LITMIR.BIZ

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knew them. That’s awful. It worries me,” the notion that if he is cast down, it will be—to his people, even his children—as if he had never lived. “That’s heavy, ain’t it?”

      “The answer is written in the book of life, for me,” he says, and the heat in his eyes tells you this is not mere rhetoric but deadly serious. “Can a man play rock-and-roll music and go to Heaven? That’s the question. It’s something that won’t be known . . . that I won’t know, till I pass away. I think so, but it don’t matter what I think. And I will take all the prayer I can get.”

      The question almost pulled him apart, as a younger man. Elvis, who would understand the question perhaps better than any other man, was haunted by it, too. Jerry Lee would have liked to talk with him about it, but Elvis hurried away, face white as bone; and then he left this world, leaving Jerry Lee to grow old with it alone.

      The thing he has come to believe, to hope, is that whatever happens in this life or beyond, it is not purely the music’s fault. People blamed the music for everything.

      “It’s not the devil’s music,” he says, sick and tired as he would be of any pretender, any hanger-on.

      He is almost eighty years old now. He knows what he has wrought.

      “It’s rock and roll.”

      The devil was no troubadour. The theater of it all, the convenient women and bottomless liquor and jet-plane parties, the whipped-out knives and waistband pistols and bags of blues and yellows, might have drawn the devil like green flies, but the devil never called a tune or found a chord, not even in the nastiest blues or most whiskey-soaked cheatin’ songs or any other music that moved a waitress to wiggle her hips or a farm boy to dance in his socks or a notary public to shake the hot rollers out of her head.

      “My talent,” he says, “comes from God.”

      Mamie tried to tell them, even as she worried where it would all end.

      “I can lift the blues off people,” he says.

      He did some meanness, God knows he did.

      But the music—funny how it turned out—was the purest part.

       Mama’s cookin’ chicken fried in bacon grease

      “The only piano player in the world . . .” he says.

       Come along boys, just down the road a piece

      “ . . . to wear out his shoes.”

      In the twilight of his life, in the late nights of the here-and-now, he sometimes still wonders: “Did I lead them people down the right way?”

      But he did not take the people anywhere they were not ready to go. Even in the most barren times, when cigarette smoke hung like tear gas in mean little honky-tonks and he might have missed a step on his way to the stage, he gave them something they were looking for. People say a lot of things about him—“talk about me like a dog,” he says—but few people can say he did not put on a show. They talk about seeing him and grin and shake their heads like they got caught doing something, like someone saw their car parked outside a no-tell motel in the harsh light of day. They grin and talk about it not like a thing they witnessed but like a thing they lived through, a meteorite or a stampede. It usually started without fanfare; he just walked out there, often when the band was in the middle of a song, and took a seat. “Gimme my money and show me the piano,” he often said of how the experience would begin. But it ended like an M80 in a mailbox, with such a holy mother of a crack and bang that, fifty years later, an old man in a Kiwanis haircut and an American flag lapel pin will turn red to his ears and say only: “Jerry Lee Lewis? I saw him in Jackson. Whooooooooo, boy!”

      Joe Fowlkes, a Tennessee lawyer, likes to tell about the time in the mid-1980s when he heard Jerry Lee do four hours at his piano without a break, after he was already supposed to have been dead at least twice. “We all went to see him at the dance hall at 100 Oaks” in Nashville, he recalls. “They called it a dance hall because it was better than calling it a beer joint.” Jerry Lee showed up looking a little worn and pale, and he started off slow—“it was kind of gradual, like watching a jet taking off”—but he played and he played and he played, and it was three o’clock in the morning before he got done. “He kind of got his color back, after a while. By two-thirty in the morning, he was lookin’ good. He played every song I’d ever heard in my life, including ‘Jingle Bells’ and the Easter Bunny song. And it was July.

      “It was the best concert I’d ever been to. I saw Elvis. I saw James Brown.” But Jerry Lee. “He was the best.”

      “There was rockabilly. There was Elvis. But there was no pure rock and roll before Jerry Lee Lewis kicked in the door,” says Jerry Lee Lewis. Some historians may debate that, but there was no one like him, just the same; even the ones who claimed to be first, who claimed to be progenitors, borrowed it from some ghost who vanished in the haze of a Delta field or behind the fences of a prison farm. People who played with him across the years say he can conjure a thousand songs and play each one seven ways. He can make your hi-heel sneakers shake the floor-boards, or lift you over the rainbow, or kneel with you at the old rugged cross. He can holler “Hold on, I’m comin’” or leave you at the house of blue lights. Or he can just be still, his legend, the legend of rock and roll, already cut into history in sharper letters than the story of his life. Sam Phillips of Sun Records, a man who snagged lightning four or five times, called him “the most talented man I ever worked with, black or white . . . one of the most talented human beings to walk God’s earth.”

      “I was perfect,” he says, “at one time. Once, I was pretty well perfect when I hit that stage.” On another man, such a claim would wear like a loud suit. On Jerry Lee Lewis, it sounds almost like understatement. Roland Janes, the great guitar man on so many Sun Records hits, once said that not even Jerry Lee knows how good he is.

      He knows. He likes to use the word stylist when referring to some of the musical greats who came before: it is his highest compliment. A stylist is a performer—not necessarily a songwriter, yet still a creator—who can take a thing that has been done before and make it new. “I am a stylist,” he explains. “I can take a song, a song I hear on the radio, and make it my song.” He can remember the first time he felt that power, too. “I was fifteen years old. Back then I played the piano all day and then at night I’d lay in bed and think about what I’d play the next day. And I see records that was out there, see the way they were going, and I just thought that I could beat it. Back then, I was playing the skating rink in Natchez, on this old upright piano—I remember it wasn’t in very good shape—and I played everything. I played Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, boogie-woogie, and I turned it all into something else. What did I turn it into? Why, I made it rock and roll.”

      He made it roll and thump in the spaces between the plaintive lyrics, a thing of rhythm impossible to describe in words. “The girls crowded around me and the boys got all upset and wanted to start a fight, but before long ever’body was lovin’ it. I can see ’em now. And it was love. Pure love. I loved it, and they loved it. That don’t come around too often, I don’t believe. And it wadn’t just the song they loved, it was the way.” At first he was struck by the power, at the rapt faces, the heaving chests, but did not marvel at it for long. “If you know you can do a thing,” he says, “then you ain’t never surprised.”

      He is not, even with the years tearing at him, a soft man. His body has been hammered by hard living, and scoured by chemicals, and pain-racked by arthritis and most of the ailments of Job, but now he is rallying again, with clean living and that mysterious thing he has always had cloaked around him, something beyond science. He is still a good-looking man, his hair faded from gold to silver; he still records and fills concert halls in the United States and Europe, though he admits it is sometimes all he can do to finish a show. Young women still push to the edge of the stage and try to follow him back to his hotel room. Now it is his prerogative to tell them no, because the shows exhaust him. What a sorry thing, a rotten choice for a good lookin’ rock-and-roll

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