by Rick Bragg
Sam Phillips was self-made if ever anyone has been. Like many of the musicians he would record, black and white, his people worked the land—tenant farmers, in his case, near Florence, Alabama. He was a white man who loved black music, and had since he picked cotton beside his mama and daddy and listened to the music in the fields. He wanted to be a big-shot criminal lawyer, but when his daddy died during the Depression, it left his family hurting for money, so he went to work in a grocery store, then a funeral parlor, and finally as a disc jockey at WLAY in Muscle Shoals, spinning both white and black records, like Dewey Phillips, who was no relation but a kindred spirit. Later he landed in Memphis, at WREC, broadcasting shows from the swank Peabody Hotel, where big bands played dance music for some of the richest people in the South. Sam was exposed to all kinds of music—swing, gospel, hillbilly—but there was just something about that blues, man, that lit him up. He would say blues was about how hard life was but it was also about why people bothered to go on living, and that made it a kind of perfect form. He would say that if he could ever find a white singer with a black soul, he would conquer the world or get rich trying. What he was hoping for was rock and roll.
His Sun Records would become a portal for it, built on a bedrock of blues. People in rock and roll are always going on about the birth of this or that, but if you had walked into the little studio on Union Avenue on March 3, 1951, you would have heard history being laid down, heard what many music historians consider the first rock-and-roll record ever pressed.
You women have heard of jalopies, heard the noise they make,
But let me introduce my new Rocket 88.
A love song to an Oldsmobile, it was credited to Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, but such a band did not actually exist; it was just the name Sam put on the label, hoping it would stick. Brenston was a saxophone player in Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, which had been playing the song at a club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Turner, Brenston, and the Kings of Rhythm drove up to Sun Records to cut the tune, giving it a rolling rhythm with a steady backbeat and a unique, fuzzed-out guitar riff, one of the first distorted guitar sounds ever laid down on tape. The band’s guitar amplifier was broken—one band member would say it fell from the top of the car and busted on Highway 61 on the way from Clarksdale—so the amp box was stuffed with wadded newspaper to hold the vibrating cone in place, making it sound fuzzy. “Leave it in,” Sam Phillips said, when someone asked if he should try to recut the record. The thing that made music work, he always said, was spontaneity: what happened in that one imperfect moment, that was the perfect thing.
Phillips would record Brenston, Little Milton, Rufus Thomas, Roscoe Gordon, and many others, some famous and some who would never be heard from on this earth again. As Chicago and other northern cities began to siphon the talent and business away from the South, the actual cradle of the blues, Phillips recorded some more hillbilly music, including the beautifully named Ripley Cotton Choppers. But he finally found what he was searching for not in some lonesome backwoods but in a Memphis housing project, in a boy who made a C in music at Humes High, who just walked in the door at Sun Records one day and told his assistant, Marion Keisker, “I don’t sound like nobody.”
Elvis changed the world, but Phillips, living in the real one, sold the last year of his star performer’s contract to RCA Victor for $35,000, money he would use to run his business and promote new talent. And talent was one thing that kept coming, sure as funeral money. He had Carl Perkins, who gave him a monster hit with “Blue Suede Shoes,” and a moody pill popper named Johnny Cash, whose “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues” were pulling hard at country audiences, and Roy Orbison, who wasn’t much to look at but had a voice like sounding bells. They all helped spread this new music around the country, one American Legion, city auditorium, and jukebox at a time. But they were not Elvis, and while they made history of their own on the stage they did not make people lose all reason and want to crawl up on it, thrashing and screaming. Phillips had good music to promote still, but he had sold away the beating heart of rock and roll, its excitement. And he was hoping every day that another miracle would just saunter in his door.
In the motel, Jerry Lee and Elmo took one more splash in the miraculous fountain of indoor plumbing and headed for the Sun studio, only to find that the keeper of dreams was nowhere to be found. Sally Wilbourn, Sun’s secretary, told Jerry Lee and his daddy that Mr. Phillips was out of town, but they were welcome to try back later, just like that, like people could come and go any time they wanted, like people had money for such as that. Jerry Lee told her he was not leaving until someone paid him some attention.
“Somebody,” he says, “was gonna hear me.”
The engineer—what would now be called a producer—was an ex-marine named Jack Clement, who would come to be known as Cowboy Jack and would see his name attached to some of Sun’s most enduring records. He looked up to see Sally Wilbourn lead two men back into the studio, saying that the young one claimed he could play piano as strong as Chet Atkins could pick a guitar, or something like that. Clement said he had to see that for himself.
“You think you’re that good?” he asked the boy.
“I’m better’n that,” said Jerry Lee.
Clement showed him to the piano; this was all he had been asking for, all along. “I knew what I could do, and I knew that if somebody could help me, and put me a record out, I was going to be a big hit. I knew that. But convincing other people about it was like crammin’ a wet noodle up a wildcat’s nose. It just don’t work, you know?”
He sat down to show the man what he could do, sure of himself, but when his daddy leaned against the piano, to show he was with him, tight, he was glad. He played for hours, three at least, played “Seasons of the Heart,” and messed around with other songs, mostly country standards and music from his memories, like “Wildwood Flower.”
“And my daddy was standin’ there. I said, ‘I think I oughta do “Crazy Arms,” put it down on tape so Sam can hear it when he comes back from vacation in Florida.’ I said, ‘Whether he does or not, I’m gon’ be sittin’ down on his doorstep, waitin’ for him.’
“‘Crazy Arms,’” he says now, “is strictly blues.” It had been a big country hit for Ray Price earlier that year, so it wasn’t exactly new—but these were days when plenty of different artists would record versions of a hit song, so that record buyers and disc jockeys might have four or five different versions to choose from. Clement just let the tape run. There was something in the boy he liked. Country music wasn’t moving then, had just gone stale. But he let the tape run, let the boy go and go.
“I played it on that old spinet,” Jerry Lee said, “with Daddy leaning on it, looking right at me.”
Now blue ain’t the word for the way that I feel
There’s a storm brewin’ in this heart of mine
His daddy closed his eyes.
He’s dreamed of this, of doing what I’m doing, Jerry Lee thought.
“I just took one take on it, just playin’ around, you know.” He says now that he was never nervous about playing in the studio in front of the engineer, but he was nervous playing in front of Elmo. “I was a little afraid Daddy would say, right in the middle, ‘You missed a minor chord there, son.’ But I played it perfect, and I made that song my own.”
This ain’t no crazy dream, I know that it’s real
You’re someone else’s love now, you’re not mine
He hit the last key and looked up. “And all Daddy said was, ‘Well, we got to go pretty quick.’”
But not before Clement made him a promise: “Well, I’ll see, Jerry Lee, that he hears it.”
Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he returned.
“Who is this cat?” Phillips said. “Get him down here.”
“It was about then that J. W. Brown walked up to me down in Ferriday and introduced himself as my cousin,” says Jerry Lee, who did not know the man that well. J. W. was the child of
Elmo’s sister, Jane, but had not grown up with Jerry Lee and the Ferriday cousins. He would later say that Jane had been forced to marry an outsider, a man from Franklin Parish named Henry Brown, because the world had temporarily run out of eligible Gilleys and Swaggarts.
J. W. used to work days as a lineman for the electric company, but he’d recently been shocked off a tall pole by a naked wire, and he was in no hurry to handle blue lightning again. Instead he thought he would like to try his hand at being a musician, which is why he came looking for Jerry Lee. He was pushing thirty, with a wife and two children at home in Coro Lake, in northern Mississippi, but he had tried the music business once before and had never gotten that sweet promise out of his mouth. In the early 1950s, he’d spent some time picking guitar with the owner of a bar in Mangham named Big Red. Once, while they were onstage, a boy with no etiquette whatsoever walked up to the jukebox and punched in a song. Red shot his own jukebox with a .45, and the boy went back and quietly finished his beer.
Figuring he needed a better ending for his musical story than that, J. W. ordered a Silvertone guitar from Sears and Roebuck and went looking for the cousin he had heard so much about. His timing was dead-on. Jerry Lee was waiting for Sam Phillips to call him back to Memphis anyway. “J. W. said, ‘You got to come to my house,’” and invited Jerry Lee to stay with him and his family at Coro Lake, where he could be close to 706 Union Avenue and close to his dreams. He had seen the boy play piano like a crazy genius on the stage and in church, and in a world of strummers and pretenders who could sing through their nose and even shake their leg a little bit, Cousin Jerry Lee seemed something else entirely. He took Jerry Lee and introduced him to his wife, Lois, and son, Rusty, who was just a toddler then, and to his lovely twelve-year-old daughter, Myra. It was not, as some have said, love at first sight. “I did notice,” Jerry Lee says now, “that she wadn’t no kid.” Jerry Lee bunked on the couch, and with his pretty twelve-year-old cousin flouncing around, prepared to conquer the world.
His first real recording session—the first one with an eye toward cutting a real record—came on November 14, 1956. He was playing with true recording professionals, with drummer J. M. “Jimmy” Van Eaton and guitarist Roland Janes, two musicians who would be as much a part of Sun in its early days as the ugly green paint and nicotine-stained acoustic tiles and the slapback echo that appeared, almost like a ghost, on the studio’s early records.
Janes and Van Eaton never went on to illustrious careers, at least as far as money and marquees go, but they are synonymous with Sun and with Memphis music and so are at the very nut of rock and roll. They were extraordinary musicians; people who really love the music can pick their styles out of the crowds of lesser ones who played before and after. Not just anyone could keep up with Jerry Lee Lewis; he has kicked musicians off the stage who could not stay with his tempo, could not blend in with his sound. Roland and Jimmy did that and more.
Janes was a marine during the Korean war, the son of a Pentecostal preacher and lumberman from Clay County, Arkansas. He could play mountain mandolin and had grown up with gospel; he had a light, sinuous tone that made itself known around the edges of a song just as much as it did during one of his indelible solos. He would go on to be an engineer and producer and part of the Memphis sound for another fifty years. Sometimes when people realized that the man they were talking to had been the guitarist on those great early hits, they would hand him a guitar and ask to hear him play. He would tell them simply, they done had. Jerry Lee gives him only the highest praise you can give a guitar man: “He could pick.”
Van Eaton was just a kid then, but like Janes he would leave his mark on an entire genre. His beat was subtler that that of most of the early rock-and-roll drummers, influenced by swing, adding crisp punctuation to the swampy Sun sound. He had grown up with Dewey Phillips and Memphis radio, and in the ’50s he became the creative drummer in Memphis, as Jerry Lee would say.
Jerry Lee respected both men, and enjoyed playing with them, but he would not form the bonds with them that he later would with his road bands, who fought drunks with him and chased women with him and survived each trip as though it was some kind of tour of duty. Roland and Jimmy tried that, but not for long. “They played with me just a very little bit. . . . I don’t think they liked being away from their spouses,” he says, and laughs. “We had a little problem with that.” (Van Eaton would say he did not mind jumping off a roof into a swimming pool now and then, but that touring with Jerry Lee was downright life-threatening.)
Also in the studio that day was guitarist Billy Lee Riley, who would go on to have a small hit with “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” and a bigger one with a cover of Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s Sun hit “Red Hot.” Riley’s records also featured Roland and Jimmy—and Jerry Lee Lewis, making a little side money on piano. Sun called them Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, to capitalize on the flying saucer fad of the time.
They all had more experience in a recording studio than Jerry Lee, but to him it appeared a little slipshod, the way his first real session went down. The studio’s electrical system was less than reliable, circuit breakers always flipping, the place going dark or silent, and people came and went in the studio even during the course of a song. But later, the musicians involved would agree that little mattered that day except the rolling, pumping, boogie-woogie piano and the boy’s strong, plaintive voice, which made all the other sounds in that drab, green little room obsolete. He played his own song, “End of the Road,” and some Gene Autry, “You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven.” Finally, he did “Crazy Arms,” just him and the drummer Van Eaton, mostly. Roland Janes left and came back, even picked up a standup bass and strummed it a bit, more or less in time, but he was mostly fooling around and off microphone anyway. At the end of the song, Billy Riley came in from the bathroom and, not knowing there was serious work being done there, hit one big, loud, ugly chord right at the end; it remains on that original recording. “He made ten dollars, for just sittin’,” says Jerry Lee. “It kind of made me mad.”
It was clear from the beginning that Jerry Lee, despite being brand-new at this, could not be led or prodded into playing a song any way other than the way he felt like playing it at the time; it would be like that all his life. Janes and Van Eaton would learn almost to sense the way he was going on a song and follow accordingly. The engineers often just put the tape on and let it run till some kind of imperfect perfection ensued. There was no dubbing, nothing manufactured; there was hardly the technology for that, anyway. “It was art,” Jerry Lee says. “I played it like I felt it, man.”
But he still had not met Sam Phillips.
Later Phillips listened to just a few seconds of “Crazy Arms.”
“I can sell that,” he said.
A few days later, Jack Clement introduced them.
“This is Jerry Lewis,” he told Phillips.
“Jerry Lee Lewis,” said Jerry Lee.
He might have tried to be modest, but he truly did not know how.
“He was kinda stone-faced,” Jerry Lee says of Phillips, “till he got to talkin’ about money. And when he started talkin’ about money, all he would talk about was money,” and then he had the white smile of a shark.
“I just got one question for you, Jerry Lee,” he said. “Tell me what you’re going to do with all this money you’re gonna make.”
Phillips asked the boy what he considered to be a good payday.
“Well,” he said, “one hundred dollars a night would be conquering the world.”
“You’ll do better’n that,” Phillips said. “You won’t be able to fit it in your pockets.”
He might as well have taken a jug of kerosene and upended it on a railroad flare.
Jerry Lee thought for a minute.
“Well?” Phillips said. “What you gonna do with it?”
“I’m gonna spend it,” said Jerry Lee.
“On what?”
“On Cadillacs.”
; Before he reached the door, a box of records under his arm, Phillips stopped him. “Son?” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m gonna make you a star.”
Later, when asked about his first impression of Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Phillips would say, “I knew that if he could do anything at all, even toot a mouth organ, I had me my next new star. He looked like a born performer.” All Jerry Lee knows is that Mr. Phillips backed up his big talk: he took a copy of the raw record to Dewey Phillips, who listened to it, “just like he done with Elvis.” And another piece of his dream clicked into place.
“WHBQ,” recites Jerry Lee. “Everybody listened to Red, Hot & Blue.” He had reason to be hopeful: “I thought a lot of Dewey Phillips. He was one of a kind . . . wild as the West Texas wind.” And one thing was certain: “You were a hit if he played your record.”
But just because a disc jockey agreed to hear a record did not mean he would play it; they were the gatekeepers of early rock and roll. All Jerry Lee could do was wait.
“I went home with that box of records, and I went straight to the back forty where Daddy was working.”
“Daddy, I want to play you this record,” he said.
“Okay, son,” Elmo said. “Let’s go hear it.”
They put the record on and listened standing up as the needle brought that Memphis moment into the little living room in Concordia Parish. Jerry Lee watched his daddy’s face, unreadable, as the circle of music grew smaller and smaller, till his own voice finally vanished into static.