17
STONE GARDEN
Ferriday
2012
He was going home to see his people. He drove ninety, a hundred sometimes, on the interstate between Memphis and the Natchez turnoff. The University of Alabama Crimson Tide and Louisiana State University Bengal Tigers were playing football that evening in a nationally televised game, the game of the century, people called it. “I wanted to see that game,” he said, and then, after a minute: “I’d have drove that fast if there wadn’t no game.” He wanted to get a choice room in the old Eola Hotel in Natchez, where good-looking Johnny Littlejohn, the one he first heard sing that “Shakin’” song, used to host his radio show. He stretched out on the bed, got a butler to bring up some room service, and thought of Elmo. The next morning, he and Judith took her new Buick across the big river, across the same old bridge, and he looked down to the barges and up at the rails overhead where he had dangled, and he smiled and shook his head. At the halfway point of the bridge, he told Judith, “You in Louisiana, now, baby,” and it made him happy to say it, so he said it again.
They took a hard right turn and followed the river north; in the town of Vidalia, they stopped at the Sonic and had a cheeseburger and a Coke. “I am a Sonic man,” he says, and ate it with relish. For months he had been mostly flat on his back in that air-conditioned dark in Nesbit, like something put up in storage in a cool, dry place; now he savored the sunshine, the balm of a warm Southern fall. “I’ve found me a new Rolls-Royce, one like I used to have. . . . Took me forever, but I found it, found it in Los Angeles,” of course. They got to Ferriday about noon, past the old fish stall with its long-ago signs for the catch of the day fading to gray, past the lovely-sounding Morning Star Alley, where a broke-down Pontiac rusted at the curb. The marquee on the First Baptist Church warned, GOD OPPOSES THE PROUD BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE, as if they knew he was coming, but then he never thought much of Baptists, anyhow.
For some reason he thought of Elvis.
“Drinkin’ champagne and feelin’ no pain,” he sings. “I hit that gate.”
Just a mile outside of the downtown, the green fields stretched out toward the big river out of sight, but you could smell it from here, those ages of mud and rot. “It used to be woods, all this,” he said. “Funny, how much it’s changed.” The dirt has not changed, still not quite brown, not gray, but the color of the front side of a dollar bill. Something else made him think of Sam Cooke. “My thirty-second cousin,” he joked. “Man, he was good.”
They stopped and said hey to his sister Frankie Jean, who talked about Uncle Will floating out of his grave in the great deluge, and then they got back into the Buick and went to see the other kin, there in their stone garden.
He drove north out of Ferriday on US 425, toward Clayton. He took a right on McAdams Road just before the rusted drawbridge over the muddy Tensas River, then another right on Indian Village Road. “There used to be a pretty little farm right here,” he said, and he looked for it, but it was gone. He rolled slowly between fallow fields and coasted up to the iron gate of the small cemetery like a man walking softly down a hallway to keep from waking a sleeping child. He stepped out, eased shut the door, and walked without sound through the thick grass. He left the Killer in the car.
His people rest in the third row. He walked past them, one by one, silent, the dead leaves, the first of the year this far south, scudding on the breeze across the ground.
Steve Allen Lewis
Feb. 27, 1959–April 22, 1962
Elmo Kidd Lewis
Jan. 8, 1902–July 21, 1979
Elmo Kidd Lewis, Jr.
Nov. 11, 1929–Aug. 6, 1938
Mamie Herron Lewis
March 17, 1912–April 21, 1971
Jerry Lee Lewis, Jr.
Nov. 2, 1954–Nov. 13, 1973
Shawn Michelle Lewis
(No birth date)–Aug. 24, 1983
Only Jaren was buried elsewhere.
He moved back down the row to stand before Junior.
“I have had a good life,” he said, “but we do lose our children.”
His back gave out as he walked the few steps back to the graves of his mama and daddy, and he sagged against the granite of Elmo’s headstone. “Daddy,” he said, “you won’t mind me resting my back?”
He leaned there for some time.
Later, in the fading light, he pointed the car back toward the big river.
“I’s just trying to make a record,” he said.
EPILOGUE
KILLER
I had to know. Who, besides the great Kenny Lovelace, would Jerry Lee Lewis want to play his music with in the Great Beyond, assuming he ever actually embraces mortality and goes?
He thought a moment, then named off the great stylists. He would like to see Hank Williams in that cowboy hat, free of the pain of his twisted spine. He would like to hear Jimmie Rodgers sing through clean, strong lungs, the tuberculosis left behind on some worldly plane. He would like to talk a long while with Al Jolson, once called the world’s greatest entertainer, who if you believe some historians, actually sang himself to death. In the Beyond, there would be no needles, no reek of raw corn liquor or bathtub gin, no pills, none of those rattling bones. But if you scrubbed them all of their pain, their addictions, their obsession, would they—any of them—be the same?
I thought of that Tom Waits song, the one about how, “If I exorcise my devils, / Well, my angels may leave too. / When they leave, they’re so hard to find.” Still, Jerry Lee would like to see them all gathered ’round his piano, with Kenny playing lead guitar and some red-hot fiddle, singing their songs, all their songs, on a never-dying rotation: “Sheltering Palms” and “You Win Again” and “Waitin’ on a Train” and “Shakin’”—wouldn’t “Shakin’” just make Jolson’s eyes bug out? And in the audience would be his people, all his people, everyone he had ever lost.
I think about that, about the four of them together, and it makes me hope that my own mother is right, that there is something out there beyond this.
“Can you just imagine it?” Jerry Lee says.
When I was done with this book, I had one line left in my notes that made no sense. It did not fit anything around it, and so I could not use the usual clues to make sense of it. It just read:
he never straightened me out
The thing is, in his story, it could have meant anything, at any moment, in any situation. It could have been anyone. I had long given up on it when it finally hit me. It was Jerry Lee, talking about the piano teacher, the one who slapped him and swore to break him of his boogie-woogie. It had come up, out of the clear blue, in the middle of another thought, a whole other conversation, just a thing on his mind, slicing straight through. But now I know it was perhaps the most important of lines, because, good Lord, what if he had?
When I was done with the interviews, as the long, hot summer faded, I walked over to the bed and shook his hand.
“I will try to write a good book,” I told him.
“I know you will, Killer,” he said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From Rick Bragg
Writing about a long life is easy, next to living it. For that reason I have to first thank Jerry Lee Lewis, who day after day walked off through the past and came back, sometimes bloody, with the stories that made this book possible. I hope, at least, it was easier remembering it than living it. I thank him for more than that. He was not, in hot spells in his life, a man to be admired, but I liked him when it was all over, and have seldom enjoyed sitting beside a man so much, hearing his life told out loud. He broke my heart a hundred times, and made me laugh a thousand or more. I do not feel guilty about it. Life is dirty and hard, and he reminded me that even in the middle of that junkyard there is great beauty, if you only listen.
It is hard to write a legend. It is impossible to do it without tremendous help from living souls and new and dusty old books and endless stories told in newspapers, magazines, album notes, newsletters, and more. People almost always say, on a page like this, that there are too many people to thank, but in a legend as large as Jerry Lee Lewis, I believe that to be more true than usual.
For that reason, I want to thank Tyler Jones, my graduate assistant who hung in until this book was done, who helped me make sense of more than a hundred pounds of paper and a billion blips on a computer screen. He also sought out people who remembered Jerry Lee Lewis as more than a rock-and-roll star and boogie-woogie man and country giant. I thank him for every word. I wore him out and moved on to Elizabeth Manning, the next assistant, who helped day after day.
I thank Judith Lewis for the fine iced tea. I thank Cecil for fighting the Giant. I thank Frankie Jean for the story of the graveyard.
There are books on my own shelf that have been almost bibles for the golden age of rock and roll. That writers like Peter Guralnick and Colin Escott would take time to aid in a project like this is a source of unending gratitude.
I need to thank several individuals who provided insight into Ferriday, Louisiana, including Stanley Nelson, Judith Bingham, Hiram Copeland, and Glen McGlothin. I appreciate the music shared by Gray Montgomery, YZ Ealey, and Hezekiah Early, and the glimpse into the history of the little church on Texas Avenue from Gay Bradford, Doris Poole, and Gwen Peterson. Many thanks to David Beatty, Donnie Swaggart, Pearry Green, Graham Knight, and Kenny Lovelace for sharing decades of memories about Jerry Lee. I thank Phoebe Lewis for her early help in getting this whole train running.
I thank the people of the University of Alabama, who have given me a beautiful place to write.
I thank Cal Morgan, my editor, for tolerance and for ignoring the fact that he knows ten thousand times as much about Jerry Lee as I do even now and should have written this damn thing himself. And thanks to him, too, for the music. I just thought I liked Jerry Lee Lewis. Then I heard “That Lucky Old Sun.” My God.
I thank my agent, Amanda Urban, for not skinning me alive during my constant whining. I am fortunate to be in your company again, and again, I owe so much of my writing life to your guidance.
I thank the pioneers of rock and roll. What a joy.
I thank, again, Dianne, and Jake, for their support and their tolerance, and of course their own contributions to the contents of this book. They are native Memphians and know this geography, its people, its stories, and its soul.
But also I thank the countless writers who came before me and gave me insights and avenues to pursue, and also good stuff to read. They are listed, as many as I could remember, in the bibliography that follows. Thank you, all of you, for the foundation. I am sure I have left out many people, because there were just so many of them, so many who followed him, loved him, worshipped him, or just listened to him, like me, wishing they could play something besides the radio.
And, as odd as it feels, I thank the alchemy of the World Wide Web, which put so much of Jerry Lee’s lifetime of work at my fingertips, and made it possible for generations to see what all the uproar was about. Because of it, people can dial up the past and see him as the young, dangerous man. They can see him age, see him growl, see him climb the piano and hurl the bench and, mostly, hear the music, the wonderful music. I have always been dismayed by the Web, somehow, because of its silliness. Now I finally know what it is really for.
From Jerry Lee Lewis
I want to dedicate this book to Mamie and Elmo, who were the best mama and daddy a boy could ever have, and with God’s help made me what I am. Without their love and their gift of music I would still be in Ferriday today . . . and there would be no Jerry Lee. I hope my mama was right and I will see them both again someday.
To my papa and grandma Herron and to my papa and grandma Lewis: I never knew how much I loved them till they were gone. They were my buddies and I miss them very much.
I want to thank my wonderful wife and soul mate, Judith, who came into my life at just the right time. She started out as my caregiver and now she is my everything, and without her and God I would not be here today. Now her love and affection make my life complete.
To my sisters, Frankie Jean and Linda Gail, who have both supported me and my music from the very beginning. Frankie Jean has done a great job telling my life story to everyone who visits Ferriday; and Linda Gail has opened more shows for me than I can count, and there is no one I’d rather have warming up the crowd. I love you both very much.
To my son, Lee (Jerry Lee Lewis III) and his wife, Debbie, thank you for always caring and loving me, and for giving me a wonderful grandson, Jerry Lee IV. He is my only grandson and he makes my life complete.
To my only daughter, Phoebe . . . all grown up but still my baby girl, I love you.
To my sons in heaven, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jr., and Steve Allen Lewis, I love you both and you are always in my heart.
Next, to Rick Bragg, who besides being a great writer, has more patience than anyone I have ever known. He did a truly amazing job putting my life onto these pages, and he somehow got me to remember things that I hadn’t thought about in years. Thank you for never pushing me too hard. I love you, buddy.
To all the Lewises, Gilleys, Swaggarts, Calhouns, and everyone else from Ferriday who helped and supported me. To all my nieces and nephews, I love all of you. Family has always and will always mean everything to me. And to Rev. David Beatty, my cousin and my prayer partner, thank you for all the years of praying with me and for me.
To my new family, my wife’s, and now mine, the Coghlans: Pete and Donna, Carolyn and Ronnie, Charles and Marida, Gene and Cathy, James and Julia, and the children, Tiffany, Ronnie, Dakota, and Kolton. I’m so lucky to have such awesome people in my camp, I love you all.
To the great Kenny Lovelace, my lead guitarist for almost fifty years now, and the best sideman an old rock and roller could ever ask for. Thanks for stickin’ with me. I wish we could do another fifty years together. And to the rest of my band, Buck Hutchenson, Robert Hall, and Ray Gann, you always make me better onstage.
To Sam Phillips: He gave me a chance when nobody else would. Sam didn’t care where you came from or what instrument you played, as long as your music moved him . . . and I always moved him!
I have to thank Steve Allen, the man who put me on television and made “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” an overnight hit, and made me a nationwide star.
To my friend, Bud Chittom, the owner of Jerry Lee Lewis’s Café and Honky Tonk in Memphis. Thanks for making my club a reality and for encouraging me to do this book.
Thanks to J. W. Whitten, who has been my road manager, my sidekick, and my friend for more than forty years. He always believed in me.
To my manager, Greg Ericson, who truly cares for me, and works hard every day to get my business in order and to keep me on the road playing for my thousands of fans around the world. Thank you.
To Cal Morgan, my editor, and Erin Hosier (Pippi Longstocking), my book agent, who got this book deal done and pushed me just hard enough to finish it . . . on time.
To my staff at the ranch, Janet, Michelle, and Seth, thanks for keeping everything running so smoothly, even with my crazy schedule. And to all the animals I have had in my life, thanks for making me smile and for the unconditional love.
To my adopted son, Steve Bing, a man of true character, who came to my aid when I felt like the whole world was against me. Steve cares for me as a person and loves my music as much as I do. He knew I had a few more songs in me and got me back in the studio. He is a great producer and a real friend. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I need to thank Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican, Al Jolson, and all the other great performers who inspired me; and to the hundreds of wonderful songwriters and musicians I have played with, recorded with, and toured with. I wish I had enough time to do it all over again.
And, finally, to all my adoring fans who have stuck with me for all these years, and who keep me on the piano stool. I promise that I will keep rockin’ for you as long as I can!
For their generous help in supplying photographs and other materials, special thanks to Jerry Lee Lewis, Judith Coghlan Lewis, the Concordia Sentinel, Bill Millar, Colin Escott, Kay Martin, Pierre Pennone, Robert Prokop, Graham Knight, Bob Gruen, Raeanne Rubenstein, Christopher R. Harris, Steve Roberts, Frankie Jean Lewis, Linda Gail Lewis, and the Ericson Group, Inc.