always a suggestion, not from a man who cut pulpwood for a living and drank his whiskey by the shot. Jerry Lee played hillbilly. He played “Release Me,” and “Good-night, Irene,” and even Glenn Miller. “I learned to play everything as long as I could get a tip out of it”—and learned to get down low when the bottles started flying. After a while, he says, “I’d get homesick and tell ’em, ‘I got to go home and see Mama.’” But he kept coming back.
At those clubs in Natchez Under-the-Hill, he played with six or seven watches dangling from each skinny arm, put there by customers who figured they’d be safe on the arms of a boy if there happened to be a raid—which happened frequently at the Blue Cat Club. “The owner’s name was Charlie. He says, ‘Now, if the cops come by and ask you how old you are, you tell ’em you’re twenty-one.’ I said, ‘Oh, sure.’”
The police, at least, had a sense of humor.
“How old are you, boy?” they always asked.
“I’m twenty-one,” he lied.
“Well,” they always said, laughing, “that sounds about right.”
“I have been twenty-one,” said Jerry Lee, unwilling to let a good lie go, “for some time.”
For the next few years, the clubs would nurture Jerry Lee’s music, as much as any place can when the owner walks around with a big .44 sagging his slacks and women routinely have their wigs slapped off their heads by other women. He walked to his car past whorehouses and heroin fiends. Nellie Jackson ran a famous cathouse in Natchez in those days, where you might run into a high official with his suspenders down, but Jerry Lee says he was not a customer. “I walked up to the front door one time, and I turned around and left,” he says. He had no business there.
His mama worried and would stay up all night sometimes, till she heard her son’s car pull up in the yard, sometimes in the dawn. It went on and on, night after night, till he was fourteen, fifteen, and there were moments of great doubt, moments when, looking at her tired face, he wondered if he could somehow have it all, if he could tame that boogie and bend it to the Lord, tame his lusts and get himself a white suit and a tent and use his burgeoning talents for the church. But he was surviving by playing music. By fall of ’51, he was going on sixteen, “and was already a man and acted like one,” and past ready to find a wife and marry, at least by the standards of his people. But he worked in a bar, and he knew that a man—a smart one, anyway—does not find a wife in a bar. Such a union is well and truly doomed, built in the quicksands of sin. A man, a wise man, found his wife in church.
He saw the girl and made a covenant with his eyes. “I was playing ‘Peace in the Valley’ when I saw her. She was sitting in the front row. What a beauty. A woman, really. And I really blew my cool, man. I got it right between the eyes.”
It was 1951. Her name was Dorothy, and she was seventeen. Her father was the Reverend Jewell Barton, a traveling evangelist from up around Monroe who came to Ferriday to save the wicked and brought his beautiful daughter with him. He was not worried about exposing her to the sin of this place, to the temptations of the road. Dorothy, whose hair fell in dark, lustrous waves, was a devout girl, and the reverend knew he had to go into the wilderness to do his job, had to venture to places like this railroad town of Ferriday, which had been drawing men like him since its beginning. He was a warrior for Christ and needed weapons. He hired Jerry Lee to play piano, to pack ’em in. The boy’s reputation as a piano player had spread. It was a good revival, with good preaching and singing and music, but Jerry Lee did not see or hear much of it, truthfully, after he saw the dark-haired girl. He was fixed on her.
“I’d just turned sixteen, and she set my world afire. I mean, I was in a fever. That’s right, a fever. And I knew I would do anything, promise anything, anything I had to do.”
He even shared his dreams, told her he wanted to hear his songs on the radio, maybe even be a big star someday. “She told me, ‘Maybe you can have your name on one of those records with the big hole in the middle,’ and I said, ‘You’re crazy, a record has a little-bitty hole in it.’ I thought she was making fun of me. But she was just talkin’ about a 45.”
They started dating, and “smooching in the car,” in ’51. He knows it was ’51 because he had a ’41 Ford, and like many Southerners, he keeps track of time and events through the lineage of his cars. “Uncle Lee had loaned me the money” for the car, he recalls. “I had to go through my Aunt Stella to get him to do it, but he left me a check laying on the table. It was white, with whitewall tires and fender skirts. John Frank Edward wrecked it, in 1958.” They spent long, frustrating hours in that car, he and Dorothy, parked in the pines.
“We both believed it was sin, to do anything more,” he says now, but after three torturous months, he wanted more, needed more, and used all his charm to get it. She told him he could just stop it right there, till he walked her down the aisle or at least through the courthouse door.
They were in love, Jerry Lee told her. They had professed it.
“But I’m saving myself for my husband,” she said.
“Well,” said Jerry Lee, “that ain’t no problem at all.”
It was not the most romantic proposal, but it got the job done.
“She was a fine woman, a fine and beautiful woman,” he says, but his mama and daddy knew the boy was a long way from being ready to start a family; sometimes they were just grateful he was not yet in Angola. “If I had just listened to mama and daddy, . . .” he laments. “But I insisted on gettin’ married. Daddy said, ‘Mamie, you know how hard headed the boy is,’ and then he threw the car keys at me and said, ‘Here, go on, and learn for yourself.’”
They set the wedding for February of ’52. “Uncle Lee got us the license,” says Jerry Lee, who did not then and would never see much need for paperwork when he was in a marrying mood. He wrote on the form that he was a twenty-year-old farmer. The family members who came to the small ceremony said they could not remember a time when two such beautiful people, one fair and one dark, had found each other and were joined in the light of the true gospel, and how lovely their children would be. A photographer came from the Concordia Sentinel and took their picture for the social page. Their honeymoon was one night in a hotel on Main Street in Ferriday, across from the Ford dealership where Jerry Lee had first squeezed silver from the crowd. “It’s an old folks’ home now,” he says, and smiles.
He had dreamed of that night, daydreamed of it, and schemed for it. They were both bashful, though, and for hours they just sat and talked, till she asked him if they should make love and Jerry Lee, smooth, said he thought that was why they had gotten married in the first place, “wasn’t it?” and by the light of the Babin-Paul Ford Motor Co., consummated their marriage in the sanctity of their faith. But after all that denial and all that conflict with the faith he had been raised within, “It wasn’t what I thought it should be. I thought it should be more.” He woke up the next morning and sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. He looked over at the beautiful girl, sleeping.
This is not right.
“It took me about thirty minutes to figure out I had made a mistake, that I had got married too young,” for the most dirt-common reason people do such a thing. “Man, I told myself, I have fouled up. It had nothin’ to do with her. She kept her end of the bargain.” What was missing was missing from within him.
In that special hell reserved for young people who marry in the heat of a moment, Dorothy started to plan their life together just as he started to scheme for their life apart. “She didn’t think there was anything happening that wasn’t supposed to be happening. She was in love.” He had only whatever you have when love burns quickly out, and no plan at all for how to live it out. She moved in with the Lewis family as though there was still some future there. For about two months, Jerry Lee tried to be a dutiful husband, at least on the outside, working as a truck driver and a carpenter’s helper, playing his piano in the service of the Lord. He even tried to preach. Two months of that nonstop