before the movie come on they’d take fifteen minutes and play Al Jolson songs on those 78 records. I was sittin’ there and I was listenin’. I had a girlfriend with me.”
Then something happened that got his attention. “Al Jolson come on, and he’s singin’ this song—I think it was ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye.’ And back then I could listen to a song an’, if I liked it, automatically I adapted that song into my mind. . . . I knew it word for word, melody for melody. I knew it. And I told my girlfriend, I says, ‘I gotta go use the restroom. I’ll be right back.’ And I left. I got on my bicycle and went home.
“I sat down at the piano and played that song—played it for two, three times, got it just like I wanted. I got back on my bicycle, went back to the theater, parked my bike, went inside, set down by Faye—her name was Faye, Faye Bryant. And she said, ‘You . . . you was gone quite a while, wasn’t you?’ I said, ‘Naw, I just went to use the restroom. Picked up some popcorn.’
“It’s unbelievable. But it happened.”
Other musical lessons took longer to sink in. It was about this time that Jerry Lee Lewis first heard the words and music of a painfully thin, sallow, brilliant man from the great state of Alabama. His mama loved Hank Williams, this man they called the Hillbilly Shakespeare, because he sang straight at her, the way he did every man and woman who had ever gone to bed unsure of what the new morning would bring.
Jerry Lee did not actually know it was genius, not quite yet. “I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t particularly care for him myself,” he says. “I didn’t think he could sing that good.” But in time, he began to listen closer, “and I was really wrong about that. It flowed out, that real stylist talent,” and suddenly it was like the man was singing right at him, too, even when the radio was off or when he was out of nickels at the jukebox and only static hissed from the spinning record.
He had practically been weaned on Jimmie Rodgers, but when he heard Hank Williams wail for his attention—really heard him—it was like he was hearing his own future sung to him. Williams had started singing on WSFA in Montgomery, with a voice that was so forlorn, it seemed trapped halfway between this and the other side. He had written songs on café napkins and scrap paper about the things that mattered—about women who did not love you back, and sons who called another man Daddy, and being so lonesome in the night that you wished you would die—and it wasn’t so awful somehow, to those cotton mill workers, pulpwooders, coal miners, sharecroppers, sweat-shop workers, and the women who wiped the tables in the truck stops, when he sang their pain on the air. Then he made them laugh out loud, singing about wooden Indians that never got a kiss, and a beer bucket with a hole in it, and how that little dog better scoot on over because the big dog’s movin’ in. He could not read music or think of a song in notes but never had to, being a genius. He drank and took morphine and gobbled painkillers to smother the agony in a twisted back and a pressing darkness; he sang drunk onstage and sometimes did not show up at all, and people loved him anyway, because he belonged to them, broken whiskey bottles and littered pill bottles and needles and all, because when he sang, you could forget for a while the stabbing, slashing machines that took their fingers, and the rich man’s courts that sent them to rot in Atmore, Parchman, and Brushy Mountain.
Like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank was not afraid to yodel, even though the moneymen had told him that a yodel record would not sell in the modern age of American music, and certainly not sell outside the peckerwoods. He told them to go to hell. After a few smaller records he wrote himself, he finally found the song that would carry him to glory. “I can throw my hat onto the stage after I sing ‘Lovesick Blues,’” he said, “and my hat will get three encores.” And he was right.
Hank Williams did not write “Lovesick Blues”—it was an old Tin Pan Alley song, written in ’22 by Clifford Friend and Irving Mills—but he made it his song forever, made his voice and his sound the only ones that would matter, forever and ever. That was what being a stylist was all about. When the Opry put him on the big stage at the Ryman Auditorium to sing it, the song rocketed outward from Nashville across the entire country. Fishermen in the Pacific Northwest heard . . .
I got a feeling called the blu-ues, oh Lawd,
Since my baby said good-bye
. . . and liked it.
But the man from Alabama led an uneasy life, and soon his career and his ways were locked in near-constant battle. The men who dominated the bluegrass and commercial country music broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium, some of them about as country as a subway if you knocked the cowboy hats off their heads, were fearful of this young man with the dark circles under his eyes. WSFA fired him for habitual drunkenness, and before long the Opry wouldn’t have him either. When Jerry Lee first heard him, it was by way of Shreveport, just 180 miles away from Ferriday, on the Louisiana Hayride, the weekly radio show he played when the Opry wouldn’t have him.
After “Lovesick Blues,” the wayward yodeler followed up with a string of hits he wrote himself—“I Can’t Help It,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”—and Jerry Lee loved them all. But that was not the only reason he cleaved to Hank Williams. As much as anything, it was the fact that Hank was also a man raised in faith but pulled and torn by sin, a man who lived with one foot hot and one foot cool, straddling the worlds of sacred music and secular music with a kind of tortured beauty. He would have the crowds tapping their toes in the auditoriums to some hillbilly swing, then mumble, “Neighbors, we’ve got a little sacred song y’all might want to hear, a little song I wrote. . . .”
I wandered so aimless, my life filled with sin
I wouldn’t let my dear Savior in
Jerry Lee knew he was bound to this man somehow. “I think me and Mr. Williams were a lot alike,” he says now. He leaned on the jukebox and listened to “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” He studied the words to “You Win Again” and sensed the unbearable humiliation there.
“I felt something when I listened to that man,” he says. “I felt something different.”
He rarely calls him Hank. It is “Mr. 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.”
There was no television, no video, so he could not really see what the man looked like, how he moved or carried himself. There were only the records to go by, and the occasional poster or flyer of an almost emaciated young man who stood a little knock-kneed onstage, but elegant, somehow, in his white suits and big white Stetson; he was elegant to the end, even after Nashville got to him and he started wearing buckskin fringe and big musical notes on his suits and lined his coat sleeves and pants legs with rhinestones and glitter and whatnot, like a dime store blew up all over him. The Opry hired him back and fired him again, but he always reappeared somewhere, saying, “Neighbors, I’m so happy to be back, and I got a purty little song. . . .”
Jerry Lee played the songs over and over. He did the same with other songs, like Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You” and a hundred more, but there was just something different in Mr. Williams’s music, the way some paintings are more vivid, more real than others, and he dreamed about meeting the man and telling him how much he liked his songs. But there was no rush. Jerry Lee was just barely a teenager, and Hank Williams was only in his late twenties, and he’d promised, over the radio, that if the Lord was willing and the creek stayed level he’d be in his town real soon.
It was about this time that Jerry Lee first started to challenge Elmo’s supremacy in the home. Elmo could abide most things, but not sass, and Jerry Lee was born to sass. He came off the bottle smarting off, and as he became a teenager, he figured he could stand up to his father, could defy his orders as a man would defy another man. It was funny when he was a boy, but when he was big enough, he knew he would have to back it up with his fists. “I figured I would try it one day,” he says. He can’t