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WHISKEY IN THE DITCHES TWO FEET DEEP

Concordia Parish

1938

The serpents balled up in the hot dark over his bed, a whole nest of them tying and untying in knots, scraping quietly across the boards of the attic, eighteen in all. Their rattles sang, but the boy never heard. Odd, how he never heard. But Scripture tells of the slyness of serpents; in the Pentecostal South they slide not only through the still water but across faith and myth. Old men hung serpents on barbed wire to bring the rains, and would not look a serpent in its eyes for fear of being charmed. In the fields of Concordia Parish, old women told of serpents that formed a circle and rolled like a wheel, and re-formed if they were chopped in two. But myth is myth and Scripture is the Word of God, and it tells over and over of the serpents’ duplicity and evil and jealousy, in Eden, Egypt, and Canaan, after God reduced it to a thing that crawled on its belly, and decreed, in Isaiah, that dust shall be the serpent’s meat. The story of the serpents above little Jerry Lee’s bed has endured for seventy years and will endure long after this, as people tell how the rising waters lifted the copperheads and diamondbacks into trees, barn lofts, and rafters. They talk of how surely the serpents would have come down in the night and coiled in the dark corners and under beds if the boy, in his covers, had not seen a big rattler slide through a knothole in the boards above his head, “stuck his head down, and looked right at me” in the dim lamplight in his room.

“This ain’t your bed,” the boy called up to it.

The snake hung there, a few feet from his face.

“Daddy,” the boy said, quietly.

“Daddy!”

But Scripture says, too, how a man without fear will go among dragons and serpents and, with God’s sanction, protect his tribe. People tell how Elmo crawled into the dark of the rafters with a kerosene lantern and piece of hard hickory and, catching them in that writhing knot, beat them to mush against the boards till they stopped singing and there was no sound in that tight space but him, breathing hard.

His daddy could not have been any other kind of man, not weak or goody-goody or ordinary; the boy’s memory could not have endured that. He has forgiven him all the rest. “He was a man. He was a magnificent man,” he says. His father had almost no schooling, “but he was a smart man,” a capable one who could not read a book of literature but could look at a machine and tell you how its pieces fit. In a less desperate place, a more prosperous time, he might have been anything, maybe even been successful, but in the bad years he was what he had to be. It was not a good age for gentle men in Concordia Parish, when men clawed at scraps and fought each other in desperation and drunkenness and sometimes just to prove their worth, when there was no other way it could be. “Daddy didn’t walk around no man,” says Jerry Lee. “His hands were so big he’d just slap people, just slap ’em about, and he never lost no fights.” A lot of people do not see why a man had to fight. “All of that, all that of not being able to do for your family, it’ll get to you, and it got to him. I saw him knock men off the porch,” men who came collecting, or threatening. “He knocked one man off the porch and he fell so hard he broke his leg, just popped him off like he was nothin’, with his left. Wasn’t nothin’ could take my daddy down. He could beat anything, but one thing. He couldn’t beat the Depression.”

The busy town had proven no great salvation, after all. Jerry Lee was too small to recall the worst of it, when cotton wasn’t worth the muscle or diesel it took to plow it under, and construction jobs dried up, no matter how far a man drove or rode a boxcar to chase the work, but he remembers how his mama and daddy spoke of it, like it was a war. Elmo could have gone to his brother-in-law, Lee Calhoun, and begged for a little extra, but that was not in him, so he walked downtown to the grocery and threatened the storekeeper, backed him up against the wall. “He demanded food,” says Jerry Lee. “He told ’em, ‘You got a store full of food here, man, and my family, my wife, my boys, ain’t got nothin’. And he walked out of there with the food he asked for, and when he could, when he got money, he’d pay the man back. All I know is, my daddy never let us go without.” His daddy cleared swamps, dug stumps, and stood in line with other men to do any job that came along, and their families waited and prayed, even the backsliders, for things to ease. It had to ease. How could a man’s labor be worth so little as this?

There was only one man hiring. After the raid that sent Elmo and Lee Calhoun’s other in-laws to prison, Lee was out of the whiskey business . . . for about a week. He found a new place to set up in the trees and had another still constructed of even newer copper that gleamed like new money, and in no time his kin were running off good liquor again, for it was one of the certainties of hard times that a man could not be so poor he could not find money for liquor. But the consequences of getting caught were serious now. Elmo and the other in-laws, once convicted in federal court, had lost all the grace they would receive. Mamie asked him not to go back to it, but there was no denying that liquor money was better than the bare subsistence he made in the field, and they were already beholden to Lee Calhoun, already living in his house on a farm that grew only debt.

Lee was glad to have Elmo back. He was the same kind of whiskey man as he was a carpenter and farmer. He chopped wood like a fiend, cooked whiskey round the clock, ran off hundreds of gallons a week, and hauled it himself around the river parishes in his old truck, under a tarp, taking all the risks, as demand grew and grew and production jumped.

“There was whiskey running in the ditches two feet deep,” says Jerry Lee, who grew up on the stories of his uncle’s magical still. “I mean, ever’body was drunk. It was the best whiskey in Louisiana.”

Mamie choked down her fear and went to the store with her head up, because whiskey money was green as any and the only real shame was in standing there in line with no money at all. Then in spring of 1938, Elmo was stopped by federal men at a roadblock. He was not even working that day, not even hauling liquor, but he was guilty nonetheless. “They caught Daddy with a single gallon of whiskey in his truck,” says Jerry Lee. “One gallon. He wasn’t sellin’ nothin’.”

He was sentenced to five years. He kissed and hugged his boys—Jerry Lee too small to know what was really happening, and Elmo Jr., going on nine years old, not sure himself—and left for New Orleans in chains, again. Mamie took the boys back to their borrowed house with the same assurances she and her husband had received the last time, that Lee Calhoun would make sure she and her boys lacked nothing, which in an odd way made it easier when Elmo was in prison than when he was out, if you didn’t mind the loneliness. People patted her, said they would pray for her.

Having a husband in jail for liquor was almost an honorable thing then, not any more shameful to her neighbors or her kin than digging a ditch. Frank and Jesse James and the Younger boys said the same thing about robbing banks and trains: it was the times that done it. Moonshine was a shadow, a hidden stream that ran through the congregants and piebald sinners alike, and so was insidious and harder to preach against. It was the reason a man could make liquor on Saturday and sing in church on Sunday with head held high, in one of the great contradictions of the age: Pentecostals, working people, desperate now, absorbed the reality of illegal liquor into their houses of worship in a way they would never have tolerated other sins. It was survival, a sin but their sin. They owned it. For men like Lee Calhoun, churches were good for business; they railed against the store-bought liquor and fought to keep things dry, at least as a matter of law, no matter what the federal government did.

As Jerry Lee neared his third birthday, Elmo Jr. was already writing and singing his own songs in church, or in the tent meetings that passed for churches here in those days. It looked more and more to Mamie like her husband’s passed-down dream, of one day seeing a Lewis on the stage, was coming true, and it was more than blind love and parental pride. The boy was gifted—people with no blood ties to Elmo Jr. swore it, in church and around town—and Mamie knew that such artists made a good living singing about Jesus and did not have to worry at the end of the day about their immortal souls. Her boy would live and sing in a world without jail, without the reek of liquor legal or otherwise, in concert with the Lord, and might even travel the country singing his music in a gilded ministry, with her in the front row. For now, his voice was enough, a balm for the pain and loneliness.

“They say I can’t remember him, but I do,” says Jerry Lee. “I was in the yard one day, digging in the dirt with a spoon, and I heard my mama call out, ‘Junior, you watchin’ that baby?’ And I heard him say back, ‘Yes, Mama, I got my eye right on him.’ We’d play under them old houses, me and him. . . . I was in my diapers. Them old houses must have stood six feet off the ground—they built that way, for when the high water came—and we’d play under them old houses, digging in that soft dirt. I can see him, see his blond hair and see his overalls, see him clear, see him just like I’m looking at you right now.”

By the time the boy they called Junior was big enough to sing his first solo in church, there was a permanent House of the Living God to sing it in, a thing of boards and blocks instead of brush arbors and ragged canvas. But the church—a simple thing floating above the mud of Texas Avenue on piers of cinder block—might not have ever been built, if not for Mamie’s boys and their cousins, all prophesied to become mighty talents. It was built, as people here tell it, because it was ordained by God, Who spoke to two women as they knelt on the floor of a boardinghouse two states away in Mobile, Alabama. He told the women to go to this place called Ferriday and lead a great revival, because it was a wicked place, and there were souls there, jewels in that colorless ground, that needed to be brought to Him.

About the time Elmo was being sent off for the second time, a woman named Leona Sumrall and her mother, whom everyone just called Mother, were planning to go to St. Joseph, Louisiana, to start a church. The Sumralls were Pentecostals, a relatively new sect born in the twentieth century but spreading quickly through desperate work camps and factory towns in the bleak landscape of the Depression. Leona would later describe what happened here in her own book, in great detail. As she prayed in the Mobile boardinghouse, she heard God tell her to abandon her original plans and go instead to this place called Ferriday:

“God spoke to us through prophecy of the Holy Spirit: ‘I have valuable treasures in this town. They are hidden from the view of man. These jewels will be carefully shaped by My Spirit. Their dedication will surpass those around them. To salvage this treasure you must dig with caution. Your patience will be tried but I will bring them forth as pure gold. Your lives will display My love and I will draw them to Myself. They will see that your dedication is not shallow and will seek to pattern their lives according to your Christian living.’”

Mother Sumrall in the same instant heard the same words in her head.

“Did God speak to you?” Mother Sumrall asked.

“Yes,” her daughter said.

“Is it Ferriday, Louisiana?”

“Yes!”

They arrived in long, white dresses, with no money and no place to stay. Leona, in her teens, was a revival preacher in a time when you did not need much besides a bare spot of earth to get such a thing going. She asked people if they knew of a spot in Ferriday where she could hold revival, and they pointed her to a patch of weeds on Texas Avenue, near the American Legion. They cut and stripped branches from trees and built a brush arbor, and laid boards across stumps for pews, and used donated lumber to build a platform to preach from. The owner of the lot, a Ferriday businessman named Perry Corbett, told them he would donate the land to them in a ninety-nine-year lease if they pushed through with plans to build a more permanent church. In a city with as much sin as Ferriday, people figured, they would take all the religion they could get. “The wives were crying for the Lord, because it was such an evil place,” said Gwen Peterson, whose mother, Gay Bradford, grew up in the church.

The Sumralls were Assembly of God missionaries, one of the most demanding of sects. Women wore no makeup, and did not cut their hair, and dressed plainly, in long skirts, without lace at their cuffs or necks. The tenets forbade public swimming, and dancing. The sect denounced gambling, moving pictures, tobacco, and alcohol—though that one was complicated—as sins of the flesh. But the rewards would be great if a person could only last. This was a religion working men and women could wrap their minds around, and their hearts. The Assembly of God believed in healing, in miracles. It was a faith a man could see, see it take hold of a person and shake them half to death, and hear, in unknown tongues. “God wants to change this town,” Leona exulted, and some people wondered if she might be mad. At the end of the day, after walking the streets, she sat on the stoop of her donated room and poured blood from her shoes.

Lee Calhoun, being the head knocker here, met with the women as they readied the bare lot for the first revival. He was not a churchgoing man but was for churches in general. He said hello to the ladies, accepted their invitation to revival, and wished them luck.

That first night, the lot would not hold the people who came, and cars clogged the narrow street. Leona opened her Bible to Revelations. “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” Law-abiding men and women listened with drunkards, gamblers, prostitutes, and thieves, and when she called them to the altar, they came by the dozens, confessing a litany of sins. One of the first to be saved was a Herron, and other kin in the great extended family would follow. Not long after, Lee Calhoun dug in his pocket, and there was a church. “Old man Lee built the church for them, for his kin,” said Glen McGlothin, who grew up in that time, witnessed the birth of the church, and later became mayor of Ferriday. “Built three more, I know of.”

The extended family would trickle in a few at a time, till it was as much their church as anyone’s, and they were there long after the Sumralls moved on. The people of the church would remember Mamie, her face alight, tears flowing down her cheeks, her arms raised to heaven. Son and Minnie Bell Swaggart, and Irene Gilley, others—the ones old enough to comprehend—all lived in the ecstasy of salvation. And through it all, Mamie’s boys sat wide-eyed, white shirts buttoned to the neck. People would often claim, writing from outside this faith, that Jerry Lee was tortured by an unfathomable religion, but it was not beyond his understanding, in time. He was raised on the Christian teachings of heaven and hell and particularly in his people’s belief in the existence and pervasive power of the Holy Ghost. The presence of the Holy Ghost, living inside of them, sometimes caused them to tremble and shake, or go into a trance and speak in tongues, in old language, the language of Abraham, which they heard as the voice of God. In their church, it was not a theory or possibility but something as fierce and plain as a burning hill.

“It took hold of them,” Jerry Lee says now, “because it was real.”

The Holy Ghost comes into a person “like a fire,” he says.

“I took hold of it,” he says, “because it is real.”

That does not mean he would grow up to adhere, to comply, just that he knew in his heart when he did wrong. Preachers at the tiny church came and went, but with one unwavering message, that the wages of sin is death. And while they preached on all sin, on a great, wide world of sin, they preached on no sin like that of woman laying with man. Only in the sanctity of marriage could such a thing be without eternal damnation as its consequence. It seemed even more vile than murder, than stealing, than anything, and preacher after preacher railed against it in the little church, so many and so regularly that it became clear, especially to the young people, that there was sin and then there was the sin, that of lust and fornication, and such a sin had to be held down by righteousness and smothered in prayer. The wages of sin is death. The cost of sin was to burn. In Ephesians, the Bible warns: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given Himself for us . . . but fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not once be named among you. . . .” Little Jerry Lee, sitting between his mother and his big brother, did not understand it at first, all of it, but it sank into his bones.

Lee Calhoun, despite his church-building and his efforts to distance himself from his whiskey business, would face federal charges not long after that, for conspiracy: having failed to catch him making liquor, they got him for thinking about it. Lee was offered a chance to pay $1,500 and avoid prison altogether, in that peculiar way that rich men always have more choices than poor men in situations such as these, but he was unmoved by the offer. “So,” he told the court, “I pay you fifteen hundred, or you’re gonna feed me and clothe me and give me a bed to sleep in and a roof over my head for six months, and I don’t have to do nothin’? Well, I’ll take six months of that,” and he headed off to federal prison, joining Elmo on his second stint. Elmo got word to Mamie that he was fine—that he could do his time, again, and they would start over as soon as he got out, again, and that he was done with the liquor business for good. At night, he and the ghost of Jimmie Rodgers sang about the wages of sin and the poor man’s burden, with the dope fiends and the perverts shrieking and cursing and crying for release.

In the late summer of ’38, when Elmo Jr. was nine and Elmo Sr. was still away, Mamie took the boys to visit her sister, Stella. They talked in the shade of the porch as Jerry Lee dug in the dirt and Elmo Jr. played at the edge of the road with his cousin, Maudine. Traffic was light on the road and drivers knew to slow down as they came through town, and the children knew to stay out of the road. They were walking down the edge of the road, Junior singing a song, when they came to a slow-moving farm truck pulling a trailer. The truck was just merging out onto the highway, and Maudine ran and jumped on back, laughing, to ride a little piece down the road, just as a car came roaring up behind the trailer. The driver of the car was so drunk he did not see the trailer or the girl till he was almost on them. He snatched at the wheel, swerved off the road, and ran down Elmo Jr. in midsong. The car came to a stop, engine screaming, on top of the child, and the man inside was too drunk to know.

The boy was dead when the police got him out from under the car. They brought the drunk driver to stand before Mamie, so the man could see what he had wrought, but the man, a stranger to them, was still too drunk to know where he was or what he had done, too drunk to stand, and he just reeled there, blabbering on and on, held upright by the police. The officers said they would see that justice was done.

“No,” Mamie said.

Her iron jaw was locked, and her eyes were dry as stone.

“Ma’am?” one officer asked.

Mamie told the officer that was not their way, that there was a higher justice, a more awful one, than man’s.

“God will punish him,” she said.

She said the man would pay for his sins, all his sins, and his punishment would be much more terrifying than anything that would happen to him in the hotbox or forced labor of a prison farm. The police took their handcuffs from the man’s wrists, and he staggered off, free. It is said that Mamie walked into the yard and wept and screamed. Jerry Lee cannot remember that. If his mama did show weakness, he is sure, it was not for long.

The Lewises, Calhouns, Herrons, Swaggarts, Gilleys, Bateys, and the rest of them assembled in black, most of the men in their one good suit of clothes, some with an ancient suit coat covering their patched and faded overalls. The women carried wildflowers; almost all of them, like Mamie, stood with babies or toddlers on their hips.

The extended family had already all gathered around the grave when the prison truck rolled up and two armed guards helped Elmo out. He was in street clothes, but bound in handcuffs and shackles. They walked him to the graveside, Elmo taking baby steps because of his restraints, and left him with his wife, still in chains. The guards stood just a few feet away, their 12-gauge shotguns pointed at the ground. Elmo tossed a white flower onto the casket of his oldest son and wept. Then, with his second son in his arms, he stood with Mamie and the members of his tribe, and sang of the King of Kings.

Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown?

When at evening the sun goeth down

When I wake with the blest in those mansions of rest

Will there be any stars in my crown?

Then the guards linked Elmo’s handcuffs and shackles with a piece of chain, and hustled him into the prison truck and drove off to the federal pen in New Orleans, Mamie begging them to let him stay, just a little bit. And the toughest man in Concordia Parish, the snake killer, went back to the sweltering cells and the dark and dragging days. Mamie’s children would sometimes wonder if she let the drunk driver go free because she knew what it was like to live with a man in prison, knew what it was like in the quiet of the nights. Years later she would get a letter from the man, telling her how he had suffered since that day, begging her forgiveness. She threw it in the trash.

The headstone, when it was finished, was a simple one, but Elmo would not see it for some time.

ELMO K. LEWIS, JR.

NOV. 11, 1929

AUG. 6, 1938

Budded on earth to bloom in heaven.

The stone would never tilt, never lean, a rare thing in the unsubstantial dirt of Louisiana.

Lee Calhoun had purchased a place for his people to rest, in a community called Clayton, in one of the most peaceful places on God’s earth, under lovely trees, with the fields stretching off in the distance. Clayton was good, high ground, a place where the river could not rise up out of its channel and wash them out of the soil. Home from prison, he paid for everything, even paid for the stone in a time when the babies of other poor families were buried under crossed sticks and rough piles of rock. Death had not much visited the extended family by then, and the grass of the small graveyard was not yet crowded.

The child had been a kind of antidote to the worst of what was out there, plugging the gap of her missing husband with his voice. It was a family that could almost live on songs. Jerry Lee would carry his one recollection of his big brother around with him all his life, Mamie’s call to the boy, and the boy’s answer; he always liked that idea, how a brother was watching over him. It is not enough to grieve on, barely enough to hold to, to keep a person from slipping away altogether.

“Sometimes a memory ain’t enough,” he says, thinking of a song.

Most people have to wait years and years before they can even guess at their purpose in this life; some never do. In 1940, when he was not yet five years old, Jerry Lee found his reason for being born. “I was walkin’ through my Aunt Stella’s house. I saw it, and I just stopped, cold.”

He cannot remember wanting to touch anything so bad. He had studied pianos for quite some time, but only at a distance. He had looked on them in great curiosity, these big wooden boxes so heavy you needed a truck to haul them around, so complicated that if they went out of tune it took a mad scientist to make them right again. He did not even fully understand how they worked, that you tapped a thin key of ivory to make a tiny steel hammer strike a steel wire, sharp and clean, eliciting a sound so sweet and pure and resonant it seemed more magic than machine. He studied them in thrown-together churches and tent revivals where silver-haired old women, hair buns so high and tight it looked like a B-movie spaceship had landed on the top of their heads, banged out “Victory in Jesus” like they were mad at it, stiff fingers jerking, marching across the ivory. He watched fat men in loud suits and dime-store diamond rings slap ham-handed at the ivory as they hollered a jingle for liver tonic or cough medicine that was 90 percent alcohol, till it was clear, from the way they played, they had been having some liver trouble themselves. And he had spied them, just a flash, through the doors of the jukes on Fifth Street, as sharp-dressed black men with cigarillos in their lips pumped the pedals like they were kicking at the devil himself rising up from beneath their feet, hands moving and crossing in the shadows. What a wonderful box, to hold so much. But you almost never saw one like this, unattended.

That day, he and Elmo and Mamie had come to visit his Uncle Lee and Aunt Stella, to talk of crops and children and other unimportant things, leaving him unsupervised, to roam the big house. “I just kept lookin’ at it,” he recalls. “I just had to get at it. It was just an ol’ upright piano, but I had to get at it.”

His fingers closed and unclosed and he made baby steps, sidling and creeping.

“I wasn’t hardly even walkin’ around too good—I was just a baby,” he says. Still, “I kept gettin’ closer and closer.”

Funny that he did not think he would try and play it.

“I knew I had to play it.”

In those days, a child, even a treasured and somewhat spoiled one, did not just jump onto a piano in another person’s house and play it, any more than he would take out the fine china and start spinning it on a stick. He waited till he could not stand it anymore, as the grow-nups just kept yapping.

“And I reached up and, for one reason or ’nother, it just come to me.”

He touched a single key, pushed it sharply down.

Cool fire.

He has always had a hard time describing what happened that day, in that moment, as he heard that music come out of him. He does not want to make too much of it, but at the same time he is not sure he can exaggerate it, any more than a man could exaggerate standing under a skinny tree in a lightning storm, at the precise moment the world around him turned a smoking blue.

“I don’t know what happened. Somethin’ strange. I felt it in my whole body. I felt it.”

Musicians, great ones, often claim that when they touched an instrument their hands knew where to go. The sound of the first key leaped into his head, ringing, ringing, and told his fingers which key to hit next, and it just kept happening, a cascade, and before he even knew what he was doing he had played a song, or at least a part of one.

Silent night, holy night

“Can you believe that?” he says now. “For a four-year-old kid, to walk by and just reach up and play it?

“Now I know what it was,” he says.

“It was deliverance.”

He laughs at himself then, a little self-consciously, at talking this way. “A talent e-merged,” he says, his words exaggerated, “and not a bad lookin’ kid, either,” as if it is too important to him to take seriously for long. But it was the day that changed everything, the day he knew what he had to be. He still remembers, after so much time, how his Aunt Stella looked at him, so oddly. She had always been a smart woman.

“She knew,” Jerry Lee believes.

Mamie almost fell out as she heard her son play. She brought her hands together and praised God.

“Oh, Elmo,” she said, “we’ve got ourselves a natural-born pianist.”

“Well, Mamie,” Elmo said, “we might have a piano player.”

Jerry Lee smiles at that. “Like there was a difference,” he says now.

“He’s a prodigy,” Mamie said. Such words had rarely even been used.

“Probably is, Mamie,” Stella said, that look still on her face. “Probably is.”

It must have seemed to Elmo and Mamie like answered prayers. They had lost one prodigy; the good son slept safe in the high ground. But now they had seen delivered unto them another one—more or less.

The wild son, seven or eight years old now, barefoot, dirty faced, and grinning, climbed the iron girders of the Mississippi River bridge till he stood swaying in the hot wind at the height of the span, then walked it like a circus rope, one step, two steps, more, as the little boys below, cousins and such, stood slack-jawed and trembling at the rail. Jerry Lee had scared them to death, again, and if the yellow-haired imp fell to his doom in the river below, surely their mamas and daddies would find a way to blame all of them and beat them unconscious. He waved at them, taunting, as the wind sucked at his shirt and almost lifted him off the iron beam as the tugboats and great barges passed beneath his feet, as the drivers of the passing cars wondered which asylum had let that boy slip out. He walked the span over and over, skinny arms akimbo, like a crow on a wire, not even looking at his feet but leering, jeering at the boys below and mightily pleased with his little self.

“Are you conquered?” he shouted.

“Please, Jerry Lee,” they begged, in a chorus, Jimmy, Mickey, Cecil Harrelson, David Batey, others. “Please get down.”

He laughed in their upturned faces.

“Get down!” they wailed.

“Come and get me,” he said.

It had started that morning as all mornings started then along the dirt streets of Ferriday, in an ever-swelling migration of scamps and urchins and ne’er-do-wells, aimed at no place in particular but intent on doing no good when they got there. One of their favorite games was called Conquer, which was basically a game of double-dog dares. One boy would do something dangerous or asinine, anything as long as there was at least some chance of bloodletting or broken bones or bug-eating, and the other boys had to do the same or admit they were just big fat sissies and sing out, “I’m conquered.” It might be anything from jumping off a railroad trestle into a murky creek to taking a punch to hollering at a big girl, and nobody—nobody—conquered Jerry Lee. “I never was afraid. . . . I don’t know why. I just never was scared of nothin’,” he said, which is an easy thing to say but hard to live. But his cousins would stand in amazement at the things he did. Cousin Mickey would say he believed most geniuses were crazy, and his cousin was a genius for sure. But the stunt on the bridge, 150 feet above the big river, was off the scale.

“Are you conquered, or not?” Jerry Lee asked.

The boys looked at the river below. They shook their heads.

“Are you conquered?” he shouted again.

They nodded.

“Say it!” he shouted.

“We’re conquered! We’re conquered!”

Jerry Lee leaped up, grabbed a crossbeam, and hung there, laughing.

“Oh,” he says now, “they begged me to come down, but I didn’t pay ’em no mind. I guess I could’ve fell, but I didn’t.”

He remembers coming back to earth in triumph.

The little boys crossed their hearts and swore not to tell.

“But somebody told,” he says.

His mama had a good cry and wondered what she had done to have God punish her this way.

“I’m gonna have to kill you, boy,” Elmo said, then just walked off, shaking his head. Mamie would not let him whip the boy.

The bridge incident was hard to eclipse, but sometime later he tried. One day, as the cadre of boys stood on an overpass, a long freight train appeared in the distance.

“I’m gonna jump on it,” Jerry Lee said.

“No you ain’t,” they said.

“Yes I am,” he said.

Jerry Lee climbed up on the rail and crouched there, like a hawk. The train had seemed to be lumbering along, but now, so close, it shook and clanked and rumbled, and the steel wheels moved in a blur. But he’d said he would do it. He picked a boxcar, one with a flat roof.

Well, he thought, you’ll probably make it.

He leaped into space.

He landed, slid, and came to a stop.

Hah.

Most boys would have let it go at that. But in the cowboy matinees, he had seen the heroes and bad men jump from one boxcar to another on a moving train, and he decided to give that a whirl. Besides, he was not altogether sure where this train was headed or when it might get there, and he might have to jump all the way to the engine, to tell the engineer to Please, sir, my name is Jerry Lee Lewis, and will you please stop this thing and let me off. It already looked like he was halfway to Baton Rouge. The other boys just stood in the far distance, wondering if they would ever see him again, and half hoping the train did not stop till it got to Canada. But then things would sure be dull around here, without Jerry Lee.

He walked to the edge of the boxcar and looked down at the coupling, at the crossties going by faster than he could count. Then he walked to the other end, got a running start, leaped and made the gap, easy, sliding on his belly. But this car had a more rounded roof. It occurred to him, in one sickening second, that there was nothing to hold on to. “I just slid off.”

He hit the big gravel at the trackside with an awful oomph, and the sound of rending clothes. The other little boys, watching in the distance, ran for home.

“They just left me there, the others, left me laying there like an old shoe,” he says. He was bruised all over, and skinned alive, but not broken, at least not that he could see. “I dragged myself up to the road and got a ride home with this rich guy.” The man looked him over.

“I slid,” Jerry Lee said.

“Oh,” the man said.

Mamie was without words. Elmo breathed fire and threatened, but there was nothing he could do. It was Elmo, in that deep backwater, who had taught the boy not to let fear own him. But this boy had no limits. Southern men like to think of people, sometimes, as machines so they can understand them, and they know that most small engines, like lawnmowers, have a tiny mechanism on them called a governor, a kind of safety device that keeps them from running wide open all the time and burning up. In people, it’s fear or common sense that serves as the mechanism. This boy, Elmo quickly figured out, didn’t have one. He was buck wild and strutting and had been since he was walking around good, determined to get away with as many transgressions as hours in the day would allow; he would not read a book on a bet and ogled all the pretty girls on the big yellow school bus and pretty women in town when he didn’t even know what he was looking at. He put one of his cousins in a cardboard box and set him in the middle of the road, and walked the parish with a perpetual smirk, like he knew even as a boy that he was the stud duck around here and people might as well get used to it.

They might have done more to rein the child in if they had not heard him play and sing.

The first time he really sang, when he was not yet even in school, it struck Elmo and Mamie hard in their hearts, because it was like their lost boy was not lost at all, like he was singing through this second son. Jerry Lee was not the good son, yet he could—if he did not fall to his death or drown in the Blue Hole or disappear on a freight car or get remanded to reform school—be a great one. He might be the one. But while this boy loved singing and, more important, noticed music, he was not yet a devotee of it, as his brother had been. There was too much of the other life out there to taste and conquer. He was a student of mischief, and even a lifetime later he relishes it almost as much as he relishes the early music, relishes any discomfort or awkwardness or devilment he took part in, the way he remembers the taste of his mama’s tomato gravy. Some men outgrow their boyish devilment. Others only polish it.

“Mama would wake me at seven thirty in the morning; school started at eight thirty. And I’d always say, ‘All I need is just one more minute, Mama,’ always just one more minute. She would come back in with a cup of cocoa and some vanilla wafers, and I’d eat it there in the bed and she’d sit with me. That was my favorite, that or tomato gravy and biscuits and a Coca-Cola. She was the angel in my life, my mama was. I had the best mama and daddy in the world, and I know everybody says that, but I believe it to be true. I know it is.”

The war raged, far off. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the one Uncle Lee Calhoun considered a sack of hot wind and a socialist, came on the radio after the double-dealing Japanese bushwhacked the sailors at Pearl Harbor, and he vowed, in that highbrow Yankee accent, that there would be a world of hurt in store. The next thing the poor people of Concordia knew, they were at war with Germans; if only Jerry Lee and the boys had paid attention in history, maybe that would have made some sense. But even before the war had reached the boys of Concordia Parish, people were beginning to feel it in their pocketbooks, as work bloomed in munitions plants and even in the fields, as parish cotton was suddenly worth something again.

Uncle Lee Calhoun had so many rental houses he could not collect for all of them in a single day and would have killed a good horse doing it. He made collections now in a raggedy prewar Chevrolet pickup and took off the driver’s-side door to save time on collection days. People here laugh about the time he ran a red light and crashed his truck into a man’s big Cadillac, how he stood there in his sweat-stained work khakis and told the man, a stranger passing through, how that ol’ truck was the only thing he owned in this sorry world and if he had to pay to get the man’s car fixed he would be ruined and maybe even have to go to prison, because when he failed to pay the damages and fine, the cold-blooded police would sock him in jail and his poor family would starve. The other man, almost in tears, patted him a little bit and drove away, his ruined car limping slowly along, happy that he had spared a poor man even more pain. The new prosperity made Lee no more generous with his own workers. One day, he promised workers in his fields some fish for lunch, and they worked all morning with their mouths watering, thinking about fried catfish, till Lee Calhoun showed up at noon with a sack full of sardines and some loose dry crackers.

Other members of the clan began to find a small prosperity of their own. Willie Harry Swaggart, the one called Pa, became chief of police. He was a craggy old man with steel-colored eyes who did not carry a gun, did not need to, because Pa had made his living in Ferriday in the swamps, trapping things that bit. But it was handy, for Jerry Lee and his cousins, to have an inside man in the department. The Gilleys opened small cafés, and others in the extended family put their names on doors and store windows. Elmo and Mamie found work in the war effort as carpentry took off again; munitions plants sprang up, other jobs appeared, and they had a grip on the here and now for the first time in their lives. “Mama sent me to the store,” Jerry Lee says, “with money.”

For working people, the boom did not extend to new houses or cars; Detroit had stopped producing cars, anyway, to use their assembly lines for planes and tanks. For the people who had been picking cotton or cutting timber, it came in the form of new overalls and food on the table at dinner and supper. His mama had the means, for the first time, to work true magic in the kitchen. “There has never been such a cook,” he says, “as my mama. Pork chops and gravy, beans and cornbread, beef, biscuits and gravy, cornbread dressing, okra, squash, tomatoes . . .” It was nothing they hadn’t had before, from the ground or the stores, but even such simple things had become so dear in the Depression. “We had hog killings, and we had fresh ham, and those pork chops, and cracklin’s.” There was money for new records, and for batteries so his mama’s radio could keep bringing in those songs by Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb.

There was even money left over for the matinee. The Arcade Theater was a place of such importance in Ferriday that the movies showed even during great floods, and men rowed their sweethearts to the entrance in canoes and bateaux, to see the outside world flash across the screen. It gave Jerry Lee’s imagination a place to grow, and he wondered, sometimes, what lurked in the dark woods on nights he walked home by himself from the double feature at the Arcade, after he watched Lon Chaney turn into The Wolfman one clump of hair at a time. He was not scared, just almost scared, “but then my imagination had been whipped up quite a bit.” But nothing drew Jerry Lee to the Arcade so relentlessly as a new Western, and no Western pulled him like those of the singing cowboy, Gene Autry. The actor had taken a sabbatical from shooting cap pistols out of outlaws’ hands to go fight the real war, in the army air corps, flying the Hump between Burma and China over the dangerous Himalayas. But he had already made so many black-and-white horse operas that there were enough to make do in the war years, and “if Gene Autry was at the Arcade Theater, then Jerry Lee Lewis was the first one in line. I liked the way he fought and I liked the way he shot, but mostly I liked the way he sang.”

One day, his cousin Jimmy approached his father and asked if he could take in a movie with his cousins. His father and mother began to cry, in disappointment. The movie theaters, they believed, were the devil’s playground, and while Jimmy went into the theater that day, he came right back out again, sobbing, convinced of their wickedness. Jerry Lee did not understand how a man in a white hat, who rarely even kissed the damsel in distress, who championed orphans and puppies, could drag a boy into the depths of hell. So, while Jimmy knelt and asked for forgiveness, Jerry Lee just ate some popcorn and sang yippy-ti-yi-yay.

The cost of the war—and of the local economic recovery—would not be known for some time, when the first casualties started appearing in the newspaper. “We had kin lost in the war,” Jerry Lee recalls. “Paul Batey got killed. A sniper got him,” in the Pacific. “My Aunt Viola never got over that. The war took a whole lot of people from here.” But for the children, safe in the low country, the war was a thing of adventure, where Germans could be killed with slingshots and Japanese fell from paper planes. The river was said to be a thing of great strategic importance, as it had since the Yankees took Vicksburg, but now it was said to be a target for sabotage, because of the freight it carried for the war effort. So the boys watched from the bank for saboteurs and submarines. It was what he did instead of going to school; it was a patriotic duty.

“Mama and Daddy seen their kid had school,” he says, but he did not always make it inside the door. He would walk off in that direction, till he was out of sight, then just go wandering, to fish or swim or throw rocks or sit and listen to an old man whup a guitar, because it was so hard to sit there in those little bitty desks and try to learn about fractions and what made the sky blue and the names of all those men in puffy pantaloons, when there was great time wasting to be done, pool halls to sneak into, barbershops to linger by. And so he just did not go often to Ferriday Elementary and hoped the teachers would just pass him through, something teachers have done since the advent of chalk. His daddy made the mistake of buying him an old motor scooter, which only increased his range. “It was a great time,” he says. “Every now and then a plane would fly over, and we’d go hide under the bridge.”

It was about this time, in the thin shadow of that distant war, he decided his own world was just too small.

“I don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to go.”

He looks as if he is searching for some kind of understanding of that, which is rare for him.

“Sometimes you just need to go.”

He had hitchhiked the dirt roads and blacktop in Concordia Parish and parishes up and down the river since he was old enough to realize what his thumb was for, sometimes just to see where the roads ended, the same way he wondered how deep the Blue Hole was, that place in the backwater where cold-blooded killers were said to dump the bodies of their victims, wired to a truck part or a cinder block. The world was wide and mysterious and rich and dangerous, and he lived in only a little bitty corner of it. The river only went north and south but roads went everywhere. He had made it as far as Vicksburg, across the dull, flat green and rolling land, had some ice cream and a candy bar, then, his head humming with sugar, hitchhiked home. One day, without a sack lunch or change of clothes or a dime in his pocket, he walked down the road till he was out of sight of his mama and daddy’s house, sprinted for the highway, and stuck out his thumb.

“Mama,” he says, “would have had a heart attack.”

The first car to stop was a ’41 Ford. The old man inside looked him up and down.

“How far you goin’, boy?”

“New Orleans,” he told him.

He made up a plausible, heart-tugging story as to why; it evades him now, but he knows it must have been a good one or he never would have gotten out of Concordia Parish. A few hours and stories later he was standing on Decatur Street, with the Crescent City hunkering at his feet. He looked at the curve of the river, crowded with ferries and tugboats and big freighters, so many vessels he could almost walk from the French Quarter to Algiers, but it was the same brown river he had at home, so he did not waste much time on the docks. He wanted to see a city, see a real one, and all that it implied. “I wanted to go somewhere big,” he says, “and New Orleans was the biggest place I could think of.”

He walked the traffic-choked, narrow streets in wonder. This was the New Orleans of Tennessee Williams, dark and rich and dangerous. He saw the old iron streetcar, rumbling and clanking and spitting sparks, crowded with people rich and poor. Ladies, some half-dressed, reclined on the balconies, just languidly wasting the day. He passed the grand hotels and the tap dancers who banged against the old bricks with bottle caps on the soles of their shoes, and the mule-drawn carriages with their velvet-fringed rooftops, and a great, cream-colored church, the one the Catholics called the cathedral of St. Louis. He peeked into cafés where the rich smell of coffee drifted down the streets till it bowed to the stronger scent of a hundred kinds of liquor, pouring from bars already going strong in the stark light of day.

“Well,” he said to himself, “this is a place.”

But he was also hungry, and beginning to think, at least a little, about the commotion that would arise when suppertime came and his mama and daddy noticed he was gone.

“I wound up in front of this Italian grocery,” he says. “I guess I looked lonesome.”

The grocer, his accent so thick Jerry Lee could barely understand him, asked the boy who he was and what he was doing there, standing around. He did not look like a New Orleans street urchin; he looked lost.

“I have been kidnapped,” Jerry Lee said.

The man just looked at him, sternly.

“And I’m hungry,” Jerry Lee said.

He may not be buying this, he thought.

Then a thickset, middle-aged woman came out of the grocery, apparently the man’s wife, and said something in Italian that seemed to be laced with smoke and fire, then in English that he could understand told the man that he should be ashamed of himself for leaving this baby to stand in the street. “Give this bambino something to eat right now,” she said. He ate enough bologna to kill a normal man.

Around one o’clock in the morning, he found himself sitting on a straight-back chair in a New Orleans police station, or perhaps Juvenile Hall; he cannot really say. A police officer, calling every place in Ferriday with a telephone, had finally gotten somebody to fetch Elmo to a phone, so the officer could tell him to, please, sir, come and get his boy, because New Orleans had enough trouble as it was.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with that boy,” Elmo told him.

Mamie was saying “Thank you, Jesus” in the background.

“I don’t know, either, sir,” the officer said.

“I mean, I got him a motor scooter,” Elmo said.

“Just please come and get him, sir,” the officer said.

Elmo drove into the night. It was no pleasure trip in those days, on those roads. When he finally got there, he just looked at his son for a moment, his face cloudy with fury, and sighed.

Jerry Lee said he would have been home sooner, but, “Daddy, it’s hard for a little boy to get home.”

Elmo sighed again and drove his son back to Ferriday.

“There stood Mama,” he says, remembering.

She ran to the car and grabbed his shoulders. “Boy,” she said, “I should kill you.” Then she snatched him to her chest. “I love you so. Come here, baby.”

He knew then that he would get away with just about anything.

“They loved their boy,” he says, again. “They were just glad to get him back.”

He is not certain, anymore, exactly why he left.

“I just knew that a motor scooter was not what I was looking for.”

Elmo had long since decided the boy was special and not always in a good way. He knew quickly that he was never going to be a farmer or a carpenter; he refused to pull his own weight around the house and might have been the sorriest cotton picker who ever put on a sack. He not only came in light, he came in almost empty, and he could tear up a tractor in no time, just disappear with it down a road, plowing up the asphalt. And he had accepted that the boy was no scholar. He had hoped, at least, to keep his son out of reform school or prison, but even that was looking grim. Before he was able to see over the dashboard, he had stolen Elmo’s Ford and gone joyriding down the roads of Ferriday and Black River, whooping. The first time it happened, Elmo had looked up to see his car rolling out of the driveway, ran up to see who was driving. It appeared to be nobody. Then he caught a brief flash of just the top of a blond head, and cursed, and considered praying. The car went sliding out of the driveway wide-open and roaring down the dirt road, and Elmo watched and listened for the sound of great tragedy. All he heard was the roar of the engine, roaring, roaring. There was something wrong. It finally hit him. “Oh Lord,” he said, “the boy ain’t changing gears.” Jerry Lee must have been pulling about four thousand RPM, the engine smoking, before he finally turned around and headed home.

When he pulled up in the driveway and killed the motor, his daddy was standing there aghast, his big hands on his hips. He could smell gaskets melting, metal smoking.

Jerry Lee decided to act like he was supposed to drive.

They stood there looking at each other.

“Well,” Elmo finally asked, “how’d you do, son?”

“I did pretty good, Daddy,” said Jerry Lee, “but I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of low gear.”

Elmo knew he should lock the boy in a pen, but he was one of those animals who would kill himself against the wire.

“Well,” he said in defeat, “maybe I better show you.”

By the fall of ’43, he was becoming more enamored of music, so that a song on the radio, or at a clothesline, or in the fields, could freeze him midstep. Music, black and white, blues and hillbilly, swirled around him, and as he sang it back, his own voice grew richer, till he sounded less like a freckle-faced kid. He knew something about the purity of music, the unvarnished beauty of it. It was among the first sounds he heard as a baby, even before Elmo Jr. was sent to heaven and Elmo Sr. was sent to New Orleans, and it would never desert him. “It was beautiful,” he says, “when Mama and Daddy sang their duets. They sang ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ and ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’ and ‘Old Rugged Cross,’ and they sang ‘Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?’” And sometimes when they sang, it looked like their hearts were breaking, but to Jerry Lee then it just sounded like the soul of music itself was laid bare, when he heard them sing the songs from church. “You simply,” he says, “cannot beat them old songs.”

He would never improve on that beauty; never wanted to sing with more heart. He just wanted to make it move faster, harder, and for that he needed an engine, but the only pianos in his world all belonged to someone else. His daddy had a guitar and encouraged him to play it, but there was just a limit to the thing—he had always despised limits—and it seemed like the strings were designed to hold him, not set him free. “I learned to play guitar, could play it pretty good,” he says, but “a guitar just has six strings.” He says it like a man would say his dog just has three legs, with dejection and pity. In church he heard the future on those old pianos, battle-scarred from all those crusades against the devil one big tent at a time. But only the rich people had one in their house, or at least, people richer than they were.

He was playing in the yard when he saw his father’s old truck lumbering up to their house on Tyler Road. The better times, the carpentry work and cotton prices, had allowed Elmo a little breathing room, and for the first time in his life he had purchased his own land. It was the first dirt he had ever put his name on.

“He had a piano on his truck,” he says, “and my eyes almost fell out of my head.”

He started hopping, like old man Herron used to hop when Elmo lifted him over a fence.

“I found out later he mortgaged his farm to buy it for me,” he says. “I tol’ you. I had the best mama and daddy in the world.”

Elmo backed the truck up to the porch and undid the ropes. Together, they lifted it into the house.

“There it is,” Elmo said. “Now play it.”

It was an upright, paneled in dark wood, manufactured by the P. A. Starck Piano Co., of Chicago, Illinois—a unique manufacture, according to the advertisements, with a bent acoustic rim that gave it a fuller, richer tone, more like a grand piano—and “well adapted for concert use.”

His daddy bought it in Monroe, Louisiana, for how much he cannot recall.

It was used, certainly. “It looked new to me,” he says now.

He let his fingers run down the keys.

“Thank you, Daddy,” he said.

Mamie stood in the doorway. She had never completely forgiven him for going to prison that second time, leaving her alone with the boys and her grief. Women can be hard on a man that way.

“You done good,” she told him.

“And it wasn’t long,” he says. “I was playin’ piano about as good as I play now.”

You have to forgive him for dismissing a lifetime of influence, of adaptation, of study—not in any traditional sense, like paid-for lessons, but in the way he learned his art, by simply listening, always listening. He will always believe that, while he did learn, did soak up the music from the outside world, the great bulk of his genius came from within, where God placed it.

The piano would come to be called the wisest investment in the history of rock and roll.

“It’s sittin’ in there,” he says now of his first piano, motioning beyond the door to where the old upright leans tiredly against the wall in the darkened hallway. “I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.”

The boy played, played every moment he was not obligated to be somewhere else, and stopped only to bathe and sleep; sometimes he even ate at the thing, chewing on a sandwich, thinking about melodies, rhythms, songs. It is not like he had anything better to do. He had never seen a great deal of value in school, at least before he discovered girls, and now knew it was totally unnecessary. Now, in the cursed classroom, he would stare at the top of his desk in abject misery and itch to be set free of this foolishness. “I was sittin’ on Ready,” he says, “and pumpin’ on Go.” There was no bell at Ferriday Elementary to mark the end of the school day, but “the band started practicing at three o’clock sharp,” and that meant the last period was finally over. He almost turned his desk over getting out, cleared the front steps in one leap, snatched up his bicycle and pedaled home, where he banged through the door and slid onto the piano seat like he was sliding in at home. He played “Blessed Jesus, Hold My Hand” and “He Was Nailed to the Cross for Me” and every other hymn he could think of, all of it by ear; the notes meant nothing to him, and the sheet music and hymnals just a waste of a good tree.

I will be a soldier brave and true and firmly take a stand

As I onward go and meet the foe, blessed Jesus, hold my hand

He disappeared into the piano just as surely as if he had crawled into the cabinet and closed the lid. His cousins came for him, but mostly now he sent them away. This was important. Nothing else was.

Elmo and Mamie encouraged his obsession, but there was a limit.

“Son,” Elmo would say, as the hour struck ten, or sometimes eleven, or later. “Son, we got to get some sleep.”

“Ten more minutes, Daddy,” he said.

“No.”

“Five more minutes?”

“No.”

Mamie would come in, rubbing her eyes. “Put the lid down, son, and go to bed.”

Even though he was a born piano player, he still had to practice and practice to master the more complicated songs. Elmo knew music, knew the science of it, despite his lack of schooling, and sometimes, in the beginning, he would correct his son.

“You missed a minor chord, son,” he said, once.

“So I missed one, big deal,” he said, then, more sheepish: “What is a minor chord?”

“And then Daddy would sit down and show me,” he said, thinking back.

But Elmo had never seen someone so quickly master the instrument, any instrument, or master the nuances of songs.

He would call out a song, “and I’d sit down and play it,” says Jerry Lee. Some of those songs would stay with him—and in his stage shows—for a lifetime, like “Waiting for a Train” by Jimmie Rodgers, the story of a penniless man just trying to get home, but thrown off the train by a railroad bull. “Songs that told a story,” he says. Others just made you feel good. He played “Mexicali Rose” by Gene Autry—that one made Elmo whoop and grin—and “My Blue Heaven” by Gene Austin, and “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller. He did not know what swing music was, completely, but he knew the feeling even before his feet reached from the piano bench to the floor. He would play “Alabama Jubilee,” a song from 1915, and “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” an even older song his mama loved. And there were other songs of a newly popular piano style called boogie-woogie—songs like “Down the Road a Piece” and, later, “The House of Blue Lights.” He cannot remember where he heard them all, but he knows how he learned to play them. “I just had to hear ’em,” sometimes just once.

And yet there was always a difference between a boy and his father. One day, as Jerry Lee was laboring to learn one of the new songs, Elmo sat down at the old piano and played it through himself. But he played it beautifully, flawlessly, and it was so lovely, so impossibly beautiful, that the boy started to cry, in despair. And, seeing that, Elmo never played another song on the piano in front of his boy again. “Can you imagine that?” Jerry Lee says. “Lovin’ a kid that much,” to stay away from the piano for a lifetime?

The shocking thing was how quickly he could learn a song, and adapt it into something new. Elmo wired the house for electricity, and got his boy a radio so he could snag what was drifting through the air. He listened to the radio like a man sifting for gold. Some stations came in maddeningly faint, wafting down from Chicago or some other big city, but the best music in the world was being played almost next door, anyway. The Jesuits at Loyola University had fifty thousand watts pushing big band and Dixieland up from New Orleans, and you could hear Sharkey Bonano like he was standing in the hall. In Natchez, WMIS played the blues almost nonstop, from the rusty piano shuffle of Champion Jack Dupree to the citified jump bands of Louis Jordan and Amos Milburn. WSMB in New Orleans piped in hillbilly music from Nashville, and before long KWKH started bringing the Louisiana Hayride in from Shreveport, on a signal that would change his life. He bought records every time a little money came his way, boogie and hillbilly and pop hits, sounds that were obscure only to people with a tin ear, and eavesdropped endlessly in Ferriday’s black section to hear the most lowdown blues he could find drifting from the flung-open doorways, always collecting, absorbing. In time, he only had to hear a song once to store it inside his head. Then he would match the words to the rows of black and white, anything from country tunes like “You Are My Sunshine” to the old New Orleans song “Margie” to blues songs and drinking ditties.

It was a grand time in American music, when field hands laid the bedrock of rock and roll, elegant orchestras held sway in hotel ballrooms in New Orleans, jump blues combos toured the South continuously, and country music was maturing from fiddle tunes and cornpone to something a soldier returning from the war could cleave to, drink to, even dance to, with his baby. New music was busting out all over, but the old music still shined. He feasted on the new, but also listened for Al Jolson, who had never truly gone out of style, and Hoagy Carmichael:

Now he’s poppin’ the piano just to raise the price

Of a ticket to the land of the free

Well they say his home’s in Frisco where they ship the rice

But it’s really in Tennessee

On Saturday nights he sat by the radio like it was something he could see into. He listened to the Grand Ole Opry, even bore up to Roy Acuff, who was “the worst singer I ever heard.”

“What do you mean you don’t like Roy Acuff?” asked his mama.

“Well,” he and his daddy would say, almost in concert, “he ain’t no Jimmie Rodgers.”

The Singing Brakeman lived in their house now the way he had bunked with Elmo in New Orleans. His daddy played his boy the music on the Victrola, and he heard the genius in it, heard the train whistle across the tortured land and heard the blues bleed into this white man’s music, the way he heard it in the fields of the parish. Rodgers was the father of country music, but he was also “a natural born blues singer,” Jerry Lee says. “I loved his blues.” In no time he was singing and playing about hopping freights and getting drunk and the perils of no-account women, and if he was ten years old, it wasn’t by much.

Oh, my pocketbook is empty and my heart is full of pain

I’m a thousand miles away from home, just waitin’ for a train

Mamie frowned at that, at the little boy singing such raw, secular music, but there was no containing it now. “Mama supported my music” from the beginning, he says, even if she blanched at the words. When he was fourteen or so, he was moved by a song called “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” which a rhythm-and-blues singer named Stick McGhee had adapted from a nastier, profanity-laced chant he’d learned in the army. Mamie’s son worked up a slightly cleaner version of his own, so that she wouldn’t faint or fall to praying for his soul or pinch a plug out of his arm, and boogie would echo down Tyler Road . . .

Way down in New Orleans where everything’s fine

All them cats is just a-drinkin’ that wine

Drinkin’ that mess is pure delight

When they get sloppy drunk they sing all night

Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee, drinkin’ wine

Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee, drinkin’ wine

Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee

Won’t you pass that bottle to me

. . . then he would do another hymn. His cousins Jimmy and Mickey had also fallen in love with the piano at about the same time, and they would play together, sometimes, the three of them, and the people of the town would wonder at such talent in one bloodline, even if it was dad-gum impossible to figure exactly which lines ran in what direction. “All three played,” he recalls. “Me and Jimmy would play together, and you could hear it for three blocks.” But there was never any doubt about who was leading that trio. “You think Mickey and Jimmy could have cut it like me, could have cut that Al Jolson like me?” he says, as if daring someone to disagree.

But he did not, even as a child, hear anyone playing exactly like he wanted to play, no one singing precisely as he wanted to sing. Most of the standout artists were guitar men; the piano players still seemed mostly in the background, trapped in one genre or another.

Then he heard a man who defied any one label, a man who looked like a country-and-western piano man and played next to men in rhinestones and big hats but who played jazz, too, and blues, and anything he damn well pleased, from Cab Calloway to Texas swing. Some people called his music Western swing, others said hillbilly boogie. Jerry Lee just knew it sounded good, like something he could do.

Yeah I’m an ol’ pipeliner an’ I lay my line all day

I got four or five women, waitin’ to draw my pay

Moon Mullican’s musical talent had germinated in the church, like his. Mullican learned first on an organ, but he was drawn to the sounds he heard drifting from the fields and chain gangs in Polk County, Texas. His daddy put a strap to him, but it was hard to stop the boy from listening to what drifted in on the Texas wind. He was Scots-Irish and as white as white could get—his grandfather fought for the South at Shiloh—but he would mix blues and big-city jazz into his stage shows between tear-soaked country ballads. The people who paid good money to hear him sometimes didn’t know what to think, with him playing that colored music so loud, and disc jockeys didn’t know where to play him, and record producers did not know what to do with him, but Jerry Lee listened to him closely, very closely, and heard in the music some of the first heartbeats of what he would one day know as rock and roll. “Moon Mullican knew what to do with a piano.” And Jerry Lee was playing it in no time.

He sat at the old piano and mixed and matched and experimented. In a way, it was like the piano was the heart of the old Lewis house, always pumping, pumping. “When it would flood, and Ferriday was under water, Daddy would put my piano on the back of the truck, and haul it out” to safety. It was not a hard decision, what to save and what to leave: the piano was the one good piece of furniture they owned. Then, when the water receded and the house dried out, he would fetch it back, and Mamie would breathe a sigh of relief.

“We gathered around the piano every night, back then, me and her and Daddy,” says Jerry Lee. It had always been that way for them, through poverty and misery and death, and now, again, in hope. It was clear that their boy was going places. It was all a matter of direction.

Mamie laid out his white shirt and bow tie. That was how you knew in the Lewis house that a great day was at hand. They rode to church in Elmo’s Ford and parked among the other ragged cars. Here and there, a backslid husband made himself comfortable across a seat, to wait out the preaching and singing and the altar call. Even Lee Calhoun drove up in a battered Chevrolet for the same reason a good poker player never flashed his wad. He had had the house of worship built on blocks, to prevent flooding, but blocks were dear, so it could not be much of a flood. There was electricity wired in the walls but no plumbing beneath the plain wood floors—an outhouse had been dug out back—and there was no stained glass in the windows to filter and soften the Louisiana sun. A rusted potbellied stove, the only heat in winter, sat in a corner. But inside, on a Sunday morning, there was no question whose house this was, and it was not Lee Calhoun’s.

It was a hothouse in summer; it seems it was always summer. The parishioners threw open the windows and installed two massive box fans on opposite sides of the building to draw the rising heat and expel it outdoors. It drew with it the sounds of the church, and created a phenomenon on Texas Avenue that people could not recall seeing anywhere else. The Assembly of God was an all-white church, but black neighbors would come by on Sundays and sit under trees to hear the music that poured from the place. People parked their cars and rolled down windows or opened doors to listen. The austerity of the Pentecostal sect did not extend to its music, even before Jerry Lee Lewis and the other boys put their stamp on it, and you could hear the piano on Main Street. Elmo whupped guitar, Mamie sang, Son Swaggart sawed his fiddle and the rest of the family joined in. In time, there would be drums, steel guitar, bass, accordion, and more, the place literally shaking. “It was lively,” says Gay Bradford, who was born in 1931 and went to church with Jerry Lee.

This Sunday his kin filed in a carload at a time—they were almost all kin, in here—and took seats in the simple, dark-wood pews: tall, angular Swaggarts, the smaller, good-looking Gilleys, the fiery Herrons, the wild Beatty boys, his pretty Aunt Stella and his rumpled Uncle Lee, and all the rest. Mamie and Elmo had a baby daughter now: Frankie Jean, born on October 27, 1944. She would be an annoyance for her brother but an ally in the long life to come. Mamie held the child in her arms, rocking her gently in the pew as the service began. The congregation prayed for strength, for the courage to be a warrior for Christ, for deliverance from all sin, and for life everlasting at the foot of His throne. Then there was a song. Here, pure genetics made the place different. There was no robed choir. The whole place, front to back, was choir.

Then Jerry Lee, his hair slicked down with hair oil, slid out of the rough pew and walked to the front of the church. It was not a long walk, so why did it seem like he was walking through a vast cathedral? He faced the congregation, about forty people that Sunday, but it looked like a lot more then. They waited politely for him to begin . . . and waited, and waited.

Jerry Lee took a deep breath, spun on his heel and walked, a hundred miles at least, back to his family’s pew.

“Mama,” he whispered.

“Yes, son,” Mamie said.

“What song was it I’s supposed to play?”

“‘What Will My Answer Be?’” she said.

He nodded.

“People just busted out laughin’.”

He marched back to the front of the church.

What will my answer be, what can I say

When Jesus beckons me home?

“It was the first song I ever sang in church.”

Everything he has sung or played since rests on the pillars of that day, that church, and that song. He sees no irony in it, asks no questions, abides none: “The music comes from God.”

Other styles of music would augment and color and shade his development, but it was all built on the grace and beauty and meaning in that old church music, no matter how far he may have strayed from the stories they told. Without it, he believes, all the other styles and achievements would have been somehow less than they were, as if they had been built on sand. He concedes that he did shake that foundation all he could, as did—to a lesser degree—Jimmy and Mickey and other piano players in the family. “If I’m not mistaken,” recalls Gay Bradford, “they had to call someone and put some new ivory on the keys.”

If there was one thing he was serious about, it was the piano, and he committed himself to it single-mindedly—but that didn’t mean he listened to anyone else about it.

“I had a piano lesson just once, just one time, when I was twelve years old. It was Mr. Griffin. He wanted to teach me how to play by note, from this little ol’ book he had, stuff for kids. But I played it the way I wanted to play it—played it that boogie-woogie style.” The teacher slapped him. “He popped my jaws a little bit, yeah. ‘You’ll never do that again,’ he told me,” and Jerry Lee smiles at that.

What he was lacking was a piano-playing role model, a performer of the kind he envisioned himself becoming onstage. Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers were guitar players. Moon Mullican, pasty and round-faced, could play it all, but he was nobody’s idea of a commanding personality—and Jerry Lee never saw him onstage, anyway. To find one, he had to look only as far as Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in his own family.

Carl Everett Glasscock McVoy was a cousin, the son of Aunt Fannie Sue Herron Glasscock and a few years older than Jerry Lee, Jimmy Lee, and Mickey. In cousin Carl’s good looks and in his piano style, Jerry Lee saw everything he wanted to be, or at least the beginning of things. Carl’s father was an evangelist who traveled the country, and on a stay in New York, Carl was exposed to big-city boogie-woogie piano, and he showed Jerry Lee some licks when he came to visit relatives in Concordia Parish. “He was a genius,” says Jerry Lee. “I saw him playin’ piano at Uncle Son and Aunt Minnie’s place, Jimmy’s mama and daddy. He played the piano and sang, and I said, ‘Man!’ And he was such a good-lookin’ guy. Aw, he was handsome. And I said, ‘Boy, if I could do what he’s doin’, that’d be something else.’”

McVoy wasn’t a star, of course. He worked construction in the daylight and played piano at night. Years later, after his nephew had made it big, he made some records, too, including a swinging version of “You Are My Sunshine” that became the first single on Hi Records. His small stardom did not swell or last, but in his charismatic looks and thumping piano style, he had already given Jerry Lee a taste of the future.

Still, Elmo’s boy knew his music wasn’t everything it could be, not yet. “Something was missin’,” he says, something that went beyond style—some element of edge, or grit. Even as a boy he knew that the music around him, that gospel and country and old-time music, wasn’t digging far enough into the deep blue state of man.

For that, he would have to put aside his hymnal and follow another kind of tumult and shouting all the way across town.