. I would, too.”

  But Elmo was between construction jobs and there were debts to pay, and it took a whole tank of gas just to get to Memphis, and they would need hotel money, too. Neither one of them knew how long it would take to get these Memphis moneymen to hear them out, or even if they would let them in the door. But for Elmo, saying no would have been like seeing his own dream go dry on the stalk for a second time.

  “I need to see that man,” said Jerry Lee. “I want to see if he can do for me what he done for Elvis. I want to see if he can make me a star.”

  He had been shown the door in Shreveport and ignored in Nashville by men who thought music was a product you stamped out on a press, like car parts. He needed a risk taker, a rebel, and he believed—at least he believed it then—that Sam Phillips of Sun Records was that man. He could have gone on his own to audition for Sun, could have lived on saltine crackers and pork and beans and slept in the car, but he knew this was his best and maybe only chance to play and sing for people who knew what chance taking was about, who had already taken one flying leap into the unknown with the boy from Tupelo and found gold.

  Elmo stood in the rising dust, thinking. From a distance, seeing the two men there in the field, their heads bowed, it might have looked like they were praying. After a while, they came up with the answer.

  “We went out in the henhouse and we gathered eggs, and we saved ’em up, day by day, and it took us a while to do it, but we eventually gathered up thirty-nine dozen. We took ’em to town and sold ’em to Nelson’s Supermarket. And then we took that money and we headed to Memphis in a ’56 Ford.”

  Jerry Lee spun the radio as they drove, looking for gold. As they passed into northern Mississippi, he found WHBQ from Memphis, found a young man named Dewey Phillips, who sounded wired on speed and certainly was, a kind of hillbilly hepcat who did not care what color the music was as long as it cooked. He played Hank Williams and Muddy Waters cheek by jowl, and Hank Snow next to Elmore James. He played Sister Rosetta Tharpe, picking on that white electric guitar and swinging her hips around, singing how “there’s strange things happenin’ every day.” Then Wynonie Harris did “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” the Soul Stirrers sang “Jesus Gave Me Water,” and Piano Red shouted, “If you can’t boogie, I’ll show you how.” And of course, he played Elvis, who stitched it all together, whose music was so far beyond category that Dewey had to ask him where he went to school so that everyone in segregated Memphis would pick up that he was a white boy who only sang colored. Dewey was sponsored by Champagne Velvet beer—“Yes, sir, CV for you and CV for me”—and yakked crazily even in the middle of the songs about a letter from his grandma, hollering, “Does anybody wanna buy a mule?” He exhorted musicians on the records to play faster, hotter, like they were sitting there in the studio with him, shouting “Awwwwww, sit on it, boy. If you can’t sit on it, play it,” to invisible piano players. You were nobody in Memphis music till Dewey Phillips played your records on the radio, and as Jerry Lee and Elmo neared the bright lights, he talked them in, frantically piecing together a patchwork quilt of blues, country, and gospel for an audience that had come to reject dull, bland music the way people in New Orleans would not eat bad food.

  Jerry Lee looked out the window at the city and felt like a bird on a wire, felt like his old self. He could fly anywhere from here. “And I knew
we didn’t sell them thirty-nine dozen for nothin’.”

  “We got us a hotel, right close to Sun Studios,” he says. “The hotel had a sink in it, with running water. First time we’d been in a place like that.” They just stood for a minute and looked at it.

  Before he started his own record company, Sam Phillips had been recording the voices of southern men and women, in moments of ecstasy and agony, for nearly a decade. He recorded big band music, but also church and funeral services, a thousand long good-byes: if you wanted your bereavement preserved, he would rig a microphone right in the eucalyptus at Idlewild Presbyterian and catch every sob. He would do the same with a big wedding in Chickasaw Gardens, an inauguration, or a speech to the Junior League, anything with sound. It was all part of his Memphis Recording Service, a little operation housed at 706 Union Avenue, hard against an upholstery shop.

  His real calling, he would tell anyone who listened, was to record music—especially the voices of the blues singers of the Delta region, seasoned performers like John Estes and Howlin’ Wolf, and younger men like Junior Parker, Ike Turner, and others who would go on to mean something in the blues. In 1952, after a few of the recordings he made for other companies became solid regional hits, he launched his own label. He called it Sun Records, and turned on the big neon sign in his window, and let the world know he was open for business. He wore good, dark suits with good ties and a gold tie clip, and he had a thick, full head of dark hair and good teeth—a respectable-looking man, the kind who could sell you the shoes you came in with and leave you feeling grateful. But his love for music was a real, consuming passion, and the kind he loved the most did not even really exist yet, at least not exactly as he dreamed it.