there she was, naked, and it was as perfect, that moment, as he thought it might be.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“And, uh, we got down to the nitty-gritty,” he says, thinking back. “And . . . I slowly approached the situation.”
But at the last second, he hesitated.
He could hear Scripture in the air.
He heard his mama.
He looked up at the sky, for lightning, for the accusation.
“Help me, Lord.”
Ruth looked at him, puzzled.
She waited.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“I won’t.”
“It was you,” she reminded him, “got me naked.”
“I thought I was willing,” Jerry Lee told her.
“You mean you got me like this, and you ain’t . . . ? You can’t do this to me, baby. You know what I want, and I know what you want. You ain’t foolin’ me.”
“No,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
She was hurt, and mad, and embarrassed, and mightily confused.
“I was wanting to . . . but I just wasn’t taught this way. I’m doing you a favor,” said Jerry Lee, and pulled on his clothes.
“I was scared to,” he says, so many years later. “I heard the sermon, and I was scared to death. I heard my mama. I thought there would be lightning flashing and everything else, and I just knew that it was wrong. And I never went with a woman, till I got married.”
He knew, even then, what was at stake. “It wouldn’t have worked. I wanted to be a star. I wanted to play that piano. Sometimes you have to pick, and I picked the dream. I was not gonna let that dream go by. I hear she married a nice man. Probably had a whole stack of kids. They moved away. But I do think about her, quite a bit. Put that in there, in the book. I want her to know that.”
The work ran out in Angola, and the family moved home to Concordia Parish, to a house in Black River. He looked up Elizabeth, but pretty girls do not linger for long in small Southern towns; they slip away, quickly, lightly. But then women were not his first love, anyway.
He had been dreaming since he was nine of being a real musician, and though he knew a hundred songs, no one had ever paid him a dime to sing one till the summer of ’49. It was the year Ford Motor Co., in Detroit, Michigan, made a car that will always be beautiful to Jerry Lee, because it was there, against those bulbous fenders, that his future began to take shape. The Ford cost only $1,624, and it had a flat-head V8 and three on the tree, and a hood ornament fashioned from a seventeenth-century European crest of lions or something; it was hard to tell. But that flathead was about the meanest thing on the blacktop in ’49, and the bootleggers bought a lot of them. Unfortunately, so did the government, so the whiskey men and G-men were in a dead heat. But regardless of your affiliation, you could get your hands on one at Babin-Paul Ford Motor Co. in Ferriday that summer, and people came to see it, and hear a hillbilly band play “Walking the Floor Over You” from a stage hammered together from plywood and two-by-fours.
By afternoon a small crowd had gathered—farmers, barbers, store clerks, insurance men, and tired women dragging children around by sticky hands—to peer under the hood and to hear Loy Gordon and his Pleasant Valley Boys play “Wildwood Flower.”
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 organizers of this hootenanny that the real talent was standing down there in the crowd popping his bubblegum. The car dealers did not see what harm it would do, and Jerry Lee was welcomed onstage to polite applause. People thought it was cute, letting this boy sit in, and the piano player relinquished his old upright. Jerry Lee took a breath. They were expecting something country, something gospel, and he looked out across the crowd and hollered “Wine Spo-dee-o-dee!” so loud it made Mamie blanch and Elmo grin like a loon.
Now I got a nickel if you got a dime.
Let’s get together and buy some wine.
Wine over here, wine over there,
Drinkin’ that mess everywhere
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.
“The boy’s doing pretty good,” said Aunt Eva. “Maybe we ought to take up a collection.”
“Money makes the mare trot,” Mamie said.
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 a little bit after that. He quit school, just saw 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, Jerry Lee singing and playing gospel and hillbilly and blues and even that Al Jolson, and in time he was taking home trophies from talent shows and doing regular spots on nearby radio stations. “I had my own show,” a fifteen-minute spot on WNAT out of Natchez sponsored by a Ferriday grocery store. “People started to hear about me, started to say, ‘Hey, who is this kid down there?’” It was mostly gospel, and some country; he couldn’t cut loose—not yet—and do the kind of music he wanted.
His cousins did similar gigs, spreading their own talent through the bottomland, though Jimmy still worried that singing and playing boogie-woogie was sending them all to hell on a handcar. Jerry Lee sometimes worried the same—every Sunday in church reminded him of the danger of such intense secular pleasure—but not as deeply or as often. “I wanted to be a star. Knew I could be, if . . .” If the starmakers in Memphis or Nashville would listen to him, really listen, and hear in his piano and voice that he was the only one like him in the ever-lovin’ world.
Impatient as he was, he knew his music was wasted if the people couldn’t hear it, and for that he needed a bigger stage. What he wanted was a honky-tonk, and that troubled his mama. 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, but to say that she castigated her boy for his secular music would be to exaggerate things, her son says. “Mama didn’t like some of it,” said Jerry Lee, “but Mama was with me,” no matter what came, and he knew it then, and he believes it now.
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. But ten dollars or so a night was more than he would make picking cotton, which he wasn’t going to do anyway, even at gunpoint. So while he was still living under his daddy’s roof, he snuck off to the clubs in Natchez to ask for steady work. The no-nonsense club owners, men who had seen it all, started to smile when the boy walked in. The smile slipped off their faces when they heard him play the boogie and the hillbilly music and even Gene Autry. He told them he was looking for work as a piano man, mostly, but could beat the drums, too, if there was cash money in it.
“I was thirteen the first time I left home to play, soon as I was big enough,” he remembers. “I was sittin’ on a piano stool where my feet weren’t even touchin’ the floor. That’s how young I was. This was the Blue Cat Club, down Under-the-Hill,