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 rhinestones 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