He disappeared into the piano just as surely as if he had crawled into the cabinet and closed the lid. His cousins came for him, but mostly now he sent them away. This was important. Nothing else was.
Elmo and Mamie encouraged his obsession, but there was a limit.
“Son,” Elmo would say, as the hour struck ten, or sometimes eleven, or later. “Son, we got to get some sleep.”
“Ten more minutes, Daddy,” he said.
“No.”
“Five more minutes?”
“No.”
Mamie would come in, rubbing her eyes. “Put the lid down, son, and go to bed.”
Even though he was a born piano player, he still had to practice and practice to master the more complicated songs. Elmo knew music, knew the science of it, despite his lack of schooling, and sometimes, in the beginning, he would correct his son.
“You missed a minor chord, son,” he said, once.
“So I missed one, big deal,” he said, then, more sheepish: “What is a minor chord?”
“And then Daddy would sit down and show me,” he said, thinking back.
But Elmo had never seen someone so quickly master the instrument, any instrument, or master the nuances of songs.
He would call out a song, “and I’d sit down and play it,” says Jerry Lee. Some of those songs would stay with him—and in his stage shows—for a lifetime, like “Waiting for a Train” by Jimmie Rodgers, the story of a penniless man just trying to get home, but thrown off the train by a railroad bull. “Songs that told a story,” he says. Others just made you feel good. He played “Mexicali Rose” by Gene Autry—that one made Elmo whoop and grin—and “My Blue Heaven” by Gene Austin, and “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller. He did not know what swing music was, completely, but he knew the feeling even before his feet reached from the piano bench to the floor. He would play “Alabama Jubilee,” a song from 1915, and “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” an even older song his mama loved. And there were other songs of a newly popular piano style called boogie-woogie—songs like “Down the Road a Piece” and, later, “The House of Blue Lights.” He cannot remember where he heard them all, but he knows how he learned to play them. “I just had to hear ’em,” sometimes just once.
And yet there was always a difference between a boy and his father. One day, as Jerry Lee was laboring to learn one of the new songs, Elmo sat down at the old piano and played it through himself. But he played it beautifully, flawlessly, and it was so lovely, so impossibly beautiful, that the boy started to cry, in despair. And, seeing that, Elmo never played another song on the piano in front of his boy again. “Can you imagine that?” Jerry Lee says. “Lovin’ a kid that much,” to stay away from the piano for a lifetime?
The shocking thing was how quickly he could learn a song, and adapt it into something new. Elmo wired the house for electricity, and got his boy a radio so he could snag what was drifting through the air. He listened to the radio like a man sifting for gold. Some stations came in maddeningly faint, wafting down from Chicago or some other big city, but the best music in the world was being played almost next door, anyway. The Jesuits at Loyola University had fifty thousand watts pushing big band and Dixieland up from New Orleans, and you could hear Sharkey Bonano like he was standing in the hall. In Natchez, WMIS played the blues almost nonstop, from the rusty piano shuffle of Champion Jack Dupree to the citified jump bands of Louis Jordan and Amos Milburn. WSMB in New Orleans piped in hillbilly music from Nashville, and before long KWKH started bringing the Louisiana Hayride in from Shreveport, on a signal that would change his life. He bought records every time a little money came his way, boogie and hillbilly and pop hits, sounds that were obscure only to people with a tin ear, and eavesdropped endlessly in Ferriday’s black section to hear the most lowdown blues he could find drifting from the flung-open doorways, always collecting, absorbing. In time, he only had to hear a song once to store it inside his head. Then he would match the words to the rows of black and white, anything from country tunes like “You Are My Sunshine” to the old New Orleans song “Margie” to blues songs and drinking ditties.
It was a grand time in American music, when field hands laid the bedrock of rock and roll, elegant orchestras held sway in hotel ballrooms in New Orleans, jump blues combos toured the South continuously, and country music was maturing from fiddle tunes and cornpone to something a soldier returning from the war could cleave to, drink to, even dance to, with his baby. New music was busting out all over, but the old music still shined. He feasted on the new, but also listened for Al Jolson, who had never truly gone out of style, and Hoagy Carmichael:
Now he’s poppin’ the piano just to raise the price
Of a ticket to the land of the free
Well they say his home’s in Frisco where they ship the rice
But it’s really in Tennessee
On Saturday nights he sat by the radio like it was something he could see into. He listened to the Grand Ole Opry, even bore up to Roy Acuff, who was “the worst singer I ever heard.”
“What do you mean you don’t like Roy Acuff?” asked his mama.
“Well,” he and his daddy would say, almost in concert, “he ain’t no Jimmie Rodgers.”
The Singing Brakeman lived in their house now the way he had bunked with Elmo in New Orleans. His daddy played his boy the music on the Victrola, and he heard the genius in it, heard the train whistle across the tortured land and heard the blues bleed into this white man’s music, the way he heard it in the fields of the parish. Rodgers was the father of country music, but he was also “a natural born blues singer,” Jerry Lee says. “I loved his blues.” In no time he was singing and playing about hopping freights and getting drunk and the perils of no-account women, and if he was ten years old, it wasn’t by much.
Oh, my pocketbook is empty and my heart is full of pain
I’m a thousand miles away from home, just waitin’ for a train
Mamie frowned at that, at the little boy singing such raw, secular music, but there was no containing it now. “Mama supported my music” from the beginning, he says, even if she blanched at the words. When he was fourteen or so, he was moved by a song called “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” which a rhythm-and-blues singer named Stick McGhee had adapted from a nastier, profanity-laced chant he’d learned in the army. Mamie’s son worked up a slightly cleaner version of his own, so that she wouldn’t faint or fall to praying for his soul or pinch a plug out of his arm, and boogie would echo down Tyler Road. . .
Way down in New Orleans where everything’s fine
All them cats is just a-drinkin’ that wine
Drinkin’ that mess is pure delight
When they get sloppy drunk they sing all night
Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee, drinkin’ wine
Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee, drinkin’ wine
Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee
Won’t you pass that bottle to me
. . . then he would do another hymn. His cousins Jimmy and Mickey had also fallen in love with the piano at about the same time, and they would play together, sometimes, the three of them, and the people of the town would wonder at such talent in one bloodline, even if it was dad-gum impossible to figure exactly which lines ran in what direction. “All three played,” he recalls. “Me and Jimmy would play together, and you could hear it for three blocks.” But there was never any doubt about who was leading that trio. “You think Mickey and Jimmy could have cut it like me, could have cut that Al Jolson like me?” he says, as if daring someone to disagree.
But he did not, even as a child, hear anyone playing exactly like he wanted to play, no one singing precisely as he wanted to sing. Most of the standout artists were guitar men; the piano players still seemed mostly in the background, trapped in one genre or another.
Then he heard a man who defied any one label, a man who looked like a country-and-western piano man and played next to men in rhine-stones and big hats but who played jazz, too, and blues, and anything he damn well pleased, from Cab Calloway to Texas swing. Some people called his music Western swing, others said hillbilly boogie. Jerry Lee just knew it sounded good, like something he could do.
Yeah I’m an ol’ pipeliner an’ I lay my line all day
I got four or five women, waitin’ to draw my pay
Moon Mullican’s musical talent had germinated in the church, like his. Mullican learned first on an organ, but he was drawn to the sounds he heard drifting from the fields and chain gangs in Polk County, Texas. His daddy put a strap to him, but it was hard to stop the boy from listening to what drifted in on the Texas wind. He was Scots-Irish and as white as white could get—his grandfather fought for the South at Shiloh—but he would mix blues and big-city jazz into his stage shows between tear-soaked country ballads. The people who paid good money to hear him sometimes didn’t know what to think, with him playing that colored music so loud, and disc jockeys didn’t know where to play him, and record producers did not know what to do with him, but Jerry Lee listened to him closely, very closely, and heard in the music some of the first heartbeats of what he would one day know as rock and roll. “Moon Mullican knew what to do with a piano.” And Jerry Lee was playing it in no time.
He sat at the old piano and mixed and matched and experimented. In a way, it was like the piano was the heart of the old Lewis house, always pumping, pumping. “When it would flood, and Ferriday was under water, Daddy would put my piano on the back of the truck, and haul it out” to safety. It was not a hard decision, what to save and what to leave: the piano was the one good piece of furniture they owned. Then, when the water receded and the house dried out, he would fetch it back, and Mamie would breathe a sigh of relief.
“We gathered around the piano every night, back then, me and her and Daddy,” says Jerry Lee. It had always been that way for them, through poverty and misery and death, and now, again, in hope. It was clear that their boy was going places. It was all a matter of direction.
Mamie laid out his white shirt and bow tie. That was how you knew in the Lewis house that a great day was at hand. They rode to church in Elmo’s Ford and parked among the other ragged cars. Here and there, a backslid husband made himself comfortable across a seat, to wait out the preaching and singing and the altar call. Even Lee Calhoun drove up in a battered Chevrolet for the same reason a good poker player never flashed his wad. He had had the house of worship built on blocks, to prevent flooding, but blocks were dear, so it could not be much of a flood. There was electricity wired in the walls but no plumbing beneath the plain wood floors—an outhouse had been dug out back—and there was no stained glass in the windows to filter and soften the Louisiana sun. A rusted potbellied stove, the only heat in winter, sat in a corner. But inside, on a Sunday morning, there was no question whose house this was, and it was not Lee Calhoun’s.
It was a hothouse in summer; it seems it was always summer. The parishioners threw open the windows and installed two massive box fans on opposite sides of the building to draw the rising heat and expel it outdoors. It drew with it the sounds of the church, and created a phenomenon on Texas Avenue that people could not recall seeing anywhere else. The Assembly of God was an all-white church, but black neighbors would come by on Sundays and sit under trees to hear the music that poured from the place. People parked their cars and rolled down windows or opened doors to listen. The austerity of the Pentecostal sect did not extend to its music, even before Jerry Lee Lewis and the other boys put their stamp on it, and you could hear the piano on Main Street. Elmo whupped guitar, Mamie sang, Son Swaggart sawed his fiddle and the rest of the family joined in. In time, there would be drums, steel guitar, bass, accordion, and more, the place literally shaking. “It was lively,” says Gay Bradford, who was born in 1931 and went to church with Jerry Lee.
This Sunday his kin filed in a carload at a time—they were almost all kin, in here—and took seats in the simple, dark-wood pews: tall, angular Swaggarts, the smaller, good-looking Gilleys, the fiery Herrons, the wild Beatty boys, his pretty Aunt Stella and his rumpled Uncle Lee, and all the rest. Mamie and Elmo had a baby daughter now: Frankie Jean, born on October 27, 1944. She would be an annoyance for her brother but an ally in the long life to come. Mamie held the child in her arms, rocking her gently in the pew as the service began. The congregation prayed for strength, for the courage to be a warrior for Christ, for deliverance from all sin, and for life everlasting at the foot of His throne. Then there was a song. Here, pure genetics made the place different. There was no robed choir. The whole place, front to back, was choir.
Then Jerry Lee, his hair slicked down with hair oil, slid out of the rough pew and walked to the front of the church. It was not a long walk, so why did it seem like he was walking through a vast cathedral? He faced the congregation, about forty people that Sunday, but it looked like a lot more then. They waited politely for him to begin . . . and waited, and waited.
Jerry Lee took a deep breath, spun on his heel and walked, a hundred miles at least, back to his family’s pew.
“Mama,” he whispered.
“Yes, son,” Mamie said.
“What song was it I’s supposed to play?”
“‘What Will My Answer Be?’” she said.
He nodded.
“People just busted out laughin’.”
He marched back to the front of the church.
What will my answer be, what can I say
When Jesus beckons me home?
“It was the first song I ever sang in church.”
Everything he has sung or played since rests on the pillars of that day, that church, and that song. He sees no irony in it, asks no questions, abides none: “The music comes from God.”
Other styles of music would augment and color and shade his development, but it was all built on the grace and beauty and meaning in that old church music, no matter how far he may have strayed from the stories they told. Without it, he believes, all the other styles and achievements would have been somehow less than they were, as if they had been built on sand. He concedes that he did shake that foundation all he could, as did—to a lesser degree—Jimmy and Mickey and other piano players in the family. “If I’m not mistaken,” recalls Gay Bradford, “they had to call someone and put some new ivory on the keys.”
If there was one thing he was serious about, it was the piano, and he committed himself to it single-mindedly—but that didn’t mean he listened to anyone else about it.
“I had a piano lesson just once, just one time, when I was twelve years old. It was Mr. Griffin. He wanted to teach me how to play by note, from this little ol’ book he had, stuff for kids. But I played it the way I wanted to play it—played it that boogie-woogie style.” The teacher slapped him. “He popped my jaws a little bit, yeah. ‘You’ll never do that again,’ he told me,” and Jerry Lee smiles at that.
What he was lacking was a piano-playing role model, a performer of the kind he envisioned himself becoming onstage. Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers were guitar players. Moon Mullican, pasty and round-faced, could play it all, but he was nobody’s idea of a commanding personality—and Jerry Lee never saw him onstage, anyway. To find one, he had to look only as far as Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in his own family.
Carl Everett Glasscock McVoy was a cousin, the son of Aunt Fannie Sue Herron Glasscock and a few years older than Jerry Lee, Jimmy Lee, and Mickey. In cousin Carl’s good looks and in his piano style, Jerry Lee saw everything he wanted to be, or at least the beginning of things. Carl’s father was an evangelist who traveled the country, and on a stay in New York, Carl was exposed to big-city boogie-woogie piano, and he showed Jerry Lee some licks when he came to visit relatives in Concordia Parish. “He was a genius,” says Jerry Lee. “I saw him playin’ piano at Uncle Son and Aunt Minnie’s place, Jimmy’s mama and daddy. He played the piano and sang, and I said, ‘Man!’ And he was such a good-lookin’ guy. Aw, he was handsome. And I said, ‘Boy, if I could do what he’s doin’, that’d be something else.’”
McVoy wasn’t a star, of course. He worked construction in the daylight and played piano at night. Years later, after his nephew had made it big, he made some records, too, including a swinging version of “You Are My Sunshine” that became the first single on Hi Records. His small stardom did not swell or last, but in his charismatic looks and thumping piano style, he had already given Jerry Lee a taste of the future.
Still, Elmo’s boy knew his music wasn’t everything it could be, not yet. “Something was missin’,” he says, something that went beyond style—some element of edge, or grit. Even as a boy he knew that the music around him, that gospel and country and old-time music, wasn’t digging far enough into the deep blue state of man.
For that, he would have to put aside his hymnal and follow another kind of tumult and shouting all the way across town.