Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  Jerry Lee told him he didn’t mean to.

  “You’ve ruined a great Christian college.”

  He told Jerry Lee he was history at Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas. But when the other students heard that, some of them chanted in support, and shouted that “if he goes, we go.”

  Why, the dean must have wondered, couldn’t everyone be like Coleman McDuff?

  One of the students let out a holler.

  “Look,” the dean said to Jerry Lee, “what you have done.”

  The next day, Pearry Lee Green was called to the president’s office. When he arrived, “Jerry Lee was there.” The president told Jerry Lee that he had wantonly solicited an impure response from the entire student body of the college by playing reckless and prurient music, and the president and deans gave him the left foot of fellowship and told him not to let the door hit him in his behind on the way out. Jerry Lee, who never lacked gall, told the deans and the president that he would not accept their expulsion.

  “I’ll just go home for two weeks, but I’m comin’ back,” he said. He had no intention of coming back, not even if they were handing out free doughnuts and pony rides, but he wanted them to watch the gate every day to see if he was.

  Then the school officials turned their wrath on Pearry Lee. Such a break of decency in a schoolwide event had to be a plot, a conspiracy. “They asked me, ‘Why did you let Jerry Lee Lewis play the piano?’ I told them, ‘Well, I didn’t know him from anybody else. And they told me he played the piano, and I’d heard him sing.’ They expelled us both. They told us they wouldn’t put up with that kind of music. They told us to pack up our books and get our clothes off of the campus. ‘You are no longer welcome here,’ they said. As we both started out the door of the president’s office, Jerry Lee turned around and said, ‘I want you men to know Pearry Lee had nothing to do with this. He didn’t know what I was going to do.’ They reversed my expulsion, and I didn’t have to leave. Jerry Lee stood up for me.”

  Some of the students waved as he walked away, headed for the bus station and Ferriday.

  “I think sincerely, in his heart, he wanted to be a preacher,” says Pearry Lee.

  Jerry Lee did not need college or the process of ordination to preach, and he did not immediately give up on it. He felt what he felt, and he preached on it, preached as the sinner he was. Small churches in and around the river parishes welcomed him, “and I preached up a storm on the Holy Ghost.” He will not talk about it much—it is one of those things he finds too private, too real, in a way, to talk about. But the people who would say he had no right to preach as a sinner, that he should not have been allowed, know nothing of the faith in which he was raised, and besides, if only men of perfection preached, there would be scarce preaching at all. It was stories of failure the people tended to cleave to, because without failure there could be no redemption. Those without sin walked a lonely road, echoing and empty. The funny thing was, the red-hot music that Jerry Lee played in Waxahachie would come to be welcomed and encouraged and even commonplace in the Assembly of God, as it already was on Texas Avenue and churches like it throughout the rougher South.

  But Jerry Lee did not preach for long. He went back to the clubs in Natchez and Monroe and elsewhere, but despite some rare nights when he hit it big with tips, the money was still not a real living, so he went looking for day work again. He again tried manual labor, only to rediscover that it required manual labor.

  At one point, considering his powerful and winning personality, he thought he might have some luck as a door-to-door salesman. So he took a job on commission with the Atlas Sewing Machine Company. The company sold their sewing machines on an installment plan; the hook was that it required no money up front, just a signed contract committing to a small payment every month. With his partner, Jerry Lee prowled the river parishes in a ’47 Pontiac, lifting the sales model in and out of the car with every call. They discovered quickly that if the people of Louisiana did need a new sewing machine, they were not going to buy one from the trunk of a Pontiac.

  “Then,” Jerry Lee says, “I figured out a way to really sell sewing machines.”

  He knocked on the door of the wood-frame houses and mobile homes and garage apartments and said, “Good afternoon, ma’am, my name is Jerry Lee Lewis and I am from the Atlas Sewing Machine Company of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, . . . a great sewing machine. Congratulations, ma’am, you have won a sewing machine.” Then he collected ten dollars, check or cash, “for the tax,” and had them sign an innocuous-looking piece of paper—“which was a contract”—and told them he hoped they enjoyed their sewing machine and the many happy hours it would bring. Then he and his partner took off down the road a piece and split the cash. “The bill come later,” Jerry Lee says.

  They sold them as fast as they could load them in the Pontiac, “sold more than fifty of ’em in one day,” says Jerry Lee. He ordered more sewing machines from the company, to keep the scam going. “They told me I was the biggest sewing machine salesman in the world, the biggest of all time.”

  When the bill came, people just ignored it, assuming it was a mistake, and when the company contacted them, the people said they were not going to make payments on a sewing machine they already owned free and clear, like that nice young man done tol’ ’em they did, and then they told the latest representative from the Atlas Sewing Machine Company, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to get off their porch before they got the gun or put the dogs on them. So the poor people got to keep their machines, and the company decided it needed some new salesmen in that part of Louisiana and Mississippi. By then Jerry Lee had already made about twelve hundred dollars on the great sewing machine sweepstakes of 1953.

  He varied his spiel, telling some women they had won fifty dollars off, and offered to drive others to the grocery store to cash a check.

  “But I was wrong,” he later told an interviewer. “I wasn’t wrong for selling sewing machines. I was wrong for sellin’ ’em the way I did.” Then he broke into song:

  Be sure

  You’re gonna pay

  For your wrongdoin’,

  Jerry Lee,

  But I’ll never

  Make the same

  Mistake again.

  “Next time,” he said, “I won’t leave the contract.”

  One day, in the midst of this new crime wave, he and his partner stopped by a country store to gas up and drink a Coke and limber up their legs, and he saw a big, blue-barreled pistol in a glass case at the counter. “I guess I thought I was Jesse James,” he says. “I come back that night and I stole it. . . . I guess it’s all right to admit that, now. Got caught with it about two weeks later,” as he sat with it in his lap in a parked car as a parish sheriff rolled up behind him. The sheriff put both men in the wretched jail in St. Francisville. He called his Uncle Lee, the only man he knew who could make his bond, and Lee Calhoun said he would be by, “d’rectly.”

  “It was awful, man,” recalls Jerry Lee. “The cell wasn’t as big as nothin’, and it was crowded with some rough ol’ boys—I mean some rough ol’ boys—but me and my partner stuck together. The food was terrible, this stew that was just slop. And there weren’t no women.”

  After three days, Lee Calhoun finally showed up.

  “He didn’t have to wait that long,” says Jerry Lee.

  They went before the judge.

  “Well,” the judge said, “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna give you three years in Angola.”

  Jerry Lee’s heart flipped. People joke about that, but he felt it.

  “God,” he said.

  “But seeing as how this is your first offense,” the judge said, “I’ll make it three years’ probation, instead.”

  Jerry Lee laughs off most near-disasters, but he knows how close he came, in that courtroom, to descending into the very real hell of Angola Prison. “After that, my buddy stole one of them big ol’ truck batteries, and they sent him off,” says Jerry Lee. He walked a tigh
ter line, on probation, knowing that Angola was the dream killer. It did not last long, that caution, but it lasted long enough to get him past his probation. If the judge had known about his sewing machine racket, of course, he would have certainly done time for theft and embezzlement—unless, of course, his Uncle Lee could have fixed that, too. He can smile about it now, for whatever the statute of limitations is on a sewing machine scam, it is probably shorter than sixty years. It makes him kind of happy, though, knowing that a whole lot of people in the backwoods and bayous of Louisiana got a free sewing machine, which makes him almost like Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor and all, except of course for that twelve hundred he made off the top.

  He went back across the river and started playing the boogie again for about ten dollars a night. On some slow nights in the clubs, he played the piano with his right hand and drums with his left, till the club’s owner, Julio May, told him that might not be a good idea. He told me, ‘These people come in here expecting to see a whole band, and when they see’s it’s one man, they get strange.’”

  Rules, always these rules.

  “I did what I had to do,” Jerry Lee says now, “to get a tip.”

  Why could there not be a different set of rules, for him?

  “Sometimes, when I know it’s right, I call it wrong, and sometimes when I know it’s wrong I call it right,” he says, and shrugs. It might make life confusing sometimes, he says now, but not dull. Dull is the real dream killer. “And it will eat you alive, if you let it.”

  4

  MR. PAUL

  Natchez

  1952

  The stage was about sixteen inches high and had a rail across the front to keep drunks from staggering into the bandstand and getting electrocuted in the extension cords. The cigarette smoke roiled in a blue fog and the air smelled of yesterday’s beer and perfume you bought by the jug. The Wagon Wheel was like the Swan Club before it, and the Blue Cat, and the Hilltop, and other beer joints where blues and hillbilly music would collide, a place to fight over a good woman or sorry man and knock back brown liquor by the shot till you were numb or just not particular, where a wedding vow was more a suggestion, and truck drivers tipped the band in little white pills. “Country people, big shots and low shots,” says Jerry Lee, who kept time to this melee with a pair of drumsticks, and loved it all.

  Only the music was extraordinary, and what made it that way, before he finally took over the old upright and stole the show, was a fifty-year-old piano player from Meadville, Mississippi, named Paul Whitehead. “Mr. Paul,” says Jerry Lee, “and he knew every song in the world. And we played ’em all.” To lift the sound of his instrument above the hard-packed crowd, Mr. Paul jerry-rigged his old piano to an amplifier, electrifying its eighty-eight steel strings till they would ring out even over the crack of a .22 pistol. He pumped the keys to get a rich, rolling sound, slapped them like he expected them to give up some secret, some music never heard in a place such as this. Sound was what he had. He could play juke-joint blues or “San Antonio Rose,” squeeze an electric accordion till it spat out a marching band, fiddle up a redneck storm, and blow a trumpet like he was trying to bring down a wall. He did it all while staring off into the distance, as if he was playing not in a tin-roofed den of iniquity but someplace fine, as if he could somehow see how far a man might fly from here with just the right song.

  “Pure talent,” says Jerry Lee, “was what it was.” The music washed out in all directions, smoked through the blades of a big electric fan and poured through the propped-open door, across the gravel and the Johnson grass and out to the blacktop, luring in the Hudson Hornets and two-tone Fords and other hunks of big Detroit steel. Young men in penny loafers and snap-pearl-button shirts checked their shine in the gleam of a baby moon hubcap and steered women with big hair and low expectations toward the disturbance within, at no cover charge. Now and then, at the end of a set, a pretty girl would approach the stage to make a request or just to tell the silver-haired piano man how much she loved his songs, and Mr. Paul, suddenly gentle, would bow low, smile, and say, “Thank you, miss.” For Mr. Paul Whitehead was blind, and in the darkness where he lived, they were all pretty girls.

  He’d been born with sight, but when he was three years old he got measles and lesions in his eyes, and the world went black. “Put a lightbulb in front of my face,” he said, “and I can’t tell if it’s off or on.” But he could tell where he was on a lonely highway by tilting his face to a window. “Well, we’re passing through Roxie. I smell the sawmill.” He knew, rolling up Highway 51, when he neared McComb. “I smell fresh-cut hay.”

  Sometimes at the Wagon Wheel, he would reach out to where a young woman’s voice told him her face would be. “Can I touch your hair, miss?” he would ask, and the girl almost always told him, “Why, yes, of course.” After prying hands off her posterior all night and entertaining offers from men whose smoothest line was, “Hey, baby, wanna go wit’ me,” it was nice to talk to a gentleman. He would take a strand of her hair and feel it between his thumb and forefinger, for just a second or so, never more. “You’re a redhead, miss,” he would say, and he was right every time. The peroxide blondes tried to fool him, but he could tell them what they were and what they used to be. The young women would waste a smile on the hard, smoked glass that covered his eyes, then rush back to tables knocked together from scrap wood and old doors to tell their girlfriends of the magic powers of Mr. Paul.

  But it was his musical memory, unlimited and forever, that was the real trick here.

  He gave them Hank Thompson . . .

  I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels.

  I might have known you’d never make a wife.

  . . . and Joe Turner, and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and even “Stardust,” sweet as any dream.

  The early days of rock and roll are thick in myth, but Paul Whitehead’s place in the greater legend is faded and paper-thin. He has been largely forgotten beyond a sentence or so, a footnote to a legend, but he deserved better than that, says Jerry Lee. He is fiercely proud of his own technique, of being self-taught, of being the one and blessed only, but concedes that he studied the blind man, as he learned the words, learned to read and even take control of a crowd, as he waited for that last element, that one, final, missing thing. “I was gettin’ my sound right,” he says, and Mr. Paul loved sound like few men he had ever seen. He was the rarest of performers, a pure musician, unpolluted by worldly things, yet he and Jerry Lee, who was a tar baby for temptation and a walking catastrophe in the realm of regular people, were in one way the same. The stage was the light. Sixteen inches down there was only the black nothing, for both of them.

  “Paul Whitehead done a lot. His lesson was worth a billion dollars to me. I guess he was like a father to me,” an influence, certainly, and a teacher, but more. He showed Jerry Lee that there was a kind of peace in it all, in the middle of the chaos and fighting and drunkards. There was life in it, in it alone.

  Paul Whitehead learned the music not from lessons or travel but from the air, from the Blue Room in New Orleans and big bands in Manhattan; he learned Cajun from the Atchafalaya, and every hillbilly song the Louisiana Hayride or the Opry ever broadcast on a dust-covered radio. But that pumping sound in his piano was pure juke joint; Jerry Lee knew it from those days he was routinely thrown out of Haney’s by a man the size of a Frigidaire. Mr. Paul found it not in a club but tapping down a sidewalk in Meadville, listening. He could tell when he passed the color line in a town by pausing a second on the concrete.

  In the late ’40s he had played with a picker named Gray Montgomery, from Security, Louisiana. Gray had a white Gibson guitar and a French harp, and could play drums with his feet. For years, he and Mr. Paul toured the South, playing honky-tonks. “The girls would come in the clubs, waitresses who worked the cafés,” Montgomery recalled. “They’d ask if we knew so-and-so, and they’d write down the words for us. . . . That’s how we got our songs, from waitresses.<
br />
  “There wasn’t no rock and roll, but people were tired of the slow songs. We’d take an old country song, and I’d say, ‘Paul, I think the people want to jump a little bit.’ And we’d watch the crowd, and if you hit some jagged notes they liked and they stomped the floor, you knew to just keep goin’. We didn’t know that was rock and roll.” Montgomery even played briefly with Mr. Paul and Jerry Lee together. He never hit it big himself but will never forget seeing the silver-haired man and the golden-haired one together onstage at the birth of a music, like a man watching a comet. Who gets to say they saw something like that?

  Outside the clubs, Mr. Paul was all but invisible, living quietly in a small house in Natchez, dressing neat but plain. Jerry Lee would take him home after the gigs and watch him walk unerring down the path to his door, counting his steps. He was resistant to the vices that swirled around musicians. He did not drink or smoke or jazz himself with pills or avail himself of loose women. He drank milk in the fifteen-minute breaks; bartenders kept a glass bottle of it behind the bar. Sometimes, after a show, he would get a ride to a late-night place called Joe’s Eats on Route 61 and order a bowl of chili. He would not eat it unless it was scorching hot, and stuck his right index finger in the bowl to make sure. He wanted the first bite to be perfect. Then, alone, he ate carefully till it was gone, and waited, silent, for a ride home. “Same thing, every night,” says Jerry Lee. “Chili and a cold glass of milk.”

  Mr. Paul did not talk much for a man who worshipped sound, as if what came out of people’s mouths, absent melody, was grating somehow. But he talked to Jerry Lee. They were often seen hunched over a piano or a song. People, wanting to believe in myth, said it was because he heard the future in him, that he would be the one to take the music to that fine place, a place he would have taken it himself if only he could have found his way alone out of that coiled nest of spitting cords. But people say a lot of things.