. . . and liked it.
But the man from Alabama led an uneasy life, and soon his career and his ways were locked in near-constant battle. The men who dominated the bluegrass and commercial country music broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium, some of them about as country as a subway if you knocked the cowboy hats off their heads, were fearful of this young man with the dark circles under his eyes. WSFA fired him for habitual drunkenness, and before long the Opry wouldn’t have him either. When Jerry Lee first heard him, it was by way of Shreveport, just 180 miles away from Ferriday, on the Louisiana Hayride, the weekly radio show he played when the Opry wouldn’t have him.
After “Lovesick Blues,” the wayward yodeler followed up with a string of hits he wrote himself—“I Can’t Help It,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”—and Jerry Lee loved them all. But that was not the only reason he cleaved to Hank Williams. As much as anything, it was the fact that Hank was also a man raised in faith but pulled and torn by sin, a man who lived with one foot hot and one foot cool, straddling the worlds of sacred music and secular music with a kind of tortured beauty. He would have the crowds tapping their toes in the auditoriums to some hillbilly swing, then mumble, “Neighbors, we’ve got a little sacred song y’all might want to hear, a little song I wrote. . . .”
I wandered so aimless, my life filled with sin
I wouldn’t let my dear Savior in
Jerry Lee knew he was bound to this man somehow. “I think me and Mr. Williams were a lot alike,” he says now. He leaned on the jukebox and listened to “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” He studied the words to “You Win Again” and sensed the unbearable humiliation there.
“I felt something when I listened to that man,” he says. “I felt something different.”
He rarely calls him Hank. It is “Mr. Williams.”
“I listened to Mr. Williams, and I listened real close. I listened to hear a sharp note, or a flat note. And you know what? I’m still listening.”
There was no television, no video, so he could not really see what the man looked like, how he moved or carried himself. There were only the records to go by, and the occasional poster or flyer of an almost emaciated young man who stood a little knock-kneed onstage, but elegant, somehow, in his white suits and big white Stetson; he was elegant to the end, even after Nashville got to him and he started wearing buckskin fringe and big musical notes on his suits and lined his coat sleeves and pants legs with rhinestones and glitter and whatnot, like a dime store blew up all over him. The Opry hired him back and fired him again, but he always reappeared somewhere, saying, “Neighbors, I’m so happy to be back, and I got a purty little song. . . .”
Jerry Lee played the songs over and over. He did the same with other songs, like Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You” and a hundred more, but there was just something different in Mr. Williams’s music, the way some paintings are more vivid, more real than others, and he dreamed about meeting the man and telling him how much he liked his songs. But there was no rush. Jerry Lee was just barely a teenager, and Hank Williams was only in his late twenties, and he’d promised, over the radio, that if the Lord was willing and the creek stayed level he’d be in his town real soon.
It was about this time that Jerry Lee first started to challenge Elmo’s supremacy in the home. Elmo could abide most things, but not sass, and Jerry Lee was born to sass. He came off the bottle smarting off, and as he became a teenager, he figured he could stand up to his father, could defy his orders as a man would defy another man. It was funny when he was a boy, but when he was big enough, he knew he would have to back it up with his fists. “I figured I would try it one day,” he says. He can’t recall exactly what sparked it—maybe the old man had finally gotten old after all—but inevitably that one day came.
“He reached his hand around my head and picked me up by the nape of my neck, and I was looking right into his face.” The last time that had happened he had been a little boy, in Haney’s Big House. This was different. His daddy’s eyes were calm, flat.
He remembers one blow, maybe two, then his mother’s voice.
“Don’t hit him again! Don’t hit my baby again.”
“I remember he picked me up like I was a straw, and I knew that I had been conquered.”
The year 1948 began with a crime wave in Concordia Parish, or at least as close to such as anyone there could recall. All kinds of things were turning up missing, including some items that left police bewildered as to why anyone would want them. It was just Jerry Lee and his cousin Jimmy, who had temporarily backslid, creeping around at night, stealing scrap iron from their Uncle Lee and selling it back to him the next morning, and breaking into warehouses that held things most people would not take on a scavenger hunt. Jimmy, in his own biography, wrote that the cousins stole a roll of barbed wire; they did not need a roll of barbed wire, and Jerry Lee was against taking it, but Jimmy figured if they were going so far as to break and enter, they dang sure were going to leave with something. He left carrying a roll of wire, but it got heavy, so he threw it in a ditch. The boys had better luck with stores, and by the summer of ’48 they had a nice pile of loot. “It’s a whole gang,” said Chief Swaggart, when asked about the rash of thefts, but the crime wave mysteriously flattened to nothing when Jimmy rededicated himself to the Lord and Jerry Lee, his family, and his piano vanished on the two-lane to Angola, where Elmo had found construction work on a hospital for the infamous prison there.
Home to some of the worst human-rights abuses in American penal history, Angola was a for-profit prison in its beginning, where men and women could be leased from the state, whipped and worked to death, then replaced like parts on a car. They worked the cotton fields and endured systematic torture, rape, and murder. The state took it over in the twentieth century, but not much changed, and inmates just vanished, buried in unmarked graves or sunk into the river, which formed a great crescent around the prison. In that year of 1948, Governor Jimmie Davis promised to make Angola humane, and his reforms created the new construction that brought Elmo and his family here. But it was not his reforms that got Davis elected; one does not get elected in the South by promising to make prison nicer. Davis, a country singer in the Jimmie Rodgers vein, had had a country hit a few years before with a song called “You Are My Sunshine,” and he sent out campaign trucks rigged with loudspeakers, blasting the song even in places where only the armadillos were likely to hear it. Sometimes, surreally, the speaker trucks would get stuck behind the truck carrying the state’s electric chair, which was hauled around the state so people could execute their condemned right close by. And the trucks rolled on, in a macabre caravan.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
You make me happy, when skies are gray.
In this haunted place, Jerry Lee fell in love, or something like it. The Lewis family moved into a workers’ camp outside the prison, and Jerry Lee went to the public school. He even went to class, because he had discovered football. He was skinny but fast, and he could catch a football and run like a water bug, and he made the girls act all gushy when he pulled off his helmet and slicked back his hair, which he knew to do a lot. But then a tackler the size of an International Harvester combine hit him low and separated his thighbone from the rest of his body, leaving him in a cast from his navel to his big toe. So he went back to being a piano player.
The girls, he quickly discovered, liked a good-lookin’ piano player even more than a football hero. He started caring about his clothes, hair, and the kind of car he could get to date in, though he was still only thirteen. Driver’s licenses, like most other forms of government interference, had nothing to do with him, and he had already discovered that many people were foolish enough to leave keys in their cars, so they could be borrowed.
As for girls, “I could take ’em or leave ’em,” he says. “Take ’em, mostly.”
Then he saw her.
She had a lovely name, a name from the Bible.
“Ruth,” says Jerry Lee.
She was slim, with dark brown hair, and prettier than string music.
“I think about her, a good bit.”
The problem with being Jerry Lee Lewis is all the sharp edges on things in his memories. In the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the domineering family patriarch describes his own life in similar terms: “All of my life I been like a doubled-up fist. . . . Poundin’, smashin’, drivin’!” You leave a lot of splintered and broken things, a lot of jagged things, in a life like that.
“But sometimes,” Jerry Lee says, “there ain’t no sharp edges.” It is that way, just like that, when he thinks about Ruth. This was back when only Cecil Harrelson called him the Killer, not yet the whole wide world. He was not a gentle boy and never had been but was gentler around her then, and as he thinks about her now. Not even Jerry Lee Lewis could be a driving fist all the time.
“Now I’m going to loosen these doubled-up hands,” Tennessee Williams also wrote, “and touch things easy with them.”
He already had one girlfriend, of course—a lovely girl back in Ferriday named Elizabeth. “A brunette doll,” he says. “I thought I loved her, a little bit. I loved the way she walked, the way she talked. Took her to her prom in a ’49 Chevrolet. A doll. Her ol’ mama stood on the porch and just watched us, watched us leave and watched us come in, and I didn’t care, I kissed her anyway. But then we moved out to Angola, and I got with Ruth.”
She was working behind the counter in a little store. “I was still thirteen, and she was sixteen, a good-lookin’ girl, and filled out, reasonably well. I said, ‘How much is this candy bar?’ and she just gave it to me. Next thing I knew, we was laying in the sun on the banks of the ol’ Mississippi.”
Jerry Lee knew about romance. He had heard it in songs. But he could have been smoother, he concedes now. They lay by the river for hours at a time, just talking.
“Look at those clouds,” she would say. “Are they telling you something?”
“Naw,” he said. “You can make anything out of clouds you want.”
She found all manner of things there, ships and houses and islands in the sky.
“I don’t know,” said Jerry Lee. “They just look like clouds to me.”
He lets his mind drift a bit, quiet for a while.
“She was a sweet girl.”
He was still in his cast when they first started seeing each other. When he was finally free of it, he and Ruth danced in her room to the record player. “We danced, and we cut up. One day her daddy caught us, but we wasn’t doin’ nothing. He whipped her pretty good. We just kept right on. Then she heard me play on the piano, and it was just over. She was in love.
“I had been a man for quite some time,” he says, by way of explanation. “Been driving since I was nine.”
She seemed content to just curl up with him, in the shade, by the river, or on a couch when her mama and daddy were away. “But I never was much of a cuddler,” he says. One day, they found a secluded spot on the bank and put out a blanket. “Right there on the sandy banks of Little Creek. Couldn’t have been a more perfect spot. . . . You know, you spend a lot of time in your life seeking some kind of perfection, but we’re a long way from gettin’ there. But this seemed like it, that there. I had spent a lot of time, thinking about things like this.”
They kissed, and Jerry Lee started asking.
“No,” she said.
He asked some more.
“No,” she said, but weaker.
He talked her into it; he had talked himself into it, he believed, already.
“I had been fighting it for a while,” he says, because of his raising. But he kept on. “I finally talked her into it—gettin’ on with the program, so to speak.”
Then there she was, naked, and it was as perfect, that moment, as he thought it might be.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“And, uh, we got down to the nitty-gritty,” he says, thinking back. “And . . . I slowly approached the situation.”
But at the last second, he hesitated.
He could hear Scripture in the air.
He heard his mama.
He looked up at the sky, for lightning, for the accusation.
“Help me, Lord.”
Ruth looked at him, puzzled.
She waited.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“I won’t.”
“It was you,” she reminded him, “got me naked.”
“I thought I was willing,” Jerry Lee told her.
“You mean you got me like this, and you ain’t . . .? You can’t do this to me, baby. You know what I want, and I know what you want. You ain’t foolin’ me.”
“No,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
She was hurt, and mad, and embarrassed, and mightily confused.
“I was wanting to . . . but I just wasn’t taught this way. I’m doing you a favor,” said Jerry Lee, and pulled on his clothes.
“I was scared to,” he says, so many years later. “I heard the sermon, and I was scared to death. I heard my mama. I thought there would be lightning flashing and everything else, and I just knew that it was wrong. And I never went with a woman, till I got married.”
He knew, even then, what was at stake. “It wouldn’t have worked. I wanted to be a star. I wanted to play that piano. Sometimes you have to pick, and I picked the dream. I was not gonna let that dream go by. I hear she married a nice man. Probably had a whole stack of kids. They moved away. But I do think about her, quite a bit. Put that in there, in the book. I want her to know that.”
The work ran out in Angola, and the family moved home to Concordia Parish, to a house in Black River. He looked up Elizabeth, but pretty girls do not linger for long in small Southern towns; they slip away, quickly, lightly. But then women were not his first love, anyway.
He had been dreaming since he was nine of being a real musician, and though he knew a hundred songs, no one had ever paid him a dime to sing one till the summer of ’49. It was the year Ford Motor Co., in Detroit, Michigan, made a car that will always be beautiful to Jerry Lee, because it was there, against those bulbous fenders, that his future began to take shape. The Ford cost only $1,624, and it had a flathead V8 and three on the tree, and a hood ornament fashioned from a seventeenth-century European crest of lions or something; it was hard to tell. But that flathead was about the meanest thing on the blacktop in ’49, and the bootleggers bought a lot of them. Unfortunately, so did the government, so the whiskey men and G-men were in a dead heat. But regardless of your affiliation, you could get your hands on one at Babin-Paul Ford Motor Co. in Ferriday that summer, and people came to see it, and hear a hillbilly band play “Walking the Floor Over You” from a stage hammered together from plywood and two-by-fours.
By afternoon a small crowd had gathered—farmers, barbers, store clerks, insurance men, and tired women dragging children around by sticky hands—to peer under the hood and to hear Loy Gordon and his Pleasant Valley Boys play “Wildwood Flower.”
Elmo, Mamie, Jerry Lee, and his Aunt Eva were looking on, listening to the free show. “My boy can do better’n that,” Elmo suddenly said, and took off for the stage, with purpose, and told the organizers of this hootenanny that the real talent was standing down there in the crowd popping his bubblegum. The car dealers did not see what harm it would do, and Jerry Lee was welcomed onstage to polite applause. People thought it was cute, letting this boy sit in, and the piano player relinquished his old upright. Jerry Lee took a breath. They were expecting something country, something gospel, and he looked out across the crowd and hollered “Wine Spo-dee-o-dee!” so loud it made Mamie blanch and Elmo grin like a loon.
Now I got a nickel if you got a dime.
Let’s get together and buy some wine.
Wine over here, wine over there,
Drinkin’ that mess everywhere