by Rick Bragg
DEDICATION
To anyone who ever
danced in their socks
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Jolson in the River
1 The Father of Waters
2 Whiskey in the Ditches Two Feet Deep
3 The Big House
4 Mr. Paul
5 Sun
6 “I Been Wantin’ to Meet That Piano Player”
Photographic Insert 1
7 Too Hot to Rock
8 England
9 “Who Wants Some of This?”
10 American Wilderness
11 “He Who Steals My Name”
Photographic Insert 2
12 Jet Planes and Hearses
13 The Year of the Gun
14 “Babies in the Air”
15 The Fork in the Road
16 Last Man Standing
17 Stone Garden
Epilogue: Killer
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Also by Rick Bragg
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
EPIGRAPH
They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
—HOSEA 8:7
If I exorcise my devils,
Well, my angels may leave, too.
—TOM WAITS
INTRODUCTION
JOLSON IN THE RIVER
The Black River, and the Mississippi
1945
The party boats churned up the big river from New Orleans and down from Memphis and Vicksburg, awash in good liquor and listing with revelers who dined and drank and danced to tied-down pianos and whole brass bands, as their captains skirted Concordia Parish on the way to someplace brighter. The passengers were well-off people, mostly, the officer class home from Europe and the Pacific and tourists from the Peabody, Roosevelt, and Monteleone, clinking glasses with planters and oil men who had always found riches in the dirt the poorer men could not see. Weary of the austerity of war, of rationing and victory gardens, of coastal blackouts and U-boats that hung like sharks at the river mouth, they wanted to raise a racket, spend some money, and light up the river and the entire dull, sleeping land. They floated drunk and singing past sandbars where gentlemen of Natchez once settled affairs of honor with smoothbore pistols and good claret, and around snags and whirlpools where river pirates had lured travelers to their doom.
The country people, in worn-through overalls and faded flour-sack dresses, watched from the banks of the Mississippi and Black rivers the same way they looked through the windows of a store. In the war years, they had traded the lives of their young men for better times, but they had seen too much bad luck and broke-down history to overcome with just one big war. Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and named storms and unnamed floods had left generations hunched over another man’s cotton, and in their faces you could read the one true thing: that sometimes all you could get of a good life was what you could see floating just out of reach, till it disappeared around a bend in the river or vanished behind a veil of flood-ravaged trees. And sometimes, hauntingly, even when a boat had passed them by, they could still hear the music drifting downriver as if there was a song in the water itself, Dixieland or ragtime or, before they turned away to their lives in the colorless mud, a faint, thin scrap of Jolson.
Down among the sheltering palms
Oh, honey, wait for me.
He was still a boy then. One day, when he was nine or ten, he stood on the levee beside his mother and father as one more party boat pushed against the current, well-dressed people laughing on deck. Safe in the middle of the Black River, they raised their glasses in a mocking toast to the family ashore. “They tipped their mint juleps at us, tipped ’em up,” he says, and smiles the faintest bit to prove how little it matters to him after so much time. But it mattered to the man and woman beside him. His daddy was indestructible then, gaunt, six foot four, with big, powerful hands that could squeeze weaker men to their knees, and a face that seemed drawn only in straight lines, like Dick Tracy in the funny papers. As the drunken revelers lifted their glasses of bourbon high in the air, Elmo Kidd Lewis pulled the boy to his hip. “‘Don’t worry, son,’ Daddy told me. ‘That’ll be you on there someday. That’ll be you.’” He does not know if his daddy meant it would be him up there with the rich folks, the high and mighty, or if it would be his songs they played as the boat passed by. “I think maybe,” he says, “it was both.”
Elmo knew it the way he knew wading in the river would get him wet. He had seen it, he and his wife, Mamie, when his son was barely five years old, seen a power take over the boy’s hands and guide them across a piano he had never studied or played before. For the boy, it was . . . well, he did not truly know. His fingers touched the keys and it was like he had grabbed a naked wire, but as it burned through him, it left him not scorched and scarred but cool, calm, certain. Only God did such as that, his mama said, and his daddy bought a piano for the boy, so the miracle could proceed.
Finally, something worth remembering.
He rests now in the cool dark of his bedroom and lets it draw at the old poisons in him like a poultice. He is a swaggering man by nature, but for a moment there is no strut in him.
“Mama and Daddy,” he says, “believed in me.”
He tried to pay them back, with houses and land and Cadillacs. “‘Money makes the mare trot,’ Mama always said.” But the debt will never be settled. The piano, the weight of it, tilted the world. He still has it, that first piano—the wood cracked and buckled, deep grooves worn in its keys—in a dim hallway in a house where gold records and other awards pile like old newspapers or lean against a wall. He pauses before the ruined piano now and then and taps a single key, but what he hears is different from what other people do.
The boat that taunted them is a ghost ship now.
The old songs sank beneath the water.
Elmo’s boy, scoured by a worldly hell and toasted by kings, is still here.
In the summers of 2011 and 2012, I listened in the quiet gloom of his bedroom as he told me what was worth remembering. He told me some of the rest of it, too, when he felt like it, for as long as he felt like it. He remembered it as it pleased him. That does not mean he always remembered it the same way twice, but day after day I was reminded of a line I once read: it was like any life, really, but with the dull parts taken out. It was odd, though, how he could see the boy on that levee so much clearer than he could see all the long life in between, like he was looking across that wide river again, at himself.
Before he rocked them, before the first piano bench went hurtling across the stage and first shock of yellow hair tumbled into his snarling, pretty face and the first spellbound, beautiful girl stared up from the footlights in unmistakable intent, he played Stick McGhee songs for Coca-Cola money from the back of his daddy’s beat-up flatbed Ford and sang Hank Williams before he knew what a heartache was.
Before Memphis, before he took them from the VFW and convention halls to a place they’d not been even in a fever dream, before preachers and Parliament damned him for corrupting the youth of their nations, before he made Elvis cry, he listened to the Grand Ole Opry on his mother’s radio, the battery she saved all week till Saturday night finally fading to nothing at the end of a Roy Acuff song.
Before bedlam, before he stacked money and hit records to the sun and blazed up, up, to come smoking to earth only to rise and fall and rise and rise again, before he outlasted almost all of his kind and proved on ten thousand stages that no amount of self-destruction could smother his voice or quiet the thunder in his left hand, before John Lennon knelt and kissed his feet, he performe
d his first solo in the Texas Avenue Assembly of God, then hid under a table in Haney’s Big House to see people grind to the gutbucket blues.
Before any of it, before the first needle and first million pills, before the first coffin passed him by, he walked a high bridge rail like a tightrope between the bluffs of Natchez and the Louisiana side, laughing, loving the scare it threw into mortals below. A lifetime later, he rode across the same bridge and looked down to the muddy water of the Mississippi, to barges long as a football field; from up there, they looked like toys in a bathtub.
“I must’ve been crazy,” says Jerry Lee Lewis, but if he was, it was just the beginning.
The weather seems different now from when he was a boy, the air so hot and thick the sky looks almost white. The afternoon thunderstorms that have shaken this land across generations now hang hostage in that cotton-colored sky, leaving the air wet and steaming but the fields dry as parchment for weeks, a thing the old people attribute to the end of days. But the end of days has been coming here for a long, long time.
“I wonder what it’s like to die? I guess they give you shots and stuff, to help you with the pain. I don’t really know,” he says, softly, as Ida Lupino and Beware, My Lovely roll across a muted television screen. “Probably, you just drift off to another world. I don’t know what that world will be like. I like to think it’s Heaven. Can you imagine me in Heaven? Imagine the orchestra we’d have.” He tosses a macadamia nut in his mouth, unscrews an Oreo, takes a long swig of purple soda, and ponders that. “Oh, man, what a band. I’ll want to go twenty-four hours a day . . . won’t never get tired. Won’t never stop.”
He has never believed the grave is the end of a man, and that has been his torture. The greater part of a man walks in Glory or burns; there is no real in-between, not in the Assembly of God. Across his life, he has proclaimed on a rolling basis the kind of man he considers himself to be, shifting from world-class sinner to penitent, sometimes in the space of a single song. Now his choice seems finally made. I am warned by members of his family, before I even enter his presence, that he abides no cursing, no blasphemy. He will live the rest of his life, he hopes, without offending God. He tithes. He blesses his food and prays at night the Lord his soul to take. He knows the Holy Ghost is as real as a pillar of fire. He believes, as always, in the God of Texas Avenue, and knows he has sinned greatly, deeply. But his God is a God of miracles and redemption, and in this case that might amount to about the same thing.
“I did a lot of thinkin’ about that. . . . Still think about it, real heavy. I sure don’t want to go to Hell. If I had my life to live over, I would change a lot of things,” he says, not for the approval of man, but for the grace of God. “I believe I would. I’d probably not do a lot of things that I’ve done. . . . Jesus says, ‘Be thou perfect even as my Father in Heaven is perfect.’ But my Lord, I’m only human. And humans tend to forget. I don’t want to die and my soul go to Hell.
“There is a Hell,” he says. “The Bible plainly speaks of it, very big-time. The fire never quenches, the worm never dies. The weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The lake of fire.”
But he can bear that, he believes, better than the rest of it.
“I just want to meet them, meet all my people that I have ever lost, in the new Jerusalem,” he says. “I often wonder about that. God says you will know as you are known, and if you don’t see them there, it will be as if you never knew them. That’s awful. It worries me,” the notion that if he is cast down, it will be—to his people, even his children—as if he had never lived. “That’s heavy, ain’t it?”
“The answer is written in the book of life, for me,” he says, and the heat in his eyes tells you this is not mere rhetoric but deadly serious. “Can a man play rock-and-roll music and go to Heaven? That’s the question. It’s something that won’t be known . . . that I won’t know, till I pass away. I think so, but it don’t matter what I think. And I will take all the prayer I can get.”
The question almost pulled him apart, as a younger man. Elvis, who would understand the question perhaps better than any other man, was haunted by it, too. Jerry Lee would have liked to talk with him about it, but Elvis hurried away, face white as bone; and then he left this world, leaving Jerry Lee to grow old with it alone.
The thing he has come to believe, to hope, is that whatever happens in this life or beyond, it is not purely the music’s fault. People blamed the music for everything.
“It’s not the devil’s music,” he says, sick and tired as he would be of any pretender, any hanger-on.
He is almost eighty years old now. He knows what he has wrought.
“It’s rock and roll.”
The devil was no troubadour. The theater of it all, the convenient women and bottomless liquor and jet-plane parties, the whipped-out knives and waistband pistols and bags of blues and yellows, might have drawn the devil like green flies, but the devil never called a tune or found a chord, not even in the nastiest blues or most whiskey-soaked cheatin’ songs or any other music that moved a waitress to wiggle her hips or a farm boy to dance in his socks or a notary public to shake the hot rollers out of her head.
“My talent,” he says, “comes from God.”
Mamie tried to tell them, even as she worried where it would all end.
“I can lift the blues off people,” he says.
He did some meanness, God knows he did.
But the music—funny how it turned out—was the purest part.
Mama’s cookin’ chicken fried in bacon grease
“The only piano player in the world . . .” he says.
Come along boys, just down the road a piece
“. . . to wear out his shoes.”
In the twilight of his life, in the late nights of the here-and-now, he sometimes still wonders: “Did I lead them people down the right way?”
But he did not take the people anywhere they were not ready to go. Even in the most barren times, when cigarette smoke hung like tear gas in mean little honky-tonks and he might have missed a step on his way to the stage, he gave them something they were looking for. People say a lot of things about him—“talk about me like a dog,” he says—but few people can say he did not put on a show. They talk about seeing him and grin and shake their heads like they got caught doing something, like someone saw their car parked outside a no-tell motel in the harsh light of day. They grin and talk about it not like a thing they witnessed but like a thing they lived through, a meteorite or a stampede. It usually started without fanfare; he just walked out there, often when the band was in the middle of a song, and took a seat. “Gimme my money and show me the piano,” he often said of how the experience would begin. But it ended like an M80 in a mailbox, with such a holy mother of a crack and bang that, fifty years later, an old man in a Kiwanis haircut and an American flag lapel pin will turn red to his ears and say only: “Jerry Lee Lewis? I saw him in Jackson. Whooooooooo, boy!”
Joe Fowlkes, a Tennessee lawyer, likes to tell about the time in the mid-1980s when he heard Jerry Lee do four hours at his piano without a break, after he was already supposed to have been dead at least twice. “We all went to see him at the dance hall at 100 Oaks” in Nashville, he recalls. “They called it a dance hall because it was better than calling it a beer joint.” Jerry Lee showed up looking a little worn and pale, and he started off slow—“it was kind of gradual, like watching a jet taking off”—but he played and he played and he played, and it was three o’clock in the morning before he got done. “He kind of got his color back, after a while. By two-thirty in the morning, he was lookin’ good. He played every song I’d ever heard in my life, including ‘Jingle Bells’ and the Easter Bunny song. And it was July.
“It was the best concert I’d ever been to. I saw Elvis. I saw James Brown.” But Jerry Lee. “He was the best.”
“There was rockabilly. There was Elvis. But there was no pure rock and roll before Jerry Lee Lewis kicked in the door,” says Jerry Lee Lewis. Some histor
ians may debate that, but there was no one like him, just the same; even the ones who claimed to be first, who claimed to be progenitors, borrowed it from some ghost who vanished in the haze of a Delta field or behind the fences of a prison farm. People who played with him across the years say he can conjure a thousand songs and play each one seven ways. He can make your hi-heel sneakers shake the floorboards, or lift you over the rainbow, or kneel with you at the old rugged cross. He can holler “Hold on, I’m comin’” or leave you at the house of blue lights. Or he can just be still, his legend, the legend of rock and roll, already cut into history in sharper letters than the story of his life. Sam Phillips of Sun Records, a man who snagged lightning four or five times, called him “the most talented man I ever worked with, black or white . . . one of the most talented human beings to walk God’s earth.”
“I was perfect,” he says, “at one time. Once, I was pretty well perfect when I hit that stage.” On another man, such a claim would wear like a loud suit. On Jerry Lee Lewis, it sounds almost like understatement. Roland Janes, the great guitar man on so many Sun Records hits, once said that not even Jerry Lee knows how good he is.
He knows. He likes to use the word stylist when referring to some of the musical greats who came before: it is his highest compliment. A stylist is a performer—not necessarily a songwriter, yet still a creator—who can take a thing that has been done before and make it new. “I am a stylist,” he explains. “I can take a song, a song I hear on the radio, and make it my song.” He can remember the first time he felt that power, too. “I was fifteen years old. Back then I played the piano all day and then at night I’d lay in bed and think about what I’d play the next day. And I see records that was out there, see the way they were going, and I just thought that I could beat it. Back then, I was playing the skating rink in Natchez, on this old upright piano—I remember it wasn’t in very good shape—and I played everything. I played Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, boogie-woogie, and I turned it all into something else. What did I turn it into? Why, I made it rock and roll.”
