Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  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 jukeboxes. But he had never heard it—really heard it—till he heard it pour from the Big House. Even before he was tall enough to see inside the place, he would climb to a window or get someone to boost him up, for just a glimpse, for a raw second. It was never enough, and it went on that way, unconsummated, for years.

  He dragged his cousin Jimmy with him, tried to coerce hi
m 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.