Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  Trying to get fatter and steadier paychecks, he drove up to Shreveport to audition for the Louisiana Hayride, which had given Hank Williams his launching pad. Jerry Lee auditioned for Slim Whitman, who had a villain’s pencil-thin mustache straight out of a Saturday matinee, and a yodel so high that Hollywood would one day use it in the spaceman parody Mars Attacks! as a weapon that could knock spaceships from the sky. Jerry Lee met Whitman at KWKH Studios and recorded two sides—a Hank Snow song, “It Don’t Hurt Anymore,” and “If I Ever Needed You (I Need You Now),” a song recorded by Joni James. No matter what happened next, he was living one of his dreams, recording a song with genuine country-music stars looking at him through the glass. Elvis Presley had worked on the Hayride, says Jerry Lee, “so I thought I had a chance.” But he let a little too much boogie-woogie creep into his piano playing, and the engineers and Slim Whitman rolled their eyes.

  “They looked at me like I was crazy,” Jerry Lee says.

  Slim sidled over.

  “Well,” he said, “I just don’t think we can use a piano player.”

  The Hayride’s piano player was Floyd Cramer, who would become one of the most famous pure instrumentalists in country music and whose elegant “Last Date” would become a romantic standard.

  Jerry Lee told him he would be as close as Ferriday if they needed him.

  “Don’t call us,” Whitman told him. “We’ll call you.”

  On New Year’s Eve 1952, Hank Williams slept in the backseat of a powder-blue Cadillac, riding through the rain and sleet of Alabama and Tennessee, sick and weak, on his way to holiday shows in Ohio and West Virginia. He would have said to hell with all of it if they had not been big sellouts, and if the promoters had not made him sign a thousand-dollar penalty clause. Rotten weather had grounded his plane, so he hired a college student from Alabama Polytechnic for four hundred dollars to drive him up from Montgomery, about six hundred miles. He was mildly drunk from a pint of whiskey, and vaguely sick, and exhausted; the boy had to stop on the road to get Hank a couple of shots, B6 and B12 laced with morphine. They had stopped off at the old Redmont Hotel in Birmingham to get a good night’s rest, but two lovely fans of Hank’s had made it impossible to get any sleep, so he had just tried to eat a few bites of food and take a little nap. But he got sick and fell on the floor. He’d been delivered to the Cadillac in a wheelchair, and now, in the big backseat, he tried to rest. He finally drifted off to sleep, and the miles stretched ahead. The West Virginia show had been canceled, but the Canton sellout was still on, and there might be time to make it, if the weather allowed. Outside Bristol, Tennessee, the boy at the wheel noticed that Hank’s blanket had slipped partly off him, and he reached back with one hand to cover him. He touched Hank’s hand, and it was ice cold. He could not even tell the police where Hank Williams died, for sure, as if they were all living out some song Hank wrote, like that one about the lost highway.

  In Canton, in the packed auditorium, the announcer stepped to the microphone. “This morning,” he said, “on the way to Canton to do this show, Hank Williams died in his car.” Some people laughed, thinking it might be a joke, since Hank had used up every excuse for a no-show but this one. “This is no joke, ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said. “Hank Williams is dead.” People began to cry, and the man working the spotlight threw a yellow circle of light on the stage, where Hank would have stood. Don Helms, Hank’s friend and steel guitar player, started to play, and the audience sang his words.

  I saw the light, I saw the light,

  No more darkness, no more night.

  Even as a raw boy, Jerry Lee enjoyed the notion of the troubadour, always liked it, the idea of a man just traveling, talking poetry, singing songs. He did not know the origins of the word or the history of the composers and poets who flourished in the High Middle Ages and spread throughout Europe before fading out about the time of the Black Death. But he knew it meant a singer of songs and a wandering man, and Hank Williams was that, just that, and the fact that he traveled in a Cadillac and was born in Mount Olive, Alabama, ought not to make him any less of one, and if Hank was a troubadour, then young Jerry Lee was a troubadour, too. Hank Williams was twenty-nine years old when he died, but look what he did, look at all the people he touched in that life, says Jerry Lee. He and his daddy would have driven to Texas, to Tennessee, anywhere, to see him sing, if they had only known, but they figured, with such a young man, even a tragic young man, there was time. Now suddenly there was a dull, empty place on the radio, even when someone else was trying to sing, a dead place, the way it gets when you drive through the tunnel over in Mobile or down in a holler so deep the airwaves just fly over your head.

  Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine

  And a woman’s lies make a life like mine.

  “I would have liked to have met the man,” he says, maybe even showed him what he had done with his songs, especially with his version of the great, heartbreaking “You Win Again.” He got a gold record later for that Hank Williams song. “I changed it up, some,” he says, “but I think he would have liked it.” Many years after the man’s death, he would place a simple black-and-white photograph of Hank Williams on his dresser, the frame draped in a black ribbon, and the thin man has remained there throughout the years, looking down on him. Sometimes he likes to think Mr. Williams somehow knows of his great respect for him, a respect he has granted to so few, and that Mr. Williams knows that he is still here, carrying on his music, music as good as maybe there ever has been. “It’s nice,” he says, “to think that. You see, you can’t fake feelin’. Hank Williams delivered a sermon in a song, and nobody else could do that, nobody else could touch it. He was like a preacher, that way. He could make you glad, and he could make you cry. I would have liked to have seen him. I hate that I didn’t.”

  Turned down, turned away, and his hero dead, he arrived back in Black River and went back to work at the Wagon Wheel. He and the blind man played into the night, sometimes into the dawn. All his life, he would be cast as a wild creature careening from one crisis to the next, succeeding on raw talent and surviving on gall and guts and luck, with a dose of what country people called the “just don’t cares,” and by God that was just about right, wasn’t it? Life outside the clubs had always been not just a runaway train but a runaway train hauling dynamite on fire on a hairpin curve. But as hopeless as it seemed even inside the clubs, as dead-end dangerous, he was creating his sound and his moves and his look and his thing, and even when he stumbled out the door into the rising sun, he knew someday people would buy his records instead of trying to charge him three dollars to record one, the way studio men in Memphis did with other dreamers. The Lewises did not let anything run over them, and certainly not fate or destiny or any other sissy-sounding thing, not the Yankee War that took their gilded past or the federal men who locked his male relatives away in the dark heart of the Depression when all they were trying to do was make a dollar selling liquor. “I didn’t give up hope, not ever,” he says, his chin in the air. “I wasn’t raised that way.” How could it begin bright and shining, with talk of miracles, of prodigy, and get lost somehow in a whiskey-and-Benzedrine blur in a mean little beer joint on Highway 61?

  He told his mama it was just a matter of time, and when he hit it big, he would buy her a new house with hot and cold running water and a television set, and buy Elmo a farm, and buy them both Cadillacs and Lincolns till there wasn’t room to park them in the yard, and she would never have to worry about money again, as she had worried about it almost every day of her life. It would be music that did it, or nothing. “I’m gonna enjoy this ride,” he told himself. “No use in even going, if you don’t enjoy the ride.” He had seen what life did to men who didn’t. He saw them, fresh-scrubbed and upstanding on the outside but dead inside, like an old cornstalk or a burned sugarcane field. “I’m not much on being careful,” he says. “I don’t even know what that means. When I was a little boy, Daddy would say, ‘Be careful, son, and I said, �
��Well, I’ll try.’”

  It is hard, in talking with him now, to elicit any admission of weakness, even disappointment; every crushing setback was a stubbed toe, a pothole, little more. “I don’t know how to quit,” he says, in a low growl. If the Louisiana Hayride would not have him, if its promoters had so little vision, he would reach even higher, further. If he was too edgy for Slim Whitman, then he would go to the mountaintop. He scraped together some traveling money and drove to Nashville.

  By the 1950s, Music City had been country music’s holy grail a decade or more, a place where countless country boys and girls had seen their dreams of stardom come apart outside the cold red bricks of the Ryman Auditorium, home since 1943 to the most vaunted country music attraction in the city of Nashville and therefore in the entire world. The Grand Ole Opry had been begun in 1925 by radio station WSM, as the WSM Barn Dance, mostly as a venue for hillbilly pickers, cloggers, old-time fiddlers, and a kind of cornpone slapstick, vaudeville in overalls. It featured such musical sophisticates as the Gully Jumpers, Fruit Jar Drinkers, Binkley Brothers’ Dixie Clodhoppers, Possum Hunters, and a sour, hawk-faced man in a white Stetson and business suit named Bill Monroe, and people throughout the land loved it. In the years to come, it would make stars of Monroe, Roy Acuff, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, and later Patsy Cline. Minnie Pearl, the sales tag from her atrocious hat dangling in front of her face, came onstage with a raucous “Howdeeee!” She told one story a thousand times, about kin who picked up a still-hot horseshoe and dropped it quick, and when asked if it was hot replied, “No . . . jes’ don’t take me long to look at a horseshoe.” Grandpa Jones played the banjo in hip waders. The featured singers sported hand-tooled cowboy boots, big hats, and glittery suits emblazoned with rhinestone cactus and wagon wheels.

  They acted like royalty, some of them, because they were: if you played the Ryman, you were somebody in country music, and the promoters treated it like a private club. You were not hired to play the Opry; you became part of its membership, as long as you behaved. They were high and mighty enough to kick even Hank Williams out for drunkenness, and when Elvis Presley auditioned for them a few years later, he was told by the Opry management to go back to Memphis and try to get back his old truck-driving job.

  Jerry Lee had no invitation, not even a ticket, unless you count nerve. He walked the streets and sat down on every empty piano stool he saw and finally once talked his way backstage at the Ryman, but the men in big hats looked right through him, and the rhinestones hurt his eyes. “I never did like them rhinestones,” he says. The tall, thin men “looked like they had been there one hundred years, and maybe they had,” he says. “They kept telling me I needed to play the guitar. They said, ‘Hey, boy, you might be somebody if you’d learn to play the guitar.’ I said I can play the guitar, but I’m a piano man.”

  “I did try to tone it down a little,” he says, but it was impossible in the end. “There’s just soul in a piano,” he says, and it just had to come out. In the end, he knew he had no place on a billing where Ernest Tubb could do “Walkin’ the Floor Over You” and get only polite applause.

  “Elvis, at the Opry, didn’t even get any applause. Elvis wasn’t ready.”

  Jerry Lee auditioned at RCA, thinking maybe the record men would have a more open mind.

  “Son,” the man told him, “you need to pick a guitar.”

  Jerry Lee was even beginning to hate the word, the way they said it. GIT-tar.

  He took work at a club in downtown Nashville owned by Roy Hall, a piano player himself. At Hall’s club, Jerry Lee played for some of the Opry’s greats, who came there to unwind—people like Webb Pierce, Red Foley, and others—but none of them reached out to him or offered to help in any way. He played sometimes till dawn, till the people at the tables were too drunk to stand.

  “Roy Acuff walked up to the bandstand one night. He told me, ‘Son, I don’t know who you are, or when, or how, but one day you’re gonna be a big star.’ And I said, ‘Well, here I am, wide open to it . . . but I could sure use a little help.’ But he just passed on by. Him and others said later on that didn’t happen, but it did. Said they sure didn’t remember me, but they did.”

  The one Opry regular who was good to him was a piano player herself, a Nashville native named Del Wood—her real name was Adelaide Hazelwood, but that was too big a mouthful for most people—who had a big hit on both the country and pop charts with an instrumental called “Down Yonder,” which sold more than a million copies. She played, too, with a raw, thumping style, almost lusty, and she saw a kind of kinship in the young man from Louisiana. She did her best to help him, introduced him to some of the stars, told them he could play, but no one was willing to give the boy a try, even then. “She was the one who was good to me,” he says now. “She was a fine lady, and I never forgot that—and what a piano player.” He swore then that if he ever made it big, he would try to pay her back somehow.

  “Nashville is good at country,” he says, thinking back to those days, trying to be charitable, “and my stuff went either way. But it was daylight and dark.” In the end, he came to see those rhinestone suits as hard, empty shells with no real life in them. He was making ten dollars a night at Hall’s bar then, and as soon as he saved up enough for a car, he bought a ’39 Ford and pointed it toward Concordia Parish. “Nawwwwww, never did like it much,” he says of Nashville now. “I did some good country records. Some I’m real proud of. But they were the kind of songs that Hank Williams might have made, or Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers was a straight-up man. . . . Hank Williams was a man.” They were flesh and blood, flawed and human, and that was what made them great, as much as any lyric, any melody, he believes. But Nashville was selling proper, well-behaved Middle Americans a myth of what country was.

  When he got home, in a dark mood, he coaxed a few lines out of his memory and wrote himself a rare song.

  The way is dark

  The night is long

  I don’t care if I never get home

  I’m waitin’ at the end of the road

  By the fall of ’55, when he was going on twenty, he was still playing five and six nights a week in clubs, raising a family on wadded-up one-dollar bills and a few fives and tens. But even then, he swears now, he knew. “I knew I was going to be the greatest thing. . . . I just needed a song.”

  On the radio, he heard what that one perfect song could do to a musician’s life, how it could lift a man out of the dust itself.

  “I think it was maybe about then. I went to get Daddy from work. . . . He was workin’ on Ferriday High School. A song come on the radio, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.’ Elvis. I said, ‘What do you think about that, Daddy? Looks like somebody done opened the door.’ And Daddy said, ‘Well, I hope they shut it quick.’ Daddy didn’t think much of it.”

  But his son heard the promise in it, the promise in Elvis and maybe even himself.

  He heard it elsewhere that year, too: In Fats Domino, the great New Orleans piano man, and in the magnificent screamer Little Richard, and in the first strains of the song that lifted Charles Edward Anderson Berry from club gigs to the lip of rock-and-roll stardom, to number 1 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues chart in ’55: “Oh, Maybellene, why can’t you be true . . . ?” In Berry, as with other great musicians he studied then, he heard what he could be, “heard it on the radio, and knew I could beat it.”

  But Chuck, Fats, Richard—even that new boy, Elvis—had what he needed.

  “A hit.”

  “I was running late that night.”

  Things at home were not good, had never been, really. Jane was still throwing St. Nicholas at him every other night. She had a better arm than most people would have believed and a seemingly endless supply—he had not known there were that many Santa Clauses in the whole world—and they hurt a good bit if she caught him flush. She was also prone to go at him with a high-heeled shoe. But she could not keep him out of the clubs no matter what weapon she employed. He pulled into the sanctuary of the Wagon
Wheel parking lot just as a mindless series of twangs and chirps spilled from the joint. The boys were coming back from a break, finding a chord, tuning up. Must be a new song, thought Jerry Lee.

  The new music had a name now. It was burning up the airwaves in Memphis and even down here in Natchez, like fire leaping from treetop to treetop in a pine barren. The black man had been doing it for years, of course, but the harsh and irrefutable truth was, it took a little touch of hillbilly to make it slide down easy for most white audiences, like a chunk of busted-up peppermint in a glass of home brew. You fooled children that way, in the Deep South, to get them to take their cough medicine, and you could fool the whole world just that easy and give them their rock and roll.

  It was about this time that Jerry Lee and Paul Whitehead came together in a new band with a Johnny Littlejohn, a slim, razor-sharp young man who played bass and worked days as a disc jockey at WNAT. People said he was a better disc jockey than he was a singer, but he bought his clothes at Lansky’s in Memphis, the same place Elvis shopped, and wore black-and-white, two-tone shoes. The girls loved it, the way he dressed, the way he carried himself, and Jerry Lee studied that, too. As he played the bass, he swung that thing around in a rhythmic arc, and acted like he was somebody. “Johnny Littlejohn was a good-lookin’ man, tall, dark, had his hair slicked back good,” says Jerry Lee. “He had a thing. I was jealous of him, a little bit. Had a nice wife, too.”

  Jerry Lee was still searching for his last element. The other boy, the one from Tupelo, had found his, and now he lived on the air. He drove to work in a ’51 Ford, one hand on the radio dial, spinning, spinning, looking for Chuck Berry, for Little Richard going wild, for the Platters, Fats Domino, and he would find this boy Elvis on the colored stations, too, crossing over the other way. The white citizens’ councils would quake and fret and condemn it all as miscegenation, but in the clubs of Natchez, it was hardly any revolution at all; the crowds there had been digging juke music along with cowboy tunes since before the Korean War. Even under the white sheets—the Klan was big here on both sides of the Mississippi—you might catch some redneck peckerwood tapping his toe.