Freedom, sang Maceo, was no easy thing, either, and Tampa Red moaned, “Mmmmmm-hhhhmmmm.” And if ever a thing of nails and wood had a life, a beating heart of its own, it was this place, where even in the hungover early morning, you might hear a single old guitar man tuning, messing, searching for a sound among the empty tables and chairs.
“Haney never did close the doors,” Early said. Jerry Lee had lived in the hot shadow of the blues all his life. The blues traveled on the wind through the low country of Louisiana, and all he had to do was stand still in one place a little while to hear it. Three out of every four people in Ferriday were people of color, and the black man’s blues poured from passing cars and transistor radios and jukeboxes. But he had never heard it—really heard it—till he heard it pour from the Big House. Even before he was tall enough to see inside the place, he would climb to a window or get someone to boost him up, for just a glimpse, for a raw second. It was never enough, and it went on that way, unconsummated, for years.
He dragged his cousin Jimmy with him, tried to coerce him into sneaking in with him. “Jimmy wouldn’t do it. I just couldn’t get him in there. . . . He was scared to go in there.” Jimmy knew the beast when he saw it, “called it the devil’s music,” recalls Jerry Lee, and, after untold pleadings, Jimmy left his wild cousin to his own destruction. Besides, Jimmy told him, if his mama and daddy found out he was sneaking into Haney’s Big House, they would beat him until he did not know his own name. “Mama might not kill me,” he told Jerry Lee, “but Daddy will.”
“Well, I ain’t scared of mine,” Jerry Lee told him.
“Never could get Jimmy to go in there with me,” he says, thinking back. “He was scared of it.” But for him, it was a good time to get out of the house; he might not even be missed, at least for an hour or two. Mamie had recently given birth to a second daughter, another dark-haired girl, named Linda Gail. Mamie and Elmo were distracted, still making a fuss over the new baby. But he truly did not much care if he was found out or not. They did not beat him, only threatened a lot. Besides, some things were worth a good beating, he surmised.
He had long suspected there was something in black music he wanted and needed, but he could not figure out exactly how to get to hear it. He scouted the problem over and over; Haney’s was an easy walk from his house, even if he had to swing by after a trip to the Arcade to catch another Western or maybe Frankenstein. Over the years, several people would claim it was they who gave him access to the forbidden nightclub, who hoisted him to an open window or left a locked door unlocked so the boy could creep in. The truth is, one day he just couldn’t stand it anymore, the itch, and walked alone to one of the two front doors that faced Fourth Street. It was a Sunday night, and he was AWOL from Texas Street. At Haney’s he saw a raggedy bus outside, which meant a traveling band and maybe even a bluesman of some renown; the nightclub was already bulging with people, the red sun not yet fully down. He would not be missed for hours. “Ever’body else was in church,” he recalls. The Assembly of God met twice on Sunday, morning and evening; the devil never took a day off.
He waited for his chance, till Haney and the money-takers were looking the other way, and darted into the smoke and noise. He searched around, frantic, for a hiding place, but there was none he could see. “So I got in under a table,” he says, just slid underneath smooth and slick and unseen—or at least that was what he told himself—till he was safe in the dark among the patent-leather shoes and the high heels.
I’m in, Jerry Lee kept telling himself. I’m in Haney’s. In that place that threatened his immortal soul.
And it was worth it. “I could see everything,” he remembers, though it is unclear if he is talking about the club or something more. Above him, people swayed in rickety chairs, drank, and laughed. On the dance floor, men and women came together in a grind, legs locked inside legs, so tight that if you cut one, the other one would bleed. “Couldn’t have been a better place for me,” says Jerry Lee. “I got right with it.”
The blues starts rollin’
And they stopped in front of my door
The guitar man onstage sang with a voice filled with all the suffering in the wide, flat, dusty world. In his voice is the sound of clanking leg irons. In his music is a daddy who grows smaller, less distinct, as a battered pickup pulls away on a bleak Delta road, and a mule that drags him over a million miles of dirt. His guitar wailed like a witness, too, to every mile and every slur and every pain. The man, his head cocked to one shoulder like it was nailed on at a cant, moved nothing but his thick fingers, fluttering around the frets like a hummingbird, and sweat poured down his face. “I just sat there and thought, Man, look at him pick. He was playing all over that guitar,” recalls Jerry Lee. In this man’s hands, it did not seem so much an inferior instrument. “And I tell you, he was singing some songs.”
The applause was still slapping, people even stomping the floor, when the guitar man lit into some stomping blues and snatched the people still sitting out of their seats. “Them cats could dance,” Jerry Lee says. Men leaped into the air, impossibly high, like they were flying. Women shook things he had believed were bolted down; some jumped onto the tables and danced up there. “They was throwin’ each other over their shoulders, throwin’ each other over their heads. And I was in seventh heaven.” This, he knew, was what had been missing. This was the spice, the soul he’d been looking for.
Woke up this morning,
My baby was gone . . .
He was already thinking how he would play it, how he would mix it with what he knew. But mostly he just let it fill him up, sink in, become part of him. “I just introduced myself to the atmosphere,” he says.
Please, God, don’t let Haney catch me now, he thought—and just then a big hand closed around the nape of his neck and lifted him like a doll from under the table and then high, high up off the floor, till he was looking Will Haney in one red, angry eye.
“Jerry Lee?”
He just dangled. Everyone in Ferriday knew the boy. Most little boys, born to overalls, did not strut around like him, like they owned every mile of dirt they walked. But Haney also knew his Uncle Lee and his Aunt Stella, and had business with them.
“What you doin’ in here, white boy?” Haney asked.
“I’m tryin’ to listen to some blues,” he said.
“You ain’t supposed to be in here.”
“I know. But I am.”
Jerry Lee tried to sound brave, but in his mind was thinking, Haney is big as a door.
“I’m tryin’ to hear some music,” he said, “if you don’t mind.”
Haney was breathing fire and seemed genuinely worried. This was a social breach, and a dangerous one. “Your Uncle Lee will destroy me for this,” Haney said.
Jerry Lee dangled.
“If your mama caught you here, she’d kill me! And your Uncle Lee will shoot me. And your Aunt Stella? She would—they would—have a heart attack.”
The music had not stopped; you could have dragged a bull alligator and a rusted washing machine through the joint when the music was going good. Haney hustled him to the door. The boy did not have to be dragged, but he did not act contrite, either. “And don’t come back,” Haney said from the door. Jerry Lee started walking in the direction of home, but as soon as Haney turned his back, he doubled back and crept through the dark to the band’s old bus. “I had to get on that bus,” he says. “I sat down in a chair, and I thought, I bet this is where he sat.” He sat there for a long time, dreaming, the music fainter now. Finally, banned for life, he walked home, the rhythm and the blues thumping inside his head.
A few days later, one of the customers called Haney over to him. “They’s a white boy under my table,” he said.
At least when Haney dragged him out, it was the same one. He could not have stood an epidemic. He threatened and pleaded with him again. “I came back,” Jerry Lee says, grinning, “for years.” He checked the “Among the Colored” column in the Sentinel, to find out when the big acts were in town. He always got in somehow, till it became ritual. He would slide under a table, and a customer would nudge him with a toe. “Is that you, Jerry Lee?”
“It’s me.”
He went back over and over and over and over. But the image that stuck in his mind was that of a young B. B. King, the “Beale Street Blues Boy,” who would one day run back into a burning juke joint in Twist, Arkansas, to save his guitar after two fighting drunks knocked over a garbage can filled with burning kerosene. Like his primary influence, T-Bone Walker, he sang the blues for a line or two, then answered with his guitar; as he bent the strings it sounded like the thing was talking back, like there was two men up there instead of one, telling the news.
It had a lot of names, then, that music: the blues, R&B, others less savory. But Jerry Lee knew what it was.
“They was playin’ rock and roll,” he says.
“They was.”
It was hard, after he had seen the Big House bulge with such raw, grand music, to get real excited about seventh grade. Still, he did his best to stay in it, even if it meant choking a man, which in this case it did.
This takes a little explaining. The sixth grade had not gone all that well for Jerry Lee. First, there had been a grade-switching scheme. “I changed all my F grades to A,” he says. “Only real whipping I ever got.” Mamie turned her back as Elmo pulled off his belt and beat the boy like a one-crop mule, beat him till Mamie pleaded with him to stop “before you beat my baby to death.” It wasn’t that the boy couldn’t do the work; it was just that it was almost impossible to learn much about Paul Revere’s ride or Isaac Newton’s apple while you were at the pool hall. If you ask him today if he minded school, he will say no, he did not mind it much, because some days—many days, really—he never got within a mile of it. He ate his vanilla wafers and marched off to school like a little man, but if there was a jukebox playing somewhere for the early-morning drunks, it shook him off his stride, or if there was just a lonely street corner somewhere, he felt compelled to lean on a power pole to keep it all company, and if the weather was hot, he just went swimming in the river or Lake Concordia, or lay in the sun and thought about songs and girls or girls and songs. He worked hard on his music because it mattered, because any nitwit could see that it was his ticket out, and let the rest slide because it did not. He watched a lot of boats churn past the levee and knocked a lot of balls across the green felt and heard a lot of Moon Mullican on the jukebox, while other boys suffered through the Ni?a, the Pinta, and the Santa María, and the square root of some silly thing.
He showed up for the beginning of the seventh grade, only to find out he was not in it. He decided to take a seat anyway. He had already figured out that a person, if they were special enough, if they had something uncommon to offer, could live by a set of rules separate from those set down for dull, regular people. The way to accomplish this was to make it too much effort for people to try to bend him to their regular-people rules. “So I picked me out a seat . . . think I took Bill Herron’s seat, and I sat down,” he said. “Mr. Lancaster was the teacher and the football coach. He told me I had failed my class and said I had to go back to the sixth grade. I told him, ‘Look, if you want me to go to school, I’m going to school in the seventh grade. This is my seat right here.’ I told him. He told me to shut up, and nobody tells me to shut up. I couldn’t take that. He was a big man, and picked me up out of that seat, and we commenced to fightin’.”
Mr. Lancaster had it in his mind that he would just bodily carry Jerry Lee to the sixth grade, but it was hard to get a good grip on the boy. Jerry Lee was bobbing and weaving and gouging and twisting as the other students watched in amazement, because nothing this exciting had happened in homeroom since a boy named Otto soiled himself during a too-long assembly in second grade and had to be sent home in a secondhand sailor suit.
The coach, red-faced and muttering, finally got a grip on him, and that’s when Jerry Lee saw the man’s necktie flutter past his face. He grabbed it with both hands and just pulled.
“I was hangin’ him,” he says. “I had him, boy. I was swinging on that necktie, and I was choking him to death.”
Mr. Lancaster gave a single, mighty gasp and began to stagger around the room, Jerry Lee swinging from the necktie like a clapper on a bell. The man’s face went bloodred and his breath was coming in tiny little wheeeees; some of the little girls began to whimper and scrunch their faces up, about to bawl. “Then two of his football players come in,” says Jerry Lee, “and drug me off him.”
He was transported, still kicking, to the principal’s office and deposited in a chair.
Another boy, Cecil Harrelson, sat across the room, looking glum.
“What you in for?” Jerry Lee asked him.
“I’s fightin’ Mr. Dickie French,” the boy told him.
That impressed Jerry Lee. Mr. French, who taught history, was a navy man.
“Then Mr. Bateman, the principal, come in, and asked me what had happened, and I told him,” and he even managed to make himself seem almost noble. “I said, ‘Mr. Bateman, they tried to make me go back to the sixth grade but I didn’t want to go back to the sixth grade and I wanted to stay in the seventh grade,’ and he said, ‘Son, I don’t blame you a bit, but I got to suspend you for two weeks, because we can’t have you killing teachers.’” Jerry told him, “Well, okay,” but what he was thinking was more like, Please, Mr. Fox, don’t throw me in that briar patch.
“I think he give Cecil two weeks, too.”
The two boys walked together through the gate.
“Well,” said Cecil, as they turned to go their separate ways, “see ya later, Killer.”
“And I been the Killer ever since,” says Jerry Lee. Most people think he got the nickname because of his wild stage show or his reputation offstage or worse, but it had nothing to do with any of that.
“I named him. I did,” recalled Cecil Harrelson, who would go on to be Jerry Lee’s road manager and his friend through good and awful times, who would hold men while Jerry Lee hit them, as they played and fought their way across the country and back again. “It’s funny. You pass through this life and you wake up one morning, and it’s about all behind you,” Cecil said shortly before his death, “but you never forget that about being boys. It’s the first thing you think of.”
Jerry Lee continued to educate himself, one genre and influence at a time. Sometimes a hit song came over him like a fever, and he quit whatever he was doing, left people standing slack-jawed, to go and play it himself and adapt it, in a matter of minutes, to his style. One day, it happened to him while he was on a date at the Arcade Theater. “I’d go see Gene Autry,” he recalls, “and just before the movie come on they’d take fifteen minutes and play Al Jolson songs on those 78 records. I was sittin’ there and I was listenin’. I had a girlfriend with me.”
Then something happened that got his attention. “Al Jolson come on, and he’s singin’ this song—I think it was ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye.’ And back then I could listen to a song an’, if I liked it, automatically I adapted that song into my mind. . . . I knew it word for word, melody for melody. I knew it. And I told my girlfriend, I says, ‘I gotta go use the restroom. I’ll be right back.’ And I left. I got on my bicycle and went home.
“I sat down at the piano and played that song—played it for two, three times, got it just like I wanted. I got back on my bicycle, went back to the theater, parked my bike, went inside, set down by Faye—her name was Faye, Faye Bryant. And she said, ‘You . . . you was gone quite a while, wasn’t you?’ I said, ‘Naw, I just went to use the restroom. Picked up some popcorn.’
“It’s unbelievable. But it happened.”
Other musical lessons took longer to sink in. It was about this time that Jerry Lee Lewis first heard the words and music of a painfully thin, sallow, brilliant man from the great state of Alabama. His mama loved Hank Williams, this man they called the Hillbilly Shakespeare, because he sang straight at her, the way he did every man and woman who had ever gone to bed unsure of what the new morning would bring.
Jerry Lee did not actually know it was genius, not quite yet. “I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t particularly care for him myself,” he says. “I didn’t think he could sing that good.” But in time, he began to listen closer, “and I was really wrong about that. It flowed out, that real stylist talent,” and suddenly it was like the man was singing right at him, too, even when the radio was off or when he was out of nickels at the jukebox and only static hissed from the spinning record.
He had practically been weaned on Jimmie Rodgers, but when he heard Hank Williams wail for his attention—really heard him—it was like he was hearing his own future sung to him. Williams had started singing on WSFA in Montgomery, with a voice that was so forlorn, it seemed trapped halfway between this and the other side. He had written songs on café napkins and scrap paper about the things that mattered—about women who did not love you back, and sons who called another man Daddy, and being so lonesome in the night that you wished you would die—and it wasn’t so awful somehow, to those cotton mill workers, pulpwooders, coal miners, sharecroppers, sweatshop workers, and the women who wiped the tables in the truck stops, when he sang their pain on the air. Then he made them laugh out loud, singing about wooden Indians that never got a kiss, and a beer bucket with a hole in it, and how that little dog better scoot on over because the big dog’s movin’ in. He could not read music or think of a song in notes but never had to, being a genius. He drank and took morphine and gobbled painkillers to smother the agony in a twisted back and a pressing darkness; he sang drunk onstage and sometimes did not show up at all, and people loved him anyway, because he belonged to them, broken whiskey bottles and littered pill bottles and needles and all, because when he sang, you could forget for a while the stabbing, slashing machines that took their fingers, and the rich man’s courts that sent them to rot in Atmore, Parchman, and Brushy Mountain.
Like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank was not afraid to yodel, even though the moneymen had told him that a yodel record would not sell in the modern age of American music, and certainly not sell outside the peckerwoods. He told them to go to hell. After a few smaller records he wrote himself, he finally found the song that would carry him to glory. “I can throw my hat onto the stage after I sing ‘Lovesick Blues,’” he said, “and my hat will get three encores.” And he was right.
Hank Williams did not write “Lovesick Blues”—it was an old Tin Pan Alley song, written in ’22 by Clifford Friend and Irving Mills—but he made it his song forever, made his voice and his sound the only ones that would matter, forever and ever. That was what being a stylist was all about. When the Opry put him on the big stage at the Ryman Auditorium to sing it, the song rocketed outward from Nashville across the entire country. Fishermen in the Pacific Northwest heard. . .
I got a feeling called the blu-ues, oh Lawd,
Since my baby said good-bye