Following are excerpts from the book, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story (Rick Bragg).
This is another rags-to-riches story of a young boy, raised in near-poverty, in an Assembly of God church, who by most people would be called a ‘hillbilly’. He rose to stardom by his early 20’s and remained a staple of rock-and-roll history, even to today. Known for his outlandish bar-room brawls, numerous marriage/divorces, routinely taking women back to his hotel room after concerts, addiction to pills, and his highly controversial performances, his legacy continues as one of the most influential figures in American rock music.
He has never believed the grave is the end of a man, and that has been his torture. “The greater part of a man walks in Glory or burns; there is no real in-between not in the Assembly of God.” Across his life, he has proclaimed on a rolling basis the kind of man he considers himself to be, shifting form world-class sinner to penitent, sometimes in the space of a single song…he abides no cursing, no blasphemy. He will live the rest of his life, he hopes, without offending God. He tithes. He blesses his food and prays at night the Lord his soul to take. He knows the Holy Ghost is as real as a pillar of fire. He believes, as always, in the God of Texas Avenue, and knows he has sinned greatly, deeply. But his God is a God of miracles and redemption, and in this case that might amount to about the same thing.
“I sure don’t want to go to Hell. If I had my life to live over, I would change a lot of things…” he says, not for the approval of man, but for the grace of God. “I believe I would. I’d probably not do a lot of things that I’ve done…Jesus says, ‘Be though perfect even as my Father in Heaven is perfect.’ But my Lord, I’m only human. And humans tend to forget. I don’t want to die and my soul go to Hell…Can a man play rock-and roll music and go to Heaven? That’s the question. It’s something that won’t be known…that I won’t know, till I pass away. I think so, but it don’t matter what I think. And I will take all the prayer I can get…My talent,” he says, “comes from God…I can lift the blues off people.”
He never wrote a song of his own, but would take others’ songs and make them his own. He considered himself a ‘song-stylist.’
Jerry’s father, Elmo, was born in 1902 in Mangham, Louisiana. His entire family were musicians of one kind or another, and they would come from miles around to get together to ‘jam’ on the front porch. Elmo had always had an ambition to become a great musician, and studied music theory. Elmo and his wife, Mamie, gave birth to their first-born son, Elmo Kidd Lewis Jr.
The boy minded his mama, said sir and ma’am, and like school, like church, and carried around a slate and chalk or a pencil and scrap paper to practice writing and spelling. By the time he was in his first year of elementary school, he was writing songs to sing in front of the congregation.
When Elmo, Jr. (Jerry’s older brother) was nine years old, and their father was still in prison for drunk driving, the boy was playing outside and killed by a drunk driver. Jerry was three years old a the time.
In 1940, when he was not yet five years old, Jerry Lee found his reason for being born. “I was walkin’ through my Aunt Stella’s house. I saw it, and I just stopped, cold.” He cannot remember wanting to touch anything so bad. He had studied pianos for quite some time, but only at a distance. He had looked on them in great curiosity, these big wooden boxes so heavy you needed a truck to haul them around, so complicated that if they went out of tune it took a mad scientist to make them right again.
He has always had a hard time describing what happened that day, in that moment, as he heard that music come out of him. He does not want to make too much of it, but at the same time he is not sure he can exaggerate it…”I don’t know what happened. Something’ strange. I felt it in my whole body. I felt it.”
By the fall of ’43, he was becoming more enamored of music, so that a song on the radio, or at a clothesline, or in the fields, could freeze him mid-step. Music, black and white, blues and hillbilly, swirled around him, and as he sang it back, his own voice grew richer, till he sounded less like a freckle-face kid.
“It was beautiful,” he says, “when Mama and Daddy song their duets. They sang ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ and ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’ and ‘Old Rugged Cross,’ and they sang ‘Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?’” And sometimes when they song, it looked like their hearts were breaking, but to Jerry Lee then it just sounded like the soul of music itself was laid bare, when he heard them sing the songs form church. “You simply, “he says, “cannot beat them old songs.”
Jerry’s father believed in his talent and one day gave him a big surprise as he brought home a piano in the back of his truck. He had mortgaged the farm to buy it.
The boy played, played every moment he was not obligated to be somewhere else, and stopped only to bathe and sleep.
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…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.
Jerry had one piano lesson from Mr. Griffin, giving him a book to play from, but Jerry played it the way he wanted to, in a ‘boogie-woogie’ style. His teacher slapped him, telling him not to do that again.
As Jerry continued to grow, and desire to hear more music, he found a place in Ferriday, where blues was the standard.
The best of the clubs here, or the worst, depending on your affiliation, was a place called Haney’s Big House, one of the biggest venues for blues and R&B between Memphis and New Orleans, and when preachers railed against the devil’s music, this was precisely what they were talking about…they played in the styles of Kansas City, St. Louis, new York, and the Oakland clubs…”Back in those days, a white man could always go where he wanted, but white people never came down to Haney’s…was strictly a black thing.”
One of Jerry Lee’s most important influences musically, however, was Hank Williams.
“I listened to Mr. Williams, and I listened real close. I listened to hear a sharp note, or a flat note. And you know what? I’m still listening.”
In the summer of 1949, there was a hillbilly band playing downtown in Ferriday.
Elmo, Mamie, Jerry Lee, and his Aunt Eva were looking on, listening to the free show. “My boy can do better’n that,” Elmo suddenly said, and took off for the stage, with purpose, and told the organization of this hootenanny that the real talent was standing down there in the crowd popping his bubblegum…Jerry Lee was welcomed onstage to polite applause.
The crowd at first did not know what to think about this kid banging that piano like a crazy man and hollering that “nigra music.” But the sunburned men tapped their Lehigh work boots in time to Stick McGhee, and people were grinning and looking downright foolish.
They passed a hat. When it came back around, it sagged with silver. “I think I made about fourteen dollars,” says Jerry Lee. He was a professional at last. “I was paid to sing and play the piano. He walked in the clouds for little bit after that. He quit school, just sow no future in it. He and Elmo heaved the piano on back of the Ford, and they went on the road, making a little money here and there…in time he was taking home trophies from talent shows and doing regular spots on nearby radio stations.
Mamie would have loved to see her son in the ministry, would have loved to see him onstage in a white suit singing only sacred songs…”Mama didn’t like some of it,” said Jerry Lee, “but mama was with me.” He tested that tolerance and allegiance across the river in Natchez. The rough nightclubs there were the only place he knew in his small world where musicians could make a living, or at least a little piece of one. “I was thirteen the first time I left home to play, soon as I was big enough. “How old are you boy?” they always asked. “I’m twenty-one,” he lied.
By fall of ’51, he was going on sixteen, “ and was already a man and acted like one,” and past ready to find a wife and marry.
In 1951, he married his first wife Dorothy, and she was seventeen. She was the daughter of the travelling evangelist Reverend Jewell Barton.
“It took me about thirty minutes to figure out I had made a mistake, that I had got married too young.”
Jerry Lee, still looking to make a living, was trying to find venues with good music.
Once, if you really wanted to hear a piano ring, you went to Storyville, where the ladies of the evening waved languidly from the balconies, half-stoned, sugar cubes in their teeth and absinthe on their breath. Jelly Roll Morton worked here, and King Oliver, playing in the brothers while the gentlemen waited or made up their minds. A music called jazz took hold here, between the hot pillow joints and vaudeville acts and streetcars on the Desire line.
His mother and father, trying to help Jerry Lee keep on a good track, and his marriage together, encouraged him to enroll at a place called Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas.
He was three months into his fall semester when the Institute put on a ‘singspiration,’ a kind of assembly talent show…
This turned out to be a big mistake for the school to have asked Jerry Lee’s participation.
He stabbed one key, drove it home like a claw hammer coming down on a bell, and launched into “My God Is Real.” It was so hot and fast, Green thought it was “When the Saints God Marching In.”
“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 the tat 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 the hair tumbled into his eyes as he hammered…The students…started rocking in their seats…a few of them came up out of their seats and even did a little dance, right there in the pews.
“They were screaming, howling,” he says. The applause boomed inside the chapel, went on and on…he saw the dean coming to toward him. “He crooked his finger at me,” he remembers. “He was a little upset.”
“Do you see what you’ve done to all these young people? You’ve driven these young people crazy…You’ve ruined a great Christian college.”
The school ended up expelling Jerry Lee. He still had aspirations of becoming an evangelist, though, and ended up preaching for a time in smaller churches who would have him.
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.”
But Jerry Lee did not preach 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 work again.
Jerry Lee, trying to make some money, began learning what would please a crowd, with his wild shows.
He did not have to act dangerous; he was. He did not have to act a little bit crazy; he was…He was getting a name, a persona…”Before I knew it, I was making two hundred dollars a week playing my piano, singing my songs.”
In ’53, on a late-night trip to Natchez radio station WANT, 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 soon pregnant. He married Jane two weeks before he was divorced from Dorothy.
Jerry Lee went to Nashville to try to gain some success. Everyone he met kept telling him that he needed to learn to play the guitar, which he had no desire to do. He auditioned for RCA, with no favor.
He took work at a club in downtown Nashville. When he was almost 20 years old, 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.
Sam Phillips was the owner of ‘Sun Record’ which ended up becoming a major bedrock of blues music. Jerry Lee recorded the song ‘Crazy Arms’ and once Sam Phillips heard it, he knew he could sell it.
Later, when asked about his first impression of Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Phillips would say, “I knew that if he could do anything at all, even toot a mouth organ, I had me my next new star. He looked like a born performer.” All Jerry Lee knows is that Mr. Phillips backed up his big talk: he took a copy of the raw record to Dewey Phillips, who listened to it, “just like he done with Elvis.”
At WHBO, Dewey Phillips and the engineers took call after call from listeners who said they like that boy form Louisiana, liked him better than Ray Price, like him the way they like Elvis.
He was the most famous man in the world, at that moment. He pulled up to Sun Records in a white and brown Lincoln Continental convertible. Elvis said his hellos, then came straight over to Jerry Lee and shook his hand. “I been wantin’ to meet that piano player,” he said. He did not act like the king of rock and roll. He acted like a good boy, with not one speck of ugliness in him. He even hugged Jerry Lee’s neck, as a brother would do.
It wasn’t long before Johnny Cash arrived.
“We got to laughing, joking, jamming,” says Jerry Lee. He and Carl joined Elvis at the piano…and all four of them…harmonized on some songs from home and church. “But we blended good,” says Jerry Lee. “I knew there was something special going on here.”
Elvis was already very successful, and Jerry Lee was just getting started. Jerry Lee wanted to record a song he had found, “A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”. Sam Phillips thought it would be too vulgar, but let him go ahead and record it. The song became a hit, but not without controversy.
Same Phillips was torn between just shelving the offending song s and going all in on one last, big gamble. He was not convinced that an expensive lark to New York City with no guarantees of a second of air time was worth the risk. To Jerry Lee, it was beginning to look like the people who had once promised him the stars no longer believed in him.
Jerry Lee watched Ed Sullivan throw him out from a distance. “Get out of here,” he said. “I don’t want any more of this Elvis junk.”
Steve Allen’s manager…was willing to take greater risks to steal a few ratings points form the competition. Green was unimpressed by the number of records Jerry Lee had sold and generally unimpressed by the notion of another hillbilly rock and roller. It wasn’t too long since they’d had to camouflage Elvis in order to bring him on the show, to keep the public outcry down to a manageable number of decibels. “All I see,” he said, “is a guy chewing bubblegum and reading a funny book. You say he can do something. I don’t know.”
“If you got a piano, he can show you what he can do.”
“I took my bubblegum out and stuck it on the top of the piano, and I laid my Mickey Mouse funny book down, and I did my thing.” By the time he was done, Green was reaching for his wallet…The next morning, Allen stood right in front of Jerry Lee as he played it again.
“I want you to do that song, Jerry Lee, do it just like that on my show tonight,” Steve Allen told him. Years later, when asked why he gave the boy his chance, Allen would say only that he loved quality and knew it when he saw it.
Allen would later say the boy was pure goind under a camera; the show brought great numbers, better even than Ed Sullivan’s, and in television nothing much really mattered except the arithmetic. “He was quality,” Allen later said. And after that night, “he was a star.”
“That broke it all loose, that night,” said Jerry Lee. “Steve Allen asked me back for the next week, and then asked me back for a third time, and it just busted wide-open. The records started selling forty, fifty thousand copies in a single day. We were a smash. Steve Allen put us back on top, and I never forgot that.”
Jerry Lee had enough money now to buy his parents a new Fleetwood Cadillac every year. He bought his father a new Lincoln. But the one bleak spot was his marriage to Jane, who was still living back in Ferriday. Ultimately, when Jane had their second son, Jerry Lee looked at the child and could not see himself in his face, so he accused her of being with another man while he was on the road. She denied it, but this ended in a messy divorce.
As Jerry Lee’s success skyrocketed, Elvis started becoming lonely and insecure.
“He was just kind of damaged,” Jerry Lee says now. It seemed to Jerry Lee like he was acting out a script written for him by people like Colonel Parker, playing the rock-and-roll idol, when all he really had to do was be one. “He was a good person,” Jerry Lee says, but he was trying to please everybody, and that wore him down.
The tension that Jerry Lee sensed between them would never go away and would grow over the years as their lives, in both similar and wildly different ways, grew more and more bizarre. But they remained friends as ’57 vanished into history.
They talked about everything…Finally, Jerry Lee asked him the same thing he’d been bothering Sam Phillips about: “Can you play rock music…and still go to heave? If you died, do you thing you’d go to heaven or hell?” Elvis looked startled, trapped. “His face turned blood-red,” remembers Jerry Lee.
“Jerry Lee,” he answered, “Don’t you never ask me that. Don’t you never ask me that again.”
But true faith is beautiful, and terrible. He and Elvis understood that. “We was raised in it.” He says, “in the Assembly of God…Him being Elvis, I thought he was the one person I could ask.”
“Elvis, he charmed the women, and he leaned more toward the women in his music,” he says. “The women was his deal. But I had the women and the men going crazy for me, because my music had guts.” In Graceland, Elvis watched Jerry Lee’s hits march relentlessly past his on the charts, and when hangers-on talked a little too much about the new boy, because they had all come to think of Jerry Lee as Elvis’s friend, Elvis said to shut up.
Elvis, Jerry Lee believes, wore a mask in the winter of 1958…That face, the haunted one, was the one Jerry Lee saw starring into his through the glass at Sun Records, as Elvis opened the door and walked up to him. They shook hands, but Elvis just stood there, as if he was a little lost.
“You got it. Take it,” he said to Jerry Lee. “Take the whole damn thing.” then, Jerry Lee recalls, Elvis started to cry. “You can have it,” Elvis told him. “I didn’t know,” Jerry Lee told him, “It meant so much to you.”
What he meant by that, he says now, was that he was inching away form the music that had made him. He seemed headed for a life of soft ballads and pop music, says Jerry Lee, because what Elvis really wanted to be, and what he told people he wanted to be, was ‘a good actor,’ and, failing that, he might have to settle for just boing a movie star. But in ’58 he was still the king, and with the induction just days away and the blond-haired boy rising, rising, he believed his time was over.
Elvis had seemed angry when he came in- Jerry Lee knew how to handle anger, knew how to rise to another man’s anger the way a game rooster knows- but now he just seemed like his heart was broken. “he was not just crying, he was sobbing…I didn’t know how to hand le it.” He felt Sam’s hand in his arn, tugging. “He’ll be all right,” Same said, softly. “Elvis is emotional. He’ll be all right, just ignore him. Pay no attention to him. He’ll quit here in a minute.”
Around this time Jerry Lee became friends with Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. He also remarried. This time it was to his 15-year-old third cousin.
The fact that she was kin, his cousin, was also not troubling to him even in the least, because marriage between even first cousins was routine in his culture and certainly in him family line.
At this time, Jerry Lee toured England, and the press took his recent marriage and blew it out of proportion, saying that he had married his 13-year-old cousin. This incited the crowds at his concerts to heckle, “cradle-robber.” The uproar followed him back to the U.S., and it seemed that he couldn’t shake the bad press.
He was also in need of another ‘hit’ song, beginning to ride on empty.
But he was also facing a bigger problem: the changing style of rock and roll. The truth is that the American music scene was morphing around him, changing into something he did not recognize and could hardly stand. It was losing its guts, its backbone; the day of the country boogies and the hard rockers was blinking out almost as soon as it arrived…into the breach flooded a wide array of music for twelve-year-old girls. It was the time of Richy Nelson, and Fabian, and Frankie Avalon, the time when Chubby Checker replaced Fats Domino at every hamburger stand in the nation…and culminating in two years with the arrival of the Beach Boys and songs like ‘Surfin’ Safari’. It was the time when indies like Sun Records were being eclipsed by new labels: Berry Gordy’s Tamla/Motown, with the Marvelettes and the Miracles and the Supremes.
As if in disgust, great black musicians with heart and grit went their own way with a music called just ‘soul’ and Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, James Brown, and Ben E. King did their thing without great regard to the once grand experiment of rock and roll.
The radio stations stopped playing his material, even though his concerts were still dynamic. At this time, his parents divorced, and soon thereafter, his mother died of cancer.
Then, in February 1961, Jerry Lee went back into the studio for one more try. He chose the Ray Charles hit “What’d I Say,” and when it was done, he knew he had a hit…it was the song that broke Ray Charles out our R&B into the pop charts, and it would put Jerry Lee back there, too.
England even wanted him back, and this time, he had much more success, even bringing Myra, his previously-scandalized wife.
After several more years of travelling, his marriage to Myra began to fail, even though for a while she was willing to put up with his infidelity. Worst of all, while he was on the road, his son tragically did in a drowning accident. He and Myra eventually divorced.
With continual ebbing and flowing of success and non-success, he remained able to catch the next wave, becoming known more as a country singer, than a rock-and-roll star, with the song, ‘Chantilly Lace’ which spent three weeks at number one on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart; it was a Top 50 pop hit in the States and a Top 40 hit in the United Kingdom. At this time, he began using a number of songs by Chris Kristofferson, who he respected greatly.
His impact on the world of rock-and-roll was not forgotten, and went beyond what he was even aware. While he was in Los Angeles, a young near-sighted young man came up to him, name John Lennon.
Lennon rushed up to Jerry Lee and dropped to his knees. He bowed, and kissed his feet. “Thank you,” Jerry Lee said, not knowing what else to way. “I just wanted you to know what you meant to me,” said Lennon. “You made it possible for me to be a rock-and-roll singer.”
In 1973, Jerry Lee’s other son, died in a car crash. This was a time in his life that he was deeply shaken.
The best balm, he had always found, was to just drift back into time. Back home in Memphis, he reunited with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison to record and album called Class of’55, a commemoration of their contributions to a whole new kind of American music, and a tribute to the man who could not be there, Elvis.
In 1980 Jerry Lee’s cousin that he had grown up with, Jimmy Lee, was beginning to become known as an evangelist.
Jimmy would backslide as a teenager, during the great scrap-iron heist of ’47, but he kept to his path, mostly, begging forgiveness, then marching onward. Jerry Lee sinned and prayed for forgiveness, too- not so different, when you think about it…By the 1980’s, Jimmy Swaggart was in a battle with the devil on many fronts. He led a national crusade against sexual immorality. He called rock and roll “the new pornography” and wrote a book called Religious Rock & Roll: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, to condemn even Christian-themed rock music. He exposed and preached against fellow Assembly of god minister Marvin Gorman, who when admitted committing an immoral act with a woman who was not his wife. He led a purification of the denomination after televangelist Jim Bakker had an affair with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, then used more than $250,000 of ministry money to cover it up.
He had preached against his cousin’s sin…It seemed, at times, as if his great crusade would be incomplete until he turned this one final soul away from the devil’s music.
Of course, we know of Jimmy Swaggart’s demise. But Jerry Lee’s view is interesting.
“Was I surprised?” said Jerry Lee, “Naw, I was never surprised.” It was never that one of them believed and the other didn’t, he said. They both believed. But there was always that one difference between them. “I never pretended to be nothin’,” he says. But in the end, Jimmy was still family, bound not by paper but by blood. “Jimmy is a human being, too, and people need to remember that. They need to stop and think about that.
One evening, his fourth wife, as she was driving home in a rain-storm saw what seemed to be an apparition over the gate as she drove up their driveway. She described it to Jerry Lee.
“I don’t know if I believe in all that stuff or not,” says Jerry Lee. “That’s what I think it was, an angel,” he says. Or maybe it was Elvis coming to answer that old question that haunted them both, that old question about what happens to those who sing and play this music.
“It’s strictly in God’s hands,” he says. And it makes no difference what they write or what they say, or how they feel, it’s…right between me and God.” He doesn’t believe he can talk his way in. “You gotta live it. You gotta…believe it. But you can only believe to a certain extent. You gotta live it, too. You gotta back up what you preach.”