He just wanted to make it move faster, harder, and for that he needed an engine, but the only pianos in his world all belonged to someone else. His daddy had a guitar and encouraged him to play it, but there was just a limit to the thing—he had always despised limits—and it seemed like the strings were designed to hold him, not set him free. “I learned to play guitar, could play it pretty good,” he says, but “a guitar just has six strings.” He says it like a man would say his dog just has three legs, with dejection and pity. In church he heard the future on those old pianos, battle-scarred from all those crusades against the devil one big tent at a time. But only the rich people had one in their house, or at least, people richer than they were.
He was playing in the yard when he saw his father’s old truck lumbering up to their house on Tyler Road. The better times, the carpentry work and cotton prices, had allowed Elmo a little breathing room, and for the first time in his life he had purchased his own land. It was the first dirt he had ever put his name on.
“He had a piano on his truck,” he says, “and my eyes almost fell out of my head.”
He started hopping, like old man Herron used to hop when Elmo lifted him over a fence.
“I found out later he mortgaged his farm to buy it for me,” he says. “I tol’ you. I had the best mama and daddy in the world.”
Elmo backed the truck up to the porch and undid the ropes. Together, they lifted it into the house.
“There it is,” Elmo said. “Now play it.”
It was an upright, paneled in dark wood, manufactured by the P. A. Starck Piano Co., of Chicago, Illinois—a unique manufacture, according to the advertisements, with a bent acoustic rim that gave it a fuller, richer tone, more like a grand piano—and “well adapted for concert use.”
His daddy bought it in Monroe, Louisiana, for how much he cannot recall.
It was used, certainly. “It looked new to me,” he says now.
He let his fingers run down the keys.
“Thank you, Daddy,” he said.
Mamie stood in the doorway. She had never completely forgiven him for going to prison that second time, leaving her alone with the boys and her grief. Women can be hard on a man that way.
“You done good,” she told him.
“And it wasn’t long,” he says. “I was playin’ piano about as good as I play now.”
You have to forgive him for dismissing a lifetime of influence, of adaptation, of study—not in any traditional sense, like paid-for lessons, but in the way he learned his art, by simply listening, always listening. He will always believe that, while he did learn, did soak up the music from the outside world, the great bulk of his genius came from within, where God placed it.
The piano would come to be called the wisest investment in the history of rock and roll.
“It’s sittin’ in there,” he says now of his first piano, motioning beyond the door to where the old upright leans tiredly against the wall in the darkened hallway. “I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.”
The boy played, played every moment he was not obligated to be somewhere else, and stopped only to bathe and sleep; sometimes he even ate at the thing, chewing on a sandwich, thinking about melodies, rhythms, songs. It is not like he had anything better to do. He had never seen a great deal of value in school, at least before he discovered girls, and now knew it was totally unnecessary. Now, in the cursed classroom, he would stare at the top of his desk in abject misery and itch to be set free of this foolishness. “I was sittin’ on Ready,” he says, “and pumpin’ on Go.” There was no bell at Ferriday Elementary to mark the end of the school day, but “the band started practicing at three o’clock sharp,” and that meant the last period was finally over. He almost turned his desk over getting out, cleared the front steps in one leap, snatched up his bicycle and pedaled home, where he banged through the door and slid onto the piano seat like he was sliding in at home. He played “Blessed Jesus, Hold My Hand” and “He Was Nailed to the Cross for Me” and every other hymn he could think of, all of it by ear; the notes meant nothing to him, and the sheet music and hymnals just a waste of a good tree.
I will be a soldier brave and true and firmly take a stand
As I onward go and meet the foe, blessed Jesus, hold my hand
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,