Jerry Lee Lewis - Rick Bragg

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in Papa George Lightfoot, the harp man who would cross over and play some of the white honky-tonks in his old age, and trombonist Leon “Pee Wee” Whittaker, who could almost remember the Creation, who had played with the old Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels when the century was new.

      Over the years, say the musicians who played in the house bands, the Big House hosted Charles Brown, the smooth Texan, and the elegant Roy Milton and his Solid Senders, who scored nineteen Top 10 R&B records, and Fats Domino, before “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Blueberry Hill.” He brought in the Slims—Memphis Slim and the House Rockers and Sunnyland Slim. A blind piano player named Ray Charles played here, and guitarist Little Milton, and singer Bobby “Blue” Bland; so did Junior Parker, a skinny black hillbilly named Chuck Berry, and a young Irma Thomas. Haney’s hosted young performers like Percy Mayfield, the gentle vocalist and songwriter who begged “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” and big stars of the previous generation like whiskey-voiced Tampa Red and his sometime partner, Atlanta piano man Big Maceo Merriweather, who reminded them, with every downward stroke, what they had endured and were enduring still.

       So take these stripes from around me

       Take these chains from around my leg

      Freedom, sang Maceo, was no easy thing, either, and Tampa Red moaned, “Mmmmmm-hhhhmmmm.” And if ever a thing of nails and wood had a life, a beating heart of its own, it was this place, where even in the hungover early morning, you might hear a single old guitar man tuning, messing, searching for a sound among the empty tables and chairs.

      “Haney never did close the doors,” Early said.

      

      Jerry Lee had lived in the hot shadow of the blues all his life. The blues traveled on the wind through the low country of Louisiana, and all he had to do was stand still in one place a little while to hear it. Three out of every four people in Ferriday were people of color, and the black man’s blues poured from passing cars and transistor radios and juke-boxes. But he had never heard it—really heard it—till he heard it pour from the Big House. Even before he was tall enough to see inside the place, he would climb to a window or get someone to boost him up, for just a glimpse, for a raw second. It was never enough, and it went on that way, unconsummated, for years.

      He dragged his cousin Jimmy with him, tried to coerce him into sneaking in with him. “Jimmy wouldn’t do it. I just couldn’t get him in there. . . . He was scared to go in there.” Jimmy knew the beast when he saw it, “called it the devil’s music,” recalls Jerry Lee, and, after untold pleadings, Jimmy left his wild cousin to his own destruction. Besides, Jimmy told him, if his mama and daddy found out he was sneaking into Haney’s Big House, they would beat him until he did not know his own name. “Mama might not kill me,” he told Jerry Lee, “but Daddy will.”

      “Well, I ain’t scared of mine,” Jerry Lee told him.

      “Never could get Jimmy to go in there with me,” he says, thinking back. “He was scared of it.” But for him, it was a good time to get out of the house; he might not even be missed, at least for an hour or two. Mamie had recently given birth to a second daughter, another dark-haired girl, named Linda Gail. Mamie and Elmo were distracted, still making a fuss over the new baby. But he truly did not much care if he was found out or not. They did not beat him, only threatened a lot. Besides, some things were worth a good beating, he surmised.

      He had long suspected there was something in black music he wanted and needed, but he could not figure out exactly how to get to hear it. He scouted the problem over and over; Haney’s was an easy walk from his house, even if he had to swing by after a trip to the Arcade to catch another Western or maybe Frankenstein. Over the years, several people would claim it was they who gave him access to the forbidden nightclub, who hoisted him to an open window or left a locked door unlocked so the boy could creep in. The truth is, one day he just couldn’t stand it anymore, the itch, and walked alone to one of the two front doors that faced Fourth Street. It was a Sunday night, and he was AWOL from Texas Street. At Haney’s he saw a raggedy bus outside, which meant a traveling band and maybe even a bluesman of some renown; the nightclub was already bulging with people, the red sun not yet fully down. He would not be missed for hours. “Ever’body else was in church,” he recalls. The Assembly of God met twice on Sunday, morning and evening; the devil never took a day off.

      He waited for his chance, till Haney and the money-takers were looking the other way, and darted into the smoke and noise. He searched around, frantic, for a hiding place, but there was none he could see. “So I got in under a table,” he says, just slid underneath smooth and slick and unseen—or at least that was what he told himself—till he was safe in the dark among the patent-leather shoes and the high heels.

      I’m in, Jerry Lee kept telling himself. I’m in Haney’s. In that place that threatened his immortal soul.

      And it was worth it. “I could see everything,” he remembers, though it is unclear if he is talking about the club or something more. Above him, people swayed in rickety chairs, drank, and laughed. On the dance floor, men and women came together in a grind, legs locked inside legs, so tight that if you cut one, the other one would bleed. “Couldn’t have been a better place for me,” says Jerry Lee. “I got right with it.”

       The blues starts rollin’

       And they stopped in front of my door

      The guitar man onstage sang with a voice filled with all the suffering in the wide, flat, dusty world. In his voice is the sound of clanking leg irons. In his music is a daddy who grows smaller, less distinct, as a battered pickup pulls away on a bleak Delta road, and a mule that drags him over a million miles of dirt. His guitar wailed like a witness, too, to every mile and every slur and every pain. The man, his head cocked to one shoulder like it was nailed on at a cant, moved nothing but his thick fingers, fluttering around the frets like a hummingbird, and sweat poured down his face. “I just sat there and thought, Man, look at him pick. He was playing all over that guitar,” recalls Jerry Lee. In this man’s hands, it did not seem so much an inferior instrument. “And I tell you, he was singing some songs.”

      The applause was still slapping, people even stomping the floor, when the guitar man lit into some stomping blues and snatched the people still sitting out of their seats. “Them cats could dance,” Jerry Lee says. Men leaped into the air, impossibly high, like they were flying. Women shook things he had believed were bolted down; some jumped onto the tables and danced up there. “They was throwin’ each other over their shoulders, throwin’ each other over their heads. And I was in seventh heaven.” This, he knew, was what had been missing. This was the spice, the soul he’d been looking for.

      Woke up this morning,

       My baby was gone . . .

      He was already thinking how he would play it, how he would mix it with what he knew. But mostly he just let it fill him up, sink in, become part of him. “I just introduced myself to the atmosphere,” he says.

      Please, God, don’t let Haney catch me now, he thought—and just then a big hand closed around the nape of his neck and lifted him like a doll from under the table and then high, high up off the floor, till he was looking Will Haney in one red, angry eye.

      “Jerry Lee?”

      He just dangled. Everyone in Ferriday knew the boy. Most little boys, born to overalls, did not strut around like him, like they owned every mile of dirt they walked. But Haney also knew his Uncle Lee and his Aunt Stella, and had business with them.

      “What you doin’ in here, white boy?” Haney asked.

      “I’m tryin’ to listen to some blues,” he said.

      “You ain’t supposed to be in here.”

      “I know. But I am.”

      Jerry Lee tried to sound brave, but in his mind was thinking, Haney is big as a door.

      “I’m

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