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.
“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.
“He was just happy to play,” says Jerry Lee. “He taught me. I’d sit beside him, and say, ‘Mr. Paul, can you show me exactly how you do that?’” recalls Jerry Lee, in one of those moments when he was not himself, when bravado sloughs away and you see the ghost of a desperate, searching young man. “Mr. Paul was good to me.”
To Paul Whitehead, dull music was just one more place to sit in the dark. “He’d wedge that violin in place with two pieces of pasteboard,” so it would hold still as he tried to saw it in two, and Jerry Lee beat the drums or the piano like it stole something, and they made people stomp and howl. Some nights it seemed like Mr. Paul, his scarred and clouded eyes hidden by round tortoiseshell sunglasses, was wired into their very bones, and he would play hotter and quicker to make people move faster, faster, and stomp the boards harder, harder. He could tell when it happened through the soles of his shoes. What power, in a man who had to be led to the bathroom and back out again. “And I liked his style,” says Jerry Lee.
“Looka here,” Mr. Paul would say, then run his thumb all the way down the keyboard, in that waterfall sound, and play Hoagy Carmichael in a redneck bar.
Ah, but that was long ago.
Now my consolation is in the stardust of a song.
“Then he’d say, ‘Let’s do “Jealous Heart.”’ I mean, we covered everything.”
Some people, numbskulled, thought he was deaf and would yell a request into his ear. He always recoiled, as if they had shouted into his ear through an electric bullhorn. Some people would say that was myth, too, that a blind man’s other senses are not so heightened, but then Mr. Paul could tell you how high the cotton was from the rising dust, the far-off drone of crop dusters, or the lingering bite of cotton poison. He could tell if a club owner shorted him, too, by the feel of the fabric of the bills—people try to pull a lot of things on a blind man. “I told him once, ‘Mr. Paul, I hear you used to be pretty tough in a fight,” says Jerry Lee. “He told me, ‘Yeah, but I’ve tried to forget those days.’ They say he swung at where he thought they was. ‘But I don’t do that fightin’ no more,’ he told me. ‘Those days are gone. I just play, now.’”
Jerry Lee beat the drums and spelled Mr. Paul on piano when he played trumpet or accordion, and never missed a thing. He spent every minute he could with the older man, and over time he became protective of him. Once a man named O. Z. Maples led Paul to the bathroom and came back without him. “Where’s Paul?” Jerry Lee asked.
“I left him in there,” the man said.
Jerry Lee told him to go back and get him, now.
“Oh, he’s all right in there,” O. Z. said. “I asked him if he wanted me to turn the light on for him.”
“Gonna be kinda hard for me to play piano around this place, after hearing you,” he told Jerry Lee. “You tickle that ivory real nice, son.”
Once, in that odd calm after a blistering set, he said quietly: “You gonna be a big star, Mister Jerry.”
“He didn’t have a jealous bone in his body,” says Jerry Lee now. “He was my true friend.” He was a witness, night by night, as the boy’s talent tumbled into alignment, as old music was remade in those hot, heaving little clubs. It was like waiting for a storm to build, but slower, over months, then years, but he heard it coming. He never claimed he showed the boy a thing, but he always, always reminded the boy that big things were coming, ’cause he heard the lightning building and heard it better than anyone.
It is romantic to believe that Mr. Paul really did somehow foresee it all, really did see Jerry Lee’s future and the future of rock and roll entwined. Jerry Lee only knows what he was told. Mr. Paul told the boy he was a natural-born blues crier and a genuine honky-tonk man, and that was just the start of things. He said he would have loved to have seen him, just once, seen that golden hair and ferocious face the people talked about, the women crowded up close, to touch. But in a way he did see it, every time Jerry Lee cut loose with the blues and out poured something raw and wild.
But it was his piano that moved Paul Whitehead the most. He knew the boy had been playing in front of crowds since he was nine, and there was a lot of church in the boy’s music still; some bar owners did not want a piano player whose songs made your wedding ring glow hot on your hand as you danced with a waitress. Mr. Paul heard the genius in it and told the boy to “go ’head on, son.” Most right-handed piano men really just played one-handed, keeping rhythm with the left hand while finding the melody with the right, but Jerry Lee had mastered that kid stuff on a thousand late nights on his old upright and moved on to something different. His left hand was sure and deft, and his right hand was controlled chaos, wildly searching for new sounds across the keys till it almost seemed he could play two melodies at once, like there was someone or something else there beside him on that piano bench, something spooky. To Mr. Paul, who was pretty good himself, who knew the limits of the instrument, it was lovely. He knew Beethoven and Brahms, and three-fingered juke men, and every piano man living or dead who ever drifted down from an antenna, and in that boy’s piano he heard it all and none of it. The boy was a species unto himself, and he was still learning.
By summer of ’52, Jerry Lee had given up on the straight world completely. He had tried manual labor again, tried to shovel gravel and push a wheelbarrow in Ferriday. “I told the boss man, Mr. Durant, to put me on the sand pile or on the rock pile. . . . I was just a kid, trying to pour that cement, pushing them wheelbarrows beside them big men. Then I told Mr. Durant I didn’t want to do that no more. He told me, ‘Well, if you ain’t gonna be no bull, you shouldn’t have bellowed.’ I told him, ‘Well, you won’t see me no more around here,’ and they cut me my check for half a day’s work—half a day—and I went to the house.”
He cast around for anything he could. “I tried construction, tried driving a truck, tried being a carpenter’s helper . . . didn’t last at that too long.” The bald, hard truth is, the things a body was supposed to do and expected to do and required to do in this life, if you were anybody else in this universe besides him, had never lined up exactly tongue-in-groove with the way he went about living. The thing is, he tried, till he did not try anymore. His daddy had been a great carpenter and fine farmer, yet he dreamed the whole time of singing “Mexicali Rose” at the Grand Ole Opry. Jerry Lee saw no reason to labor in a long life of that, on a treadmill of hoping, dreaming, wanting, and not to cut right to the dream. “I couldn’t,” he says.
The churches of home had acknowledged and welcomed his gift. But the churches and revivals and camp meetings did not pay well; mostly did not pay at all. He was like a tick on a leather sofa; it feels like home, but there just isn’t much profit in it. His cousin Jimmy had devoted himself full-time to the Lord. He had seen a red-eyed demon outside his trailer and was flung into the ministry like a human cannonball, but Jerry Lee was not called that way.
That pretty much left the beer joints. Week after week, six days a week, he played with bands that tore up the night, serenading the fallen, the drunken, and the lonely, and a growing number of people who were just on fire with this new music, this music that did not even have a name. “Singing and piano playing . . . and women. That’s all I ever needed,” he says. Some nights, some glorious nights, he made a hundred, even two hundred, from the tip jar, but most nights he made walking-around money, hamburger money, and even on the fattest nights, he was still stuck fast in small time.
He remembers, on one long-ago gig, an empty tip jar.
“Not a resounding success,” said his beloved Aunt Stella, worried for the boy.
“Not resounding,” Jerry Lee said.
But even as a boy he knew, if you were ever going to be hit by lightning, you had to stand under a tree. The Wagon Wheel and places like it scattered around the South were where the music was in great disturbance, right here in his own dirt. Why, Memphis itself was a fast car ride away, and Memphis was where the whole world was changing, even if it seemed a distant universe. In the small clubs, people wanted that hillbilly music, and the old, raw, bloody blues, and they wanted it shouted loud, to make the hot divorcée in the corner forget her sorry husband and shake something. Jerry Lee was born to do it. He had heard it all before, had heard it all at Haney’s, and he was out from under the table now. “Wasn’t nobody gonna throw me out.”
She roll her belly
Like she roll her biscuit dough
But instead of parroting a black bluesman, he almost yodeled on the higher, bleaker notes, in a rolling, keening exultation of pain and suffering and lust, something from the other side of town or way out in the lonesome pines, but a place as rough, hard, and mean. His people pulled the cotton sack, too, and walked a chain gang, and sat in the hot dark of the federal prison in New Orleans. To understand it, to see the way it was, you have to think of it in the box it came in, the smoke and cave dark, for discretion, where a hundred people jammed jaw to jaw to medicate themselves, overalls and bow ties and strapless dresses lined up at the bar, all there to fight and cuss and rave and cheat, and some to just get lost in the liquor and the rhythms for a few hours; no one was asking for anything more. But they got Paul, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his benign face unchanging, the accordion around his neck and the trumpet at his lips and the fiddle at his right hand, and no one would know, as he sipped his milk, if it was a good day or the deepest, darkest night of his soul. And they got Jerry Lee, whip thin, hair in his eyes, intent on the music, the keyboard. He was not the showman then he would become in just a few years. The hard shell of the Pentecostals had not shattered, but it was beginning to vibrate, and if you listened close enough you could hear it crack. More and more he was replacing Mr. Paul on piano now, and he played rough with it and howled the blues. But for now, he did it all sitting down. Like Mr. Paul, he was unconcerned with the louts and loud talkers, the knife fighters and dustups and drunken husbands. “People was always pullin’ guns and knives,” he says. “Didn’t amount to nothin’ . . . I carried a pistol myself,” in case a blind-drunk farm boy got crazy over his girlfriend’s wandering gaze.
He played from late in the evening until two, three, even four in the morning, sometimes till the last drunk had tumbled to the floor. He never got tired, or at least his body never told his mind that it was running on fumes. The truck drivers tipped him with Benzedrine. “They’d give me a whole bag of ’em, if I’d play ’em a song. I’d flip one into my mouth and just keep on playin’,” he says, “and never even miss a lick.” And the crowd ate it up like peach ice cream.
It didn’t hurt that he was tall and handsome and had eyes like the sun shining through a jar of dark honey, and that he carried himself like the King of England. And then there was that hair. “That hair, it used to be just waves, just lay in waves,” said Doris Poole, who was born in ’34 and lived in Ferriday when Jerry Lee was a boy. “He looked so good.” And when it fell into his face, it made the women like him some good bit better, so of course he shook it and made it do that right off.
He did not have to act dangerous; he was. He did not have to act a little bit crazy; he was. He did not have to act like he would steal your wives and daughters; he would, in front of you, because he had a good taste for it now and it was like trying to keep a bull out of the dairy lot when the fence was down. He might have been a little rough, a little coarse, but he could get smooth if he ever wanted to, and the smooth guys would never have the grit and the menace of Jerry Lee. And no matter how many women say to their husbands and other nice men that they want no part of such a man, the truth is . . . well, the truth.
He was getting a name, a persona, in the flat country and the piney woods. “I went up and played the Atlas Bar in Monroe. They let me play a few tunes, put a jar up there for tips. Before I knew it, I was making two hundred dollars a week, playing my piano, singing my songs.” But the good money never lasted. Since the days when he’d played the talent shows and car lots and played on the back of his daddy’s truck, people had been talking about how he would hit it big someday—just never the right people. Someday seemed to stretch on forever, like those endless brown fields that surrounded him. To sustain this life—and, more important, to survive it and push beyond it—he knew he had to have a record, and if it was to carry him out of here, it had to be a big one. “I knew once I had my record, I was off to the races . . . knew there wouldn’t be stoppin’ me. It all tied together. I noticed the girls right off, knew they liked my playin’ and singin’, knew they liked me . . . that they looked at me and they saw something different.” But the record men up north hadn’t yet noticed, did not yet seem to care.
This life was not what Mamie had dreamed of for their son. But she and Elmo came to see him, and dreamed still.
“You sweat too much,” Mamie told him.
Well, let me tell ya somethin’—what I’m talkin’ ’bout.
When Elmo walked into the smoke-filled room the first time, he knew that he was home, here with the music and the dancing and the pretty women and the smell of legal whiskey in the air.
I’ll bet my bottom dollar, ain’t a cherry in this house.
Mamie stood with her purse in front of her like a shield.
“Why you sweatin’ so much?” his mama asked.
She had never refused him anything, but this. . .
“You gonna have a heart attack,” she warned.
Mamie worried, yes, but she also knew that the world is hard and it’s harder if you’re broke, so she told him she was with him, as she would always be with him, and made sure he had an ironed shirt. The young girls, these new brides, forgot such as that sometimes. If you’re going to toil in Sodom, be neat about it.
In ’53, on a late-night trip to Natchez radio station WNAT, Jerry Lee met another lovely brunette—he was developing a taste for them—named Jane Mitcham, and when a protesting boyfriend told him to “Hold on now, hoss, that’s my girlfriend,” he answered with a line he would use all his life.
“Naw,” Jerry Lee said, “she used to be your girlfriend.”
Jane was seventeen and different. She was not a trembling flower. She would also soon be pregnant. Jerry Lee told her he would like to do the right thing, but he was still married to Dorothy, who was currently residing in Monroe. Jane went home to Natchez and told her family about her situation and about Jerry Lee’s refusal to wed. Not long after that, the male members of Jane’s family showed up in Ferriday with horsewhips and pistols and a duck gun. Jerry Lee did not think much of the marriage law, but he did not think much of threatening relatives either. He downplays any actual danger to his person, but people here still say, only half joking, that it all came down to whether the boy wanted to be a bigamist or a dead man. Not all of Jane’s family wanted her to marry; some just wanted him to be dead, and it is believed his Uncle Lee Calhoun stepped in to negotiate. The result was that Jerry Lee did not die but instead got two wives, though because one of those wives was in far-off Monroe, this was acceptable. He married Jane two weeks before he was divorced from Dorothy. “I was bad to get married,” he says. “Never let it be said that Jerry Lee Lewis turned a lady down.” But Jerry Lee secretly knew he had won. He had lied on his first marriage license, claiming to be a twenty-year-old farmer, and his second was null and void because of the preexisting marriage. “So, see, if you think about it, I ain’t never really been married,” he says, at least to that point.
Jane believed she was married, and she expected Jerry Lee to act like he was, too. In the span of a year, Jerry Lee went from a preacher-in-training who was acting single to a man with a baby on the way and a wife who hollered at him and could curse like a man and who insisted he give up his dreams and those Natchez clubs and go make a living. They fought, and fought hard and ugly. “Man, Jane could fight. She hit like a man. She knocked me down the stairs, one time.”
They moved into a garage apartment on Louisiana Avenue, and people would marvel at the hail of projectiles that would follow Jerry Lee as he emerged, hollering, from the apartment door, and at how the projectiles—some of which looked like Santa Claus figurines—rained down on him as he descended the steps and flew in great arcs at him as he slid behind the wheel of his car or jumped into the car of someone giving him a ride to work, cars that sometimes barely slowed down because you never knew when something heavy would come winging out of the dark.
“She loved them Santa Claus figurines,” says Jerry Lee, but not as much as she hated him, in the moment.
Once he was getting into his car when a bottle shattered against the windshield.
“You gonna regret you did that,” he hollered at her, but she didn’t.
“That woman was hard on a windshield,” he says.
He half wished things would calm down, half wished they wouldn’t.
“We fought every night. Why? Because it was somethin’ to do.”
They had almost no money. He rode to work in a 1940 Plymouth, “six cylinders, but only hittin’ on five. Used oil. Used a lot of oil.” He drove it till it slung a rod, then found another car, another windshield for Jane to go at with a claw hammer or a high-heeled shoe.
“It was like living in the Twilight Zone,” he says.
But the storm abated in November 1953, when Jerry Lee Lewis Jr. was born. Jerry Lee held him and just looked at him for a long time, and saw his own face. He was born into a people who didn’t believe a family had to be perfect. Families fought, men drank, women hollered, and in the middle of it all, babies got born and held and marveled over, and on and on it went, until the grave. “I was raised to believe it, that if a man ain’t got a family, then he ain’t got nothin’.” So he held his son, between storms. “I loved my boy. He was the apple of my eye. So you see, somethin’ good came out of all that.”
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.
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.
“I walked in the door,” says Jerry Lee, “just as they kicked it off.”
Paul Whitehead was playing that electrified upright like he was whacking a bell, on a tune that had all the subtleties of a dog bite.
“Man,” he said to himself, “I like that lick. I like it.”
Then Johnny Littlejohn jumped in.
Come on over, baby.
Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.
That quick, he knew.
“That’s my song.”
Yeah, I said come on over, baby.
Baby, you can’t go wrong.
We ain’t fakin’.
Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.
“I got to have that song.”
I said come on over, baby.
We got chicken in the barn.
Come on over, baby.
We got the bull by the horns.
Littlejohn was singing his heart out, because if you did not sing tough on this song, did not sing wild, it would sound silly, sound like a prissy man trying to act tough in a cowboy bar. The song—written at a fish camp on Lake Okeechobee, some say, in between milking rattlesnakes, drunk—required that. This was a song without a speck of nice in it.
Yeah, we ain’t fakin’.
Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.
The origin of the song is cloudy at best. Roy Hall, the Nashville musician and bar owner who briefly employed Jerry Lee, later said he wrote the song with a black musician named Dave “Curlee” Williams while they were in the Florida swamps milking poisonous snakes and drinking heavily, two things that do not usually mix well. But Williams said he wrote the song himself, leading some to wonder if Hall perhaps bought a piece of the song, as was common then.
Hall recorded the song for Decca—that record lists Williams alone as the songwriter—but it had never been a hit for him, nor for Big Maybelle, who cut the first version, with Quincy Jones leading the band, nor for anyone else who ever tried. But no matter its credits, it does seem to have been born in a state of blissful sorriness, a thing not blues and not hillbilly but with all the baser elements of both, not as raunchy as some dirty songs but maybe just raunchy enough to thrill people and still, if the preachers weren’t listening too closely, get played on the radio, trembling somewhere between glorious entertainment and a greased rail straight to hell.
Jerry Lee knew nothing about any of that, not yet, and if he had, he would not have cared even a little bit. He was already singing it in his head, his fingers already twitching in the air. His gaze was fixed on the stage, but from the corners of his eyes he could see the women start to sway and move, even the ones sitting down. “They didn’t even know what they were tappin’ up to,” he says. Then Littlejohn launched into the part that seemed taken straight from under the circus tent at a hootchie coo, from the strip clubs in downtown Atlanta, from the watered-down, two-drink minimum, broken backroom promises of Bourbon Street.
Well, I said shake, baby, shake.
“It was meant for me,” says Jerry Lee. “It was written for me.”
I said shake, baby, shake now.
He did not have to write the lyrics down. The ones he forgot, he replaced with others he just made up. It wasn’t Tennyson. But the rhythm, the feel, bored into him.
“It was stamped on my mind, right then.”
I said shake it, baby, shake it.
“No, it was burned,” he says.
We ain’t fakin’.
Whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on.
It ended in a roar.
He walked up to the bandstand, like a boy with a stolen comic book stuffed down his pants.
“You a little bit late, ain’t you?” said Littlejohn, when he approached the stage.
“No,” Jerry Lee said, “I’m right on time.”
“And I took that song home with me.”
It played through his pillow, and hummed in his ear.
The next night, he asked—no, he insisted—that Littlejohn let him sing it.
He knew every word, every gesture the singer had made.
“I done it just like Johnny done it,” he said. “Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.”
Mr. Paul moved to his squeezebox, without ego, just changing gears.
Come on over, baby.
But it was not the same. He rewrote the lyrics in his head as he went along and felt like shouting them, and was shouting before he was through, till it was no longer Curlee Williams’s song or Roy Hall’s song or Johnny Littlejohn’s song but his, just his. It was stronger, rawer, more dangerous. There was a buck-naked joy in it as he pumped the piano hard from the first lick, beat it sore, and the crowd knew it.
But mostly, of course, Jerry Lee noticed the women, moving in their seats at the tables, gyrating at the bar. “They looked at me different, and I looked at them different,” he says, “than I ever had before.” They pushed up to that rickety rail and heaved and squirmed and “just moved, man,” moved everything but their eyes. He can’t really explain it, even now, but they just looked different. “They looked better.”
They did not all look back at him in exactly the same way—that only happens in the movies and the funny papers and maybe in some really good dreams—but the ones who crowded to the front of that little stage, right up to that deadly coil of extension cords, did. They left their men standing open-fisted, and their eyes drilled at him, offered him everything. “They took their dresses in their hands, and swung them around,” like they wanted to do more, needed to do more, right then and there. “And I knew,” he says now, “I was doing somethin’ different.”
It was a dancing song, and the women who didn’t crowd the stage dragged their men out on the floor with them—drillers and wrench slingers and insurance men, men who thought dancing was a Texas two-step or a sock hop or a vague, grandma-haunted memory of a Virginia reel. Now they just hung onto their partners’ hips with both hands, and if they had possessed any sense, they would have seen that the blond-haired boy was doing them a favor.
The song even had a little talking part in the middle, the way these boys played it, a place where the singer could cheer the dancers on; it was the kind of thing piano players had been doing since Pine Top Smith made the very first boogie-woogie record in 1928. But in Jerry Lee’s hands it became something else entirely.
“Johnnie Littlejohn did a little bit of the talkin’ part, and that’s where I picked it up. But I redone it. Rewrote it all,” in his head.
“Easy now,” he told the boys, lowering his hand.
Shake it! Ahhhhhhhh, shake it, babe!
Yeah, shake it one time for me.
“I saw my Aunt Eva out there dancin’ with some young man, so I knew she was gettin’ on with it.”
Now let’s get real low one time.
Shake, baby, shake.
Shake, baby, shake.
Then he slowly raised one hand up high, where he and the crowd could see it.
All you got to do is stand in one spot
He pointed one finger and rotated it in the air.
And wiggle it around just a little bit.
That’s when you got something.
The young girls screamed.
He had heard them scream during a raw, nasty blues number, but not like that.
The boys and the husbands, some of them, got to lookin’ mean.
He liked that, too.
“It was wonderful.”
Now’s let’s go one time. . . .
Mr. Paul pumped his squeezebox, and he knew.
It was the beginning and the end of everything.
Jerry Lee left the Natchez clubs not long after that night. He did not take that song right then and ride it like a rocket, though that would have made a fine movie or a very fine lie. Instead, he tucked it away in his vast catalog of songs, the way a gambler slides a jack or a queen up his sleeve to pull out when he needed it, when the time seemed right, or when he was down to his last scrap of luck. But he could feel it. He knew he had his missing piece. “I knew exactly what it would be,” he says, fifty-seven years after that night. “I knew it was on its way to the moon,” and someday he would ride it into the stars. It may sound like fiction, but he knew it was one of those forever songs, knew that someone a hundred years from now would pluck it off a wireless signal or a moonbeam, shout “Shake it, baby, shake it,” and dance in their socks.
“They say radio waves bounce,” he says. “Well, I reckon so.”
It pleases him, as an old man, to think of it like that, out there in space, looping through the universe between the stars, never ending.
And it makes him a little sad.
The song is forever.
Mr. Paul played the clubs for years. He lived long enough to see country music become so banal and plastic he could not feel it in his heart. He saw the blues go out of style, saw it replaced on the airwaves by something called disco and then slip deeper, further into a kind of empty posturing known as hip-hop, which did not seem like something, any of it, that a grown man would do. The few old men who remember him recall a genuine music man in a great, glorious time. Sometimes people leave this world just when they should.
Mr. Paul’s sound mostly died with him. The Wagon Wheel closed and returned to the weeds. The blind man never made a commercially viable record of his own, as far as anyone knows. But there is, if you look for it, a ghost of his piano still. After Jerry Lee left for Sun Studio, Mr. Paul’s old bandmate, the guitar picker Gray Montgomery, tried to sell Sam Phillips a song called “Right Now.” It was a swinging little guitar-driven song that was rich with rockabilly and featured a lovely piano solo by Paul Whitehead. Phillips said he liked the song fine, but he wanted to replace the piano with a saxophone. Saxophones were getting to be pretty big in redneck music. Besides, he had already locked up the most sensational, wildly wicked piano man in the whole known universe, maybe the most wild and wicked who had ever been, and he needed another piano record like he needed a cement lawn monkey. Montgomery, unwilling to change it, walked away and took the song to a small label instead. The song got jukebox play in and around Natchez, but it faded and all but vanished, as even some good songs are destined to do. But if you search for it on the new lightning of the Internet, on a little label called Beagle Records, you can find it, still, find Paul Whitehead, his piano solo ringing out so lovely, lovelier than can be described with black ink on white paper. It lasts just a few seconds, but it will be forever, too.