“People were shocked,” said Pearry Lee.
It would only get better, or worse, depending on your affiliation.
“Up-tempo, spiritual,” is how Jerry Lee describes it now.
Then he unleashed the boogie. He was true to the song, but he was also true to what was in his heart in that moment, and that ripped and roared through the chapel. He stuck that leg out toward the audience and shifted around so he could see them twitch and suffer, and all that hair tumbled into his eyes as he hammered out:
His love for me, His precious love, is like pure gold.
My God is real, for I can feel him in my soul.
The students, the ones who were not paralyzed by this point, started to move. They started rocking in their seats, and tapping their feet in time, and then some of them even started waving their arms in the air. A few of them came up out of their seats and even did a little dance, right there in the pews. Now we’re gettin’ somewheres, Jerry Lee thought, and he pushed it harder. He raked the keys like he was wringing out the last bit of boogie they had in them, and by the time he was done, he was sweating. “I always knew when I started sweatin’,” he says, “I had it knocked.”
But the crowd was still moving.
“They were screaming, howling,” he says.
The applause boomed inside the chapel, went on and on. It was the most applause, the loudest, he had ever had.
“It scared me, a little bit,” he says. “I said, What’s going on here?”
They wanted more.
He was willing but saw the dean coming toward him.
“He crooked his finger at me,” he remembers. “He was a little bit upset.”
“Do you see what you’ve done to all these young people? You’ve driven these young people crazy.” He said the word crazy like he was dragging it down a cabbage grater.
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 tighter 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.”