to help care for him when he was sick. To make the proverbial long story short, he got better. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with him,” she says, “but . . .” They married and honeymooned in Natchez, near the bridge he walked as a boy. By late summer 2013, he was back playing gigs in Europe, booking studio time in Los Angeles, buying a new Rolls-Royce and stopping for Sonic cheeseburgers before driving Judith’s Buick one hundred miles an hour down Interstate 55. The laws of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the United States of America have never much applied.
Once, while mulling over a difficult question, he muttered, “This feller’s about to get shot.” And I thought, Well, I’m dead. It was only Gunsmoke he was watching over my shoulder. He’d seen it all before, and he knew what happened next.
“You know, you can load that .357 with .38 shells,” I told him, “and you won’t blow such deep holes in . . . things.” I waited a few flat, silent seconds, knowing I had wasted my breath.
“Naw,” he finally said, “I don’t think I’ll do that.”
One afternoon near the end of it, I told him why I wanted to write his story. I was born in the South in a time of tailfins, when young men with their hair slicked back with Rose hair oil and blast-furnace scars on their necks and arms would thunder down the blacktop with his music pouring from the windows. The great Hank Williams lifted their hearts with “Lovesick Blues” and became a kind of sin eater for their lives and pain. “That’s it,” says Jerry Lee. “Hank got them up off their knees, and Jerry Lee got them to dancin’.” They loved Elvis, too, but there was a softness in him, a kind of beauty the men did not understand. They got Jerry Lee. He was a balled-up fist, a swinging tire iron. My people, aunts and uncles, rode ten to a car to see him in Birmingham’s Boutwell Auditorium in 1964. “I was wild as a buck then,” said John Couch, who made tires at Goodyear. “And he embarrassed me.” His wife, Jo, was scandalized. “They got all over Elvis for shaking one leg. . . . Jerry Lee shook everything.” Juanita Fair, a bird-like member of the Congregational Holiness Church, remembers just one thing, and has to whisper. “He played piano, with his rear end.” They drove home to pipe shops, furnaces, and cotton sacks, somehow lighter than when they left. I told him this one afternoon as heroes sang to their horses and bad men reached for the sky.
“I did it for them people,” he says, though a great deal of the time he did it for him, because without the music, I had come to believe, he would just cease to be, like cutting through the drop cord on an electric fan. In the still, awful nothing, he is just like everyone else. But it was still a fine thing to say. The point is, when he talked about lifting the blues off people, I knew it to be true. In the past, in telling his story, he pretty much cussed out the world. It was like the story of his life was a record warped and stuck on the wrong speed, but left on, anyway, to howl, groan, and hiss. He was, he admits, often a little bit drunk or mad in those days, and he put people on, to watch them twitch or swing on the gallows of his temper and moods. Even today, it can seem that the only people he truly trusts with his legacy are the ones who knocked over seats as they lunged to their feet in the city auditorium, who got their money’s worth in the Choctaw casino, or who begged him for one last song in some airport hotel lounge. Only they will remember him right. “I look at the faces,” he says. “I look out there, and I know. I know I’ve given ’em something, boy, something they did not know was out there in this world. And I know. They won’t forget me.”
In the dark of his room, the rock-and-roll singer watches himself on the big-screen television, watches himself in fifty-year-old black and white do that song about shakin’ that conquered the world, watches the power in that young, dangerous man. He sees the man stab the keys and kick away the bench and lift the audience from its seats to come swarming, twisting, jumping onstage, to close in a tight circle around his grand piano, all of them shakin’ and twitchin’ like he has them on a stick or a string or a jerking rubber band. He sees him vault on his young legs to the lid of the piano as if some outside force just threw him there, as the other young people snatch at him, at his hair, at the hems of his garments. The boys seem about to lose control of themselves and break something or turn over some cars. The women, jerking and sobbing, seem about to faint, or die, or embarrass their mamas. As he watches, the old man’s toes tap, tap, tap in time, and his fingers play the air. “Gr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r,” he says, in duet with the young man, and grins wickedly. When the song is over and the young man takes his exaggerated bow, the old man settles back in his pillows, content. Then, from the gloom, barely loud enough to hear, comes a soft “Hee-hee-hee.”
Later, on one of those quiet, weary afternoons, I have one more question before we stop for the night.
“Didn’t I hear once that you . . .” But he cuts me off.
“Yeah,” he says, “I probably did.”
1
THE FATHER OF WATERS
Concordia Parish, Louisiana
THE BEGINNING
The water would rise up every few years, wash across the low, flat land, and take everything a poor man had, ruin his cotton and corn and drown his hogs, pour filth and dead fish into his home, even push the coffins from the earth and float his ancestors all the way to Avoyelles. Jerry Lee’s sister, Frankie Jean, tells of a day the rains beat down, the rivers rose, and the swelling groundwater shoved the dead from the mud. “Uncle Henry and Aunt Maxine had been nippin’, and they went by Uncle Will’s grave and saw he’d come partway out of the ground. Uncle Henry said, ‘Oh, Lord, Maxine, the Rapture has done come and the Lord has left us here. He tried to take Will and Will just wouldn’t go. Oh, God, Maxine, we done been left behind. Oh, God, Maxine, I told you not to buy that whiskey. . . .’” The point is, it takes guts to stay with it when the land you owe the bank for runs liquid between your toes and balls of water moccasins form islands on the rising tide. Water was everywhere, was life, and death. A person could not live here in this low place, Jerry Lee believes, and be afraid of water.
“We were going to the backwater one day, me and Daddy,” he says, traveling as far back as his memory could reach. “I was three years old.” It was late summer, the Louisiana sun hot on his blond head. Elmo, singing about trains and untrue women, swung his boy like a knot on the end of a rope. They followed the river to a place where the current slacked and died and pooled in lakes and sloughs, as still as black glass. The air smelled as it has always smelled and smells now, of a thousand years of silt, rot, and mud. His daddy pushed an old boat into the shallows, and they headed to deep water. The boy had never been out so far, never done more than wade close to the bank, toes digging into the silt and sand, his mama and daddy holding his hands. This water had no bottom, let in no light. They drifted a while, just living.
Then his daddy reached for him, lifted him high in his arms, and threw him out of the boat.
The water closed over his head. He thrashed toward the light, sank, and clawed his way up again, in panic. He kicked at it with his legs as if it was filled with devils, all twining around his skinny body, dragging him down. It was not a cruelty, he knows now, it was just his turn. It did no good to wait till a boy was older. The terror only grew with the child. You threw them both in the river and took what came out.
“Get with it, boy!” his daddy yelled.
Jerry Lee drank the water in, breathed it, choked.
“Swim,” his daddy yelled, “or float!”
“Help me!” the boy hollered.
But his daddy only knelt in the boat, his arms outstretched.
“Come on, boy!”
“Help me!”
“Come on.”
Then he felt iron fingers on his arm and he was lifted up, up, forever out of his fear. He thinks now his daddy would have saved him; surely he would, would have