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 fair 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.
“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 it 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.