trees to hear the music that poured from the place. People parked their cars and rolled down windows or opened doors to listen. The austerity of the Pentecostal sect did not extend to its music, even before Jerry Lee Lewis and the other boys put their stamp on it, and you could hear the piano on Main Street. Elmo whupped guitar, Mamie sang, Son Swaggart sawed his fiddle and the rest of the family joined in. In time, there would be drums, steel guitar, bass, accordion, and more, the place literally shaking. “It was lively,” says Gay Bradford, who was born in 1931 and went to church with Jerry Lee.
This Sunday his kin filed in a carload at a time—they were almost all kin, in here—and took seats in the simple, dark-wood pews: tall, angular Swaggarts, the smaller, good-looking Gilleys, the fiery Herrons, the wild Beatty boys, his pretty Aunt Stella and his rumpled Uncle Lee, and all the rest. Mamie and Elmo had a baby daughter now: Frankie Jean, born on October 27, 1944. She would be an annoyance for her brother but an ally in the long life to come. Mamie held the child in her arms, rocking her gently in the pew as the service began. The congregation prayed for strength, for the courage to be a warrior for Christ, for deliverance from all sin, and for life everlasting at the foot of His throne. Then there was a song. Here, pure genetics made the place different. There was no robed choir. The whole place, front to back, was choir.
Then Jerry Lee, his hair slicked down with hair oil, slid out of the rough pew and walked to the front of the church. It was not a long walk, so why did it seem like he was walking through a vast cathedral? He faced the congregation, about forty people that Sunday, but it looked like a lot more then. They waited politely for him to begin . . . and waited, and waited.
Jerry Lee took a deep breath, spun on his heel and walked, a hundred miles at least, back to his family’s pew.
“Mama,” he whispered.
“Yes, son,” Mamie said.
“What song was it I’s supposed to play?”
“‘What Will My Answer Be?’” she said.
He nodded.
“People just busted out laughin’.”
He marched back to the front of the church.
What will my answer be, what can I say
When Jesus beckons me home?
“It was the first song I ever sang in church.”
Everything he has sung or played since rests on the pillars of that day, that church, and that song. He sees no irony in it, asks no questions, abides none: “The music comes from God.”
Other styles of music would augment and color and shade his development, but it was all built on the grace and beauty and meaning in that old church music, no matter how far he may have strayed from the stories they told. Without it, he believes, all the other styles and achievements would have been somehow less than they were, as if they had been built on sand. He concedes that he did shake that foundation all he could, as did—to a lesser degree—Jimmy and Mickey and other piano players in the family. “If I’m not mistaken,” recalls Gay Bradford, “they had to call someone and put some new ivory on the keys.”
If there was one thing he was serious about, it was the piano, and he committed himself to it single-mindedly—but that didn’t mean he listened to anyone else about it.
“I had a piano lesson just once, just one time, when I was twelve years old. It was Mr. Griffin. He wanted to teach me how to play by note, from this little ol’ book he had, stuff for kids. But I played it the way I wanted to play it—played it that boogie-woogie style.” The teacher slapped him. “He popped my jaws a little bit, yeah. ‘You’ll never do that again,’ he told me,” and Jerry Lee smiles at that.
What he was lacking was a piano-playing role model, a performer of the kind he envisioned himself becoming onstage. Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers were guitar players. Moon Mullican, pasty and round-faced, could play it all, but he was nobody’s idea of a commanding personality—and Jerry Lee never saw him onstage, anyway. To find one, he had to look only as far as Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in his own family.
Carl Everett Glasscock McVoy was a cousin, the son of Aunt Fannie Sue Herron Glasscock and a few years older than Jerry Lee, Jimmy Lee, and Mickey. In cousin Carl’s good looks and in his piano style, Jerry Lee saw everything he wanted to be, or at least the beginning of things. Carl’s father was an evangelist who traveled the country, and on a stay in New York, Carl was exposed to big-city boogie-woogie piano, and he showed Jerry Lee some licks when he came to visit relatives in Concordia Parish. “He was a genius,” says Jerry Lee. “I saw him playin’ piano at Uncle Son and Aunt Minnie’s place, Jimmy’s mama and daddy. He played the piano and sang, and I said, ‘Man!’ And he was such a good-lookin’ guy. Aw, he was handsome. And I said, ‘Boy, if I could do what he’s doin’, that’d be something else.’”
McVoy wasn’t a star, of course. He worked construction in the daylight and played piano at night. Years later, after his nephew had made it big, he made some records, too, including a swinging version of “You Are My Sunshine” that became the first single on Hi Records. His small stardom did not swell or last, but in his charismatic looks and thumping piano style, he had already given Jerry Lee a taste of the future.
Still, Elmo’s boy knew his music wasn’t everything it could be, not yet. “Something was missin’,” he says, something that went beyond style—some element of edge, or grit. Even as a boy he knew that the music around him, that gospel and country and old-time music, wasn’t digging far enough into the deep blue state of man.
For that, he would have to put aside his hymnal and follow another kind of tumult and shouting all the way across town.
3
THE BIG HOUSE
Ferriday
1945
The church ladies walked faster in the 500 block of Fourth Street. They did not want the sun to set on them there. The conflict, as old as Eden, had been burning on the black side of Ferriday since the first guitar man jumped from a freight and played for his liquor between Maryland and Carolina avenues. Now and then, a few brave preachers, washed in the blood and bulletproof, would set up near the nightclubs and hold church in the twilight. They warned that Satan lurked in the drink and lewdness and would come among them, to sift them as if wheat. But the pull of sin was strong, and people swarmed to Fourth Street after dark. They stepped out in spats and pearls from big Packards and rattling Model As, or stumbled from a Trailways bus, searching for this one place where the brimstone smelled a lot like good barbecue, where the shrieking and wailing had a rhythm to it, and a wild kind of joy. Here, young men played the blues with tiny bags of graveyard dirt tucked into the bodies of their guitars, and fine women moved in a way the human backbone should not allow. 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.
But Haney’s was no mean little juke with a tub of iced-down beer and a few Mason jars of home brew. This was a place where four hundred people squeezed in on weekend nights—the entire population of Ferriday was less than four thousand—to dance, drink, gamble, fight, and cut, all of it washing onto a dirt street where a rattling old tour bus idled in the weeds. Slot machines spat out a hundred nickels at a time, and floorwalkers kept the peace with brass knuckles, clubbing a pistol out of a man’s hand or cracking his head before he did something stupid and violent enough to bring in the white police. It was a club where roofing knives routinely shook loose on the dance floor and women toted straight razors in their underwear, so it was for good reason that the boss tried to keep things as calm as possible.
The