Читать книгу Jerry Lee Lewis - Rick Bragg - Страница 13

3

THE BIG HOUSE

Ferriday

1945

The church ladies walked faster in the 500 block of Fourth Street. They did not want the sun to set on them there. The conflict, as old as Eden, had been burning on the black side of Ferriday since the first guitar man jumped from a freight and played for his liquor between Maryland and Carolina avenues. Now and then, a few brave preachers, washed in the blood and bulletproof, would set up near the nightclubs and hold church in the twilight. They warned that Satan lurked in the drink and lewdness and would come among them, to sift them as if wheat. But the pull of sin was strong, and people swarmed to Fourth Street after dark. They stepped out in spats and pearls from big Packards and rattling Model As, or stumbled from a Trailways bus, searching for this one place where the brimstone smelled a lot like good barbecue, where the shrieking and wailing had a rhythm to it, and a wild kind of joy. Here, young men played the blues with tiny bags of graveyard dirt tucked into the bodies of their guitars, and fine women moved in a way the human backbone should not allow. The best of the clubs here, or the worst, depending on your affiliation, was a place called Haney’s Big House, one of the biggest venues for blues and R&B between Memphis and New Orleans, and when preachers railed against the devil’s music, this was precisely what they were talking about.

But Haney’s was no mean little juke with a tub of iced-down beer and a few Mason jars of home brew. This was a place where four hundred people squeezed in on weekend nights—the entire population of Ferriday was less than four thousand—to dance, drink, gamble, fight, and cut, all of it washing onto a dirt street where a rattling old tour bus idled in the weeds. Slot machines spat out a hundred nickels at a time, and floorwalkers kept the peace with brass knuckles, clubbing a pistol out of a man’s hand or cracking his head before he did something stupid and violent enough to bring in the white police. It was a club where roofing knives routinely shook loose on the dance floor and women toted straight razors in their underwear, so it was for good reason that the boss tried to keep things as calm as possible.

The big man here was no flashy kingpin but a serious-minded African American businessman named Will Haney, who reigned over not only this den of iniquity but also a motel, laundry, and a modest fortune in rented shotgun houses and even sold insurance on the side. He was said to be a decent man and slow to anger, despite being in league with the devil. But Haney knew rough music was money, knew the power of the blues the same way the sponsors of the Grand Ole Opry understood the appeal of lovelorn ballads and cheatin’ songs—knew how the blues could bite down hard on people like a big snapping turtle and not turn loose till lightning burned the earth.

“It’s where I got my juice,” says Jerry Lee, and he has to think back almost seven decades to taste that first night again, to find the guitar slingers and harp blowers and piano men, young scorchers and scarred old relics in rumpled, sweat-stained, pin-striped suits and two-tone patent-leather shoes, playing boogie like it was their last night on earth. They played in the styles of Kansas City, St. Louis, New York, and the Oakland clubs, though he did not know them then. Their names are lost to him now, too, if he ever knew them at all; nor can he recall any one piano player, any one style or trick that he tried to emulate, specifically. It was more the feel of it, the rawness, the pounding rhythm that struck him, slapped him, as if the music there had blown open a rift into a whole other dimension. “I fell right in,” he says.

The white people called it Bucktown. “They said if you were ever black for one night down there, that you would never want to be white no more,” said Doris Poole, who worked the counter at the dime store on Saturday nights back then. “Women used to come in there and buy those slate knives, those knives that would fold . . . put it down in their bosoms before they went out on Saturday night.” One thing is sure. The first time little Jerry Lee climbed to the window to look inside, to see what the shouting was about, he knew he belonged there too, no matter how golden his hair, and he would never really make it back to the other side.

You can take me, pretty mama,

Jump me in your big brass bed.

He is asked, again, about the luck of it. Would his music have had the gut and grit and power if he had been born someplace else, someplace more peaceful, instead of smack-dab in the convergence of these two cultures living in uneasy and brittle peace, where people, black and white, all had someone’s boot on their neck. Would he have been the musician he became? “If is the biggest word in the English language,” he says, and his pride will not let him concede that his light might not have shone out the same way from any place, any time. Still, there was a reason he shuffled down Fourth Street so often as a boy, humming church music and cowboy songs, while on the other side of a thin wooden wall, the greatest names in blues were waiting for him to figure a way in. There was no pretense here. Here big-city blues stalwarts like Big Joe Turner or rising stars like young Riley King would check their pomade in a backstage mirror and go on to shout the blues.

You can rock me, baby,

Till my face turn cherry red.

Will Haney is important to the legacy of rock and roll because of the house he built, and he did not build it for white folks. He was a man above foolishness, who ran a dance club and did not dance, who rarely drank but when he did, did with grim purpose. He was just short of six feet and short of two hundred pounds, moonfaced, with a permanent serious look, like he always had something better to do. In a black-and-white studio photograph taken in the 1940s, he poses in a chair against a fake garden window; he looks supremely unhappy, like a man waiting to be shot out of a cannon. He built a small empire in the Jim Crow South, in a town where the Klan burned a good friend to death in his own store. He had served his country in France in the stench and poison of the trenches, doing soul-killing servant’s work, and came home to sell insurance for Peoples Life Insurance of New Orleans, collecting on policies that cost pocket change and paid out barely enough for a pine coffin. But when the floods came to Concordia Parish, he traveled to New Orleans to stop the company from canceling his customers’ insurance.

In the mid-1930s, he took the money he made and procured a patch of dirt on Fourth Street, which gradually grew into an iconic nightclub that closed only once, the day his mama died. It sold hot links and pork shoulder and fine fried chicken, and white beans and a chunk of cornbread. “A full-course meal,” said Hezekiah Early, who built his first guitar out of a cheese box and grew up with the legend of the place, and went on to play in Haney’s house band in later years. Haney arranged to have the bus stop situated at the restaurant’s front door. It had fifty tables, as well as pool tables, poker tables, and slot machines, for when gambling was legal—and when it was not. It was bigger than anything, black or white, so they called it the Big House.

“Back in those days, a white man could always go where he wanted, but white people never came down to Haney’s,” said YZ Ealey, a guitar man from Sibley, Mississippi, who played with Big Mama Thornton and L. C. “Good Rockin’” Robinson, and played three years in the house band at Haney’s. “Haney’s was strictly a black thing,” and if you wanted to drink, gamble, and hear live music, you paid Haney a dollar at the door. And when you walked into the Big House on a hot Louisiana night, into the screaming laughter and thumping drums and the roiling smoke, you could almost believe all that stuff the church folks were always going on about. You knew, one step in, that you had crossed over, say the musicians who played there. The hot-grease spat at you from the smoking iron skillets, and in the pit, flames licked at the sizzling meat. The air had a tang of snuff in it, and a funk of frying fish, and a cloying sweetness of gin and menthol. One-armed bandits lined a wall, clanking, ringing, the devil shaking hands on every pull. Sharks circled the pool tables, men who came in on sleeping cars but would leave running alongside the tracks, reaching for a cattle car, because Ferriday had some sharks itself. In the back rooms, men in good suits with good cigars in their gold teeth sat behind piles of money, bodyguards standing stone-faced behind them. But nobody stole at Haney’s. The games lasted all day and well into the night, drawing gamblers from Houston, New Orleans, and West Memphis, and before the sun rose, there would be wedding rings and bills of sale in the pot, but no IOUs. The house took a cut of everything. “Everybody got a talent,” said Ealey, “and Haney’s was running a nightclub.” At about nine o’clock, after the clientele was pretty well lubricated, the live music would commence with a hellish crackling as the musicians jacked their jerry-rigged, hollow-bodied guitars into big amplifiers. The stage was five feet high and ten feet deep and ran the length of one whole wall; it had to be that way, to hold all the wickedness that would be set loose into the night. It could hold an orchestra or just an old man by himself on a stool playing a mail-order guitar.

Haney called them “dances,” which was less likely to offend church people or scare the white folk, and cars lined up on the river bridge from Natchez, headlights making a glowworm a mile or more long. The dances were announced in a Concordia Sentinel column called Among the Colored. “You couldn’t walk in the place . . . it would be jammed, packed,” said Early, whose Hezekiah and the House Rockers played for years at the Big House. “Haney had his floorwalkers, but there would still be some hellish fights, but there wouldn’t be no shootin’.” There were black professionals here, people who, like Haney, operated solely on one side of the color line, morticians and doctors sharing space with barbers, sawmill hands, cooks and maids, track layers, and icehouse workers. The musicians called it the Chitlin’ Circuit, all-black clubs throughout the segregated Deep South where a man or woman with talent could leave with a wad of twenties and still have to sleep in the car. But if you played at Haney’s, you slept on clean sheets in Haney’s Motel, ate Haney’s ham and eggs, and drank Haney’s liquor, and if the police pulled you over, you said the magic word. “The sheriff pulled me over many times,” said Early. “‘Where you goin’? What you got in there?’ I’d say, ‘Mr. Haney gave us this liquor.’ I never went to jail.”

If you were anybody in blues, shoutin’ blues, rhythm and blues, any blues, you played the Big House.

Jerry Lee used to stand in the weeds and broken glass and watch the bluesmen disembark from their trucks and buses, “when I wasn’t old enough to go in,” and not yet desperate enough to sneak in. They had slept in their suits, often, big city suits, from Beale Street in Memphis and as far away as Chicago, and covered their chemically straightened and sculpted hair with kerchiefs, like a woman, till showtime. The guitar men and saxophone wailers, even the famous ones, carried battered cases inside, because no one toted another man’s baby. “Ever’body played Haney’s, big bands, horns and everything,” recalls Jerry Lee. Haney brought in Papa George Lightfoot, the harp man who would cross over and play some of the white honky-tonks in his old age, and trombonist Leon “Pee Wee” Whittaker, who could almost remember the Creation, who had played with the old Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels when the century was new.

Over the years, say the musicians who played in the house bands, the Big House hosted Charles Brown, the smooth Texan, and the elegant Roy Milton and his Solid Senders, who scored nineteen Top 10 R&B records, and Fats Domino, before “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Blueberry Hill.” He brought in the Slims—Memphis Slim and the House Rockers and Sunnyland Slim. A blind piano player named Ray Charles played here, and guitarist Little Milton, and singer Bobby “Blue” Bland; so did Junior Parker, a skinny black hillbilly named Chuck Berry, and a young Irma Thomas. Haney’s hosted young performers like Percy Mayfield, the gentle vocalist and songwriter who begged “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” and big stars of the previous generation like whiskey-voiced Tampa Red and his sometime partner, Atlanta piano man Big Maceo Merriweather, who reminded them, with every downward stroke, what they had endured and were enduring still.

So take these stripes from around me

Take these chains from around my leg

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 juke-boxes. 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 Niña, 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, sweat-shop 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

. . . 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 flat-head 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

The crowd at first did not know what to think about this kid banging that piano like a crazy man and hollering that “nigra music.” But the sunburned men tapped their Lehigh work boots in time to Stick McGhee, and people were grinning and looking downright foolish.

“The boy’s doing pretty good,” said Aunt Eva. “Maybe we ought to take up a collection.”

“Money makes the mare trot,” Mamie said.

They passed a hat. When it came back around, it sagged with silver.

“I think I made about fourteen dollars,” says Jerry Lee.

He was a professional at last.

“I was paid to sing and play the piano.”

He walked in the clouds for a little bit after that. He quit school, just saw no future in it. He and Elmo heaved the piano on back of the Ford, and they went on the road, making a little money here and there, Jerry Lee singing and playing gospel and hillbilly and blues and even that Al Jolson, and in time he was taking home trophies from talent shows and doing regular spots on nearby radio stations. “I had my own show,” a fifteen-minute spot on WNAT out of Natchez sponsored by a Ferriday grocery store. “People started to hear about me, started to say, ‘Hey, who is this kid down there?’” It was mostly gospel, and some country; he couldn’t cut loose—not yet—and do the kind of music he wanted.

His cousins did similar gigs, spreading their own talent through the bottomland, though Jimmy still worried that singing and playing boogie-woogie was sending them all to hell on a handcar. Jerry Lee sometimes worried the same—every Sunday in church reminded him of the danger of such intense secular pleasure—but not as deeply or as often. “I wanted to be a star. Knew I could be, if . . .” If the starmakers in Memphis or Nashville would listen to him, really listen, and hear in his piano and voice that he was the only one like him in the ever-lovin’ world.

Impatient as he was, he knew his music was wasted if the people couldn’t hear it, and for that he needed a bigger stage. What he wanted was a honky-tonk, and that troubled his mama. Mamie would have loved to see her son in the ministry, would have loved to see him onstage in a white suit singing only sacred songs, but to say that she castigated her boy for his secular music would be to exaggerate things, her son says. “Mama didn’t like some of it,” said Jerry Lee, “but Mama was with me,” no matter what came, and he knew it then, and he believes it now.

He tested that tolerance and allegiance across the river in Natchez. The rough nightclubs there were the only place he knew in his small world where musicians could make a living, or at least a little piece of one. But ten dollars or so a night was more than he would make picking cotton, which he wasn’t going to do anyway, even at gunpoint. So while he was still living under his daddy’s roof, he snuck off to the clubs in Natchez to ask for steady work. The no-nonsense club owners, men who had seen it all, started to smile when the boy walked in. The smile slipped off their faces when they heard him play the boogie and the hillbilly music and even Gene Autry. He told them he was looking for work as a piano man, mostly, but could beat the drums, too, if there was cash money in it.

“I was thirteen the first time I left home to play, soon as I was big enough,” he remembers. “I was sittin’ on a piano stool where my feet weren’t even touchin’ the floor. That’s how young I was. This was the Blue Cat Club, down Under-the-Hill, the old Natchez,” a riverfront neighborhood that had been a warren of iniquity and villainy for more than two hundred years but a gold mine for musical style. Here a musician had to know everything. A request was not always a suggestion, not from a man who cut pulpwood for a living and drank his whiskey by the shot. Jerry Lee played hillbilly. He played “Release Me,” and “Good-night, Irene,” and even Glenn Miller. “I learned to play everything as long as I could get a tip out of it”—and learned to get down low when the bottles started flying. After a while, he says, “I’d get homesick and tell ’em, ‘I got to go home and see Mama.’” But he kept coming back.

At those clubs in Natchez Under-the-Hill, he played with six or seven watches dangling from each skinny arm, put there by customers who figured they’d be safe on the arms of a boy if there happened to be a raid—which happened frequently at the Blue Cat Club. “The owner’s name was Charlie. He says, ‘Now, if the cops come by and ask you how old you are, you tell ’em you’re twenty-one.’ I said, ‘Oh, sure.’”

The police, at least, had a sense of humor.

“How old are you, boy?” they always asked.

“I’m twenty-one,” he lied.

“Well,” they always said, laughing, “that sounds about right.”

“I have been twenty-one,” said Jerry Lee, unwilling to let a good lie go, “for some time.”

For the next few years, the clubs would nurture Jerry Lee’s music, as much as any place can when the owner walks around with a big .44 sagging his slacks and women routinely have their wigs slapped off their heads by other women. He walked to his car past whorehouses and heroin fiends. Nellie Jackson ran a famous cathouse in Natchez in those days, where you might run into a high official with his suspenders down, but Jerry Lee says he was not a customer. “I walked up to the front door one time, and I turned around and left,” he says. He had no business there.

His mama worried and would stay up all night sometimes, till she heard her son’s car pull up in the yard, sometimes in the dawn. It went on and on, night after night, till he was fourteen, fifteen, and there were moments of great doubt, moments when, looking at her tired face, he wondered if he could somehow have it all, if he could tame that boogie and bend it to the Lord, tame his lusts and get himself a white suit and a tent and use his burgeoning talents for the church. But he was surviving by playing music. By fall of ’51, he was going on sixteen, “and was already a man and acted like one,” and past ready to find a wife and marry, at least by the standards of his people. But he worked in a bar, and he knew that a man—a smart one, anyway—does not find a wife in a bar. Such a union is well and truly doomed, built in the quicksands of sin. A man, a wise man, found his wife in church.

He saw the girl and made a covenant with his eyes. “I was playing ‘Peace in the Valley’ when I saw her. She was sitting in the front row. What a beauty. A woman, really. And I really blew my cool, man. I got it right between the eyes.”

It was 1951. Her name was Dorothy, and she was seventeen. Her father was the Reverend Jewell Barton, a traveling evangelist from up around Monroe who came to Ferriday to save the wicked and brought his beautiful daughter with him. He was not worried about exposing her to the sin of this place, to the temptations of the road. Dorothy, whose hair fell in dark, lustrous waves, was a devout girl, and the reverend knew he had to go into the wilderness to do his job, had to venture to places like this railroad town of Ferriday, which had been drawing men like him since its beginning. He was a warrior for Christ and needed weapons. He hired Jerry Lee to play piano, to pack ’em in. The boy’s reputation as a piano player had spread. It was a good revival, with good preaching and singing and music, but Jerry Lee did not see or hear much of it, truthfully, after he saw the dark-haired girl. He was fixed on her.

“I’d just turned sixteen, and she set my world afire. I mean, I was in a fever. That’s right, a fever. And I knew I would do anything, promise anything, anything I had to do.”

He even shared his dreams, told her he wanted to hear his songs on the radio, maybe even be a big star someday. “She told me, ‘Maybe you can have your name on one of those records with the big hole in the middle,’ and I said, ‘You’re crazy, a record has a little-bitty hole in it.’ I thought she was making fun of me. But she was just talkin’ about a 45.”

They started dating, and “smooching in the car,” in ’51. He knows it was ’51 because he had a ’41 Ford, and like many Southerners, he keeps track of time and events through the lineage of his cars. “Uncle Lee had loaned me the money” for the car, he recalls. “I had to go through my Aunt Stella to get him to do it, but he left me a check laying on the table. It was white, with whitewall tires and fender skirts. John Frank Edward wrecked it, in 1958.” They spent long, frustrating hours in that car, he and Dorothy, parked in the pines.

“We both believed it was sin, to do anything more,” he says now, but after three torturous months, he wanted more, needed more, and used all his charm to get it. She told him he could just stop it right there, till he walked her down the aisle or at least through the courthouse door.

They were in love, Jerry Lee told her. They had professed it.

“But I’m saving myself for my husband,” she said.

“Well,” said Jerry Lee, “that ain’t no problem at all.”

It was not the most romantic proposal, but it got the job done.

“She was a fine woman, a fine and beautiful woman,” he says, but his mama and daddy knew the boy was a long way from being ready to start a family; sometimes they were just grateful he was not yet in Angola. “If I had just listened to mama and daddy, . . .” he laments. “But I insisted on gettin’ married. Daddy said, ‘Mamie, you know how hard headed the boy is,’ and then he threw the car keys at me and said, ‘Here, go on, and learn for yourself.’”

They set the wedding for February of ’52. “Uncle Lee got us the license,” says Jerry Lee, who did not then and would never see much need for paperwork when he was in a marrying mood. He wrote on the form that he was a twenty-year-old farmer. The family members who came to the small ceremony said they could not remember a time when two such beautiful people, one fair and one dark, had found each other and were joined in the light of the true gospel, and how lovely their children would be. A photographer came from the Concordia Sentinel and took their picture for the social page. Their honeymoon was one night in a hotel on Main Street in Ferriday, across from the Ford dealership where Jerry Lee had first squeezed silver from the crowd. “It’s an old folks’ home now,” he says, and smiles.

He had dreamed of that night, daydreamed of it, and schemed for it. They were both bashful, though, and for hours they just sat and talked, till she asked him if they should make love and Jerry Lee, smooth, said he thought that was why they had gotten married in the first place, “wasn’t it?” and by the light of the Babin-Paul Ford Motor Co., consummated their marriage in the sanctity of their faith. But after all that denial and all that conflict with the faith he had been raised within, “It wasn’t what I thought it should be. I thought it should be more.” He woke up the next morning and sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. He looked over at the beautiful girl, sleeping.

This is not right.

“It took me about thirty minutes to figure out I had made a mistake, that I had got married too young,” for the most dirt-common reason people do such a thing. “Man, I told myself, I have fouled up. It had nothin’ to do with her. She kept her end of the bargain.” What was missing was missing from within him.

In that special hell reserved for young people who marry in the heat of a moment, Dorothy started to plan their life together just as he started to scheme for their life apart. “She didn’t think there was anything happening that wasn’t supposed to be happening. She was in love.” He had only whatever you have when love burns quickly out, and no plan at all for how to live it out. She moved in with the Lewis family as though there was still some future there. For about two months, Jerry Lee tried to be a dutiful husband, at least on the outside, working as a truck driver and a carpenter’s helper, playing his piano in the service of the Lord. He even tried to preach. Two months of that nonstop goodness almost killed him.

“She was a good girl, a pure girl,” he says. In a way, she was just too good. One night, about two months after they said “I do,” he came out the front door of the house at Black River wearing a white sport coat.

“Where you going?” she asked.

“Me and Cecil Harrelson’s goin’ coon hunting.”

He had no ready explanation as to why anyone would go coon hunting in a white sport coat.

Mamie liked Dorothy and, like all smart mamas, had feared this.

“You ain’t going nowhere,” she told him.

He talked back, and she slapped him. “Boy,” she told him, “you married this girl. You come here and take care of her.”

He walked into the yard with his wife calling to him, and his mother’s anger cutting at his back.

“I love you,” Dorothy cried. “Please don’t go.”

He headed out with Cecil, and left his wife with his mama.

He and Cecil were going to a bar, to hear music and play music and perhaps consort with women; his reluctance to do such outside the conventions of the church was breaking down. “It seemed like women fell out of the trees,” he says, women his age and older, all beautiful, all willing. Across the river in the honky-tonks, they waited for him in great variety. “Playing in the clubs . . . you just do it. They just lay it on you. It was just about impossible to resist. And I just had to pick one out. It just kind of seemed like a dream. It just seemed like ‘The Impossible Dream,’ as Elvis would say. I’d see these girls walking by the bandstand, mouthing ‘I love you,’ and I’m sixteen, seventeen, and I see these girls, and I just try to turn my head and do my songs and get off the stage,” but he did not try all that hard. “And, son, it was good. As long as I wanted them.”

After a while, Dorothy went home to Monroe, heartbroken. “And me and Cecil went to New Orleans.”

Once, if you really wanted to hear a piano ring, you went to Storyville, where the ladies of the evening waved languidly from the balconies, half-stoned, sugar cubes in their teeth and absinthe on their breath. Jelly Roll Morton worked here, and King Oliver, playing in the brothels while the gentlemen waited or made up their minds. A music called jazz took hold here, between the hot pillow joints and vaudeville acts and streetcars on the Desire line, but by the early 1950s the whorehouses had moved more deeply into the constant shadows of New Orleans, and the noise had shifted to Bourbon Street. Here the sidewalks throbbed with light, liquor, sex, and music, with more than fifty burlesque shows, striptease acts, and other distractions between Canal Street and Esplanade, most of them clustered in about five city blocks. Vice had a grandeur to it then. The nightclubs featured everything from the dance of the seven veils to slapstick to a man who could scratch the top of his head with his big toe, all to live music, one band bleeding onto the street and into another band, and another, and so on, till it was all just a kind of mad cacophony. Here, men lined up for a city block outside the Casino Royale, Sho Bar, and 500 Club to see Wildcat Frenchie, Lilly Christine the Cat Girl, Alouette LeBlanc the Tassel Twirler, Kalantan the Heavenly Body, Linda Brigette the Cupid Doll, Tee Tee Red, Blaze Starr (who kept company with the somewhat peculiar Governor Earl Long), and Evangeline the Oyster Girl, who rose from a shell the size of a sedan and danced with a strategically placed giant pearl. Soldiers hooted, bouncers slapped them silly, and the Mob took a little piece of every dollar. The liquor was overpriced and watered down and the pimps and the pickpockets and dope addicts moved through the cigarette smoke like wolves, and ten hard-earned dollars would not buy you a meal at Galatoire’s but might be just enough to get you killed. And it was all kind of wonderful, in a way, if all you were doing was passing through on the way to someplace that still made a little bit of sense.

Jerry Lee Lewis and Cecil Harrelson, sixteen years old, walked unafraid. Cecil, though smaller than Jerry Lee, was the perfect accomplice for such an adventure. He was tough and quick and capable, and he knew how to talk to people, how to sell his friend’s talent. They had become fast friends since that day when they both tried to murder their homeroom teachers at Ferriday High School. “Cecil was bad to use a knife,” said Jerry Lee. “He was the Killer.”

They walked past the barkers and painted girls till they saw a place that looked likely, and ducked inside. They never had to worry about being underage; unless you were pushed inside in a pram, the New Orleans bartenders would serve you liquor here, and tell you where to buy some dope, and let you see a woman dance with a snake.

“I seen things I never seen,” Cecil recalled, actually giggling.

“We never bought a drink,” says Jerry.

Cecil would ask to see “the boss man of this here establishment.” When the man arrived, Cecil made his simple pitch. “I got a boy here,” he said, “who can play the piano better’n anybody you ever saw, and I was wondering if you’d let him play a tune.”

“And some of them just looked at me like I was crazy,” said Cecil, thinking back. “But once they heard him play, even a little bit, that was all it took.”

Jerry Lee sat down and did a hillbilly jump tune called the “Hadacol Boogie,” named for a booze-laden tonic—played it hot—and in the chorus the drunken throng sang it with him like they’d all gotten together that morning and planned it out.

Standin’ on the corner with the bottle in my hand

And up steps my mama with the Hadacol man

She done the Hadacol boogie

“They were pouring us liquor, double shots, just like in the movies. And we just moved on down Bourbon Street, club to club. They even started hearing about me, started hearing about that wild boy that played the boogie-woogies on the piano. And the more we went the drunker we got. . . . By the time the night was over, we was so drunk we couldn’t see. Caked in vomit. Couldn’t stand up. My first real drunk.” They were fortunate to get out of the Crescent City alive, he realizes now. But he had tasted the apple, and he liked it.

He’d been needing to cut loose a little bit, needed it for some time; he was starting to understand that a man just has to cut loose now and then, unless he’s scared of the world or scared of his woman. Still, somewhere during that debauched trip to New Orleans, he managed to create some musical history. At the J&M studio, where Fats Domino had been making hits for a few years now, he cut what is believed to be his first recording. Two songs: a Lefty Frizzell ballad called “Don’t Stay Away (Till Love Grows Cold),” which he sang high and plaintive, and a stomping boogie that showed off all he knew. Cecil would hold on to that record into his old age.

He was done with marriage, he knew that much, and through with Dorothy. He told himself he was single in his own mind, and that should have been enough, but the State of Louisiana insisted on paperwork or resolutions or such as that. He had always hated forms and formality, hated tedium, hated the rules the other people lived by, so he did nothing, just kept on living within the rules he laid down for himself. A lot of rich men do that, and it’s easy to pull off if you’re a Kennedy or Lee Calhoun, but it takes guts to try it if you’re a poor man. “I just done what I wanted,” he says. He says it a lot.

It is why, when he walked past a car lot after closing time and saw a good-looking automobile, he saw no reason not to borrow the car for a little while, at least until morning. In the rules of regular people, that was called grand theft auto, and a felony. In such a small town, though, security on the lots was lax. “I guarantee you, if I walked by a car lot and saw one with the keys in it back then, I was gone. I just said, ‘Well, looka here.’ I drove it all over the country. But I took it back. I always took ’em back. I got all kinds of car, and parked ’em right where I had borrowed ’em from. Last one was a ’50 Chevrolet.” In a way, he treated some people that same way. He rarely speaks with regret about anyone, but he does when he talks about Dorothy. “Dorothy told me I was the only man she had ever been with, and I know that was true. . . . I left her cryin’ on my mama’s doorstep. ‘Son, you’re wrong,’ she told me. I’m ashamed it happened. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have done it.”

He made one more attempt at a holy life, in part because he wanted to ease his mother’s mind. Or at least he went to a place where doing right was the general idea. He might have even made it—probably not, but maybe—if someone had just had the good sense to lock up the piano.

The student body waited respectfully in the pews, not one painted fingernail or undone button among them, some five hundred souls humming, but quietly so, with school spirit, and alight in the love of the true gospel. The male students at Southwestern Bible Institute wore coats and ties and starched shirts to class, and the women wore long skirts and did not cut their hair, some for so long that it swung against the backs of their legs when they walked across campus in their flat-heeled shoes. Makeup was forbidden; lipstick was contraband. The young women were required to wear stockings at all times, but fall came late to East Texas that season and it was too hot to breathe, so some of the coeds drew a line down the back of their bare legs with black shoe polish, for relief. That was the year the editor of the yearbook cropped the pictures of the students so tightly that all you could see was a circle of their faces, because some of the young women had sinned against God and styled their hair. When one of the boys, Billy Paul Branham, went walking through campus after dark one evening, eating an ice cream cone and lustily singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” the dean of men gave him ten demerits.

It was not a place that rewarded individuality. “Apparently not,” says Jerry Lee.

The school offered courses in church business, missionary organization, Bible study, and of course, Pentecostal history and prophets. But there was not a lot of shouting here in the chapel on Sunday mornings, in a sanctuary sealed tight in stained glass, and no one got happy, very much, in the middle of a song. Just off campus, Victorian mansions and gingerbread architecture fronted clean, quiet streets, with not a mud-hole or a black racer or an armadillo anywhere in sight. Here in this unforgiving place, Jerry Lee sat at his piano, looked over the student body, and decided it was time for a change.

The boy had always had the power to win people over, had a personality like an industrial magnet. He would be a formidable evangelist. Still married to a young woman he had no intention of keeping, he finally bowed to his mother’s wishes and decided to use his God-given talents as a singer and piano player to bring people to the Lord. He enrolled at a place called Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas. The name of the town means “cow creek” or “buffalo creek” or “fat wildcat,” depending on which linguist you believe. Waxahachie was a 380-mile, dusty bus ride from Ferriday. He chose the school there in part because it had a junior college division that was content to overlook small matters such as prerequisites and even high school diplomas. Aunt Stella and Uncle Lee helped with the tuition and bus fare, thinking he might make a preacher after all but certain he needed to get out of Ferriday before a jealous boyfriend or irate daddy caught him from behind with a pine knot or a pipe wrench—or before some car dealer had him arrested or shot him from the dark. Mamie kissed him good-bye and told him she was so proud of him, and cried a little. Elmo shook his hand like a man, and as the big Trailways pulled out from Ferriday, it carried a whole busload of unreasonable expectation.

“I really could preach,” he says, and he did plan on giving the place a solid try, at least at first. Almost immediately, however, he was stultified. The classes were as dull and irrelevant to his life as the ones he had dodged before. He did not see the point, in a school in which he was purportedly readying himself to be a preacher, of immersing himself in a library of thick, dusty books. The Bible was the Word of God, the Rock, the Great Speckled Bird, and a man preached from it, period. The Bible was all a man needs to know, he says even now. The rest was just fluttering paper and wind.