(The following is an excerpt from Nick Tosches’s new book Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, (Delacorte hardbound, Dell trade paperback). Tosches, a contributing editor, is well-known to CREEM readers from his previous book, Country, The Biggest Music In America, and his Unsung Heroes Of Rock ’n’ Roll cofumns, which frequently appear in these pages. Former Nashville resident Nick, a Lewis familiar, has written about the seminal rock star many times in the past, both here and in other publications. In this excerpt, we encounter young Jerry Lee shortly before fame “lifted its skirt” the first time. —Ed.) ©Copyright 1982 by Nick Tosches

Every morning Mamie Lewis brought her son breakfast in bed on an old tray that she dressed with tinfoil: hot chocolate and Jack’s Vanilla Wafers. She sat by him with her own hot chocolate and her own Jack’s Vanilla Wafers. Neither of them would accept any other make of vanilla cookie. “Jack’s Cookies are always smiling fresh!” declared the man in the radio advertisement, and both Jerry Lee and his mama knew this to be true.

Mamie’s parents were living in the little Black River house now, too. Her mother, Theresa Lee, had lost her mind. She spoke to the walls, bore grudges against them, cast demons from them, and threatened them with eternal damnation. She had little truck with the people around her, children and grandchildren. It was between her and the walls. Her husband, J.W., who was now in his 80’s, sat by her and tried to correct her, reprimand her, as if it were all a matter of misbehavior. “Girl,” he would say, “enough.” Then he would shake his head and recede into that other century whence he had come.

“It run in her family,” the doctor told Jerry Lee’s father, Elmo. “It run in her blood.”

got a boy here who can play piano better than anything you ever heard.

In the summer of 1951, Ferriday’s main thoroughfare, Fourth Street, was paved. That same summer Jerry Lee met a 17-year-old girl named Dorothy Barton, a pretty thing with high, strong cheekbones and thick, dark wavy hair. She was the daughter of Reverend Jewel Barton, a Pentecostal preacher from the town of Sterlington, near Monroe. A few months later, in February 1952, when Jerry Lee was 16, he and Dorothy went to the Concordia Parish Court House, in nearby Vidalia, and applied for a marriage license. Jerry Lee lied about most of the information asked to him, while Dorothy did not.

Name: Jerry Lewis

Usual Residence: Sterlington, Union Parish

Date of Birth: Sept. 29, 1930

Last Grade of School Completed: 8th Present Occupation: Farmer

Name: Dorothy Barton

Usual Residence: Sterlington, Union Parish

Date of Birth: Nov. 10, 1933

Last Grade of School Completed: 11th

They were married by Reverend W.W. Hall in Uncle Lee Calhoun’s house on Louisiana Avenue, on February 21. A photographer from the Parish paper, the Concordia Sentinel came to the house and took pictures of the couple. These pictures were published the following month in the column “Ferriday Happenings.” Jerry Lee WQS grinning, slightly, crookedly, and staring vaguely at God knows what; his blond hair combed back in thick waves, his ears still sticking out, but not so much as they had in childhood.

Dorothy moved in with the Lewis family, out Pear Black River. Jerry Lee began to talk a great deal about becoming a minister. He took to composing sermons. Elmo had made a pinewood mantel for the fireplace, but he had never gotten around to staining it. Jerry Lee paced throughout the little house, working up sermons in his head. Whenever something truly fine came to him—words of damnation, words of wonder—he went to the mantel and began to scrawl. As the weeks passed, the homely pine-board mantel filled with exhortations, allusions to the Pentateuch, and the blood of Christ. In its planed, knotted grain were serpents and the sins of the Israelites.

Jerry Lee spoke to the minister of the Church of God on Mississippi Avenue, and the minister told him that he was welcome to preach. On several Sundays among the last warm days of the year, Jerry Lee took the pulpit in the little white three-eaved Church of God. He raised his voice and preached about the rich man in hell, how that rich man cried out to Abraham for a drop of water to cool his dry tongue, and how Abraham gave him none; for no man can serve God and Mammon both. Jerry Lee told it to them, and he told it right. People congratulated him, told him that he had the makings of a great preacher.

But Jerry Lee ceased writing on the mantel, and he ceased preaching at the Church of God. He let his marriage to Dorothy fall to the ground, too. He began to run out into the night, leaving Dorothy at home with his mother and sisters.

One evening everyone was sitting in the yard, eating watermelon, spitting out the pits, saying nothing. Jerry Lee’s friend Cecil Harrelson came by, and he and Jerry Lee went into the house. When they came out Jerry Lee was wearing a white sportcoat, and he was wet-combing his hair as he walked.

“Me and Cecil are goin’ out,” he announced from the side of his mouth. Dorothy’s forehead tightened and she spat a pit to the dirt.

“No,” Mamie said. “You’re married now, and it ain’t right the way you do, goin’ out on the town every night.” Her eyes were clear and cutting.

“Me and Cecil are goin’ out,” he said, looking at neither his wife or his mother, but at Cecil’s beat-up Ford.

“Oh, really?” Mamie said.

“Yeah, really,” Jerry Lee said.

Mamie took her hunk of dripping red watermelon and hurled it at her son, smashing it against his breast, all over that fancy white jacket. Jerry Lee turned and re-entered the house. He came back out wearing a different jacket, one that his aunt Stella had given him. He strode to Cecil’s car and rode away into the warm, cricketing twilight.

By the spring of 1953, Dorothy had left him and returned to her family. Much else had changed, too. Jerry Lee’s cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart was married now to a wonderful girl who spoke in tongues. They lived together in a small trailer parked in his aunt Irene Gilley’s frontyard. On Saturdays Jimmy Lee roamed from town to town, preaching on streetcorners, telling how America was thigh-deep in sin and under the judgement of God. He carried with him an accordian, and he sang “There Is Power In The Blood,” and he collected what coin he could.

Jerry Lee began to talk a great deal about becoming a minister. He took to composing sermons.

One night Jimmy Lee could not sleep. He left his trailer and walked in darkness. When he returned, toward dawn, he found a hideous creature awaiting him. This creature had the form of a great bear and the visage of a man, and its eyes were the yellow of evils unimagined.

“In the name of Jeeesus!” Jimmy Lee hollered.

Upon hearing the name of the Lord, the creature fell to the ground and writhed, baying in agony.

“In the name of Jeeeeeesus!” Jimmy Lee hollered.

The creature crept away, twisting and groaning and clutching itself. Jimmy Lee lifted his hands to God and spoke in an unknown tongue. Then he entered the bed where his wife, Frances, slept, and he embraced her, closing his eyes in strength and in peace.

Jerry Lee’s cousin Mickey Gilley was married now, too, living in Houston, running a ditching machine for his fatherin-law’s construction company.

After his marriage fell apart, Jerry Lee threw himself deep into his music. Though he was still a minor, he began to seek nightclub work. His friend Cecil served as a sort of manager. Together they drove to Monroe, where Jerry Lee made some money playing piano with the house band at the Little Club, a bucket of blood on the outskirts of town. It was a country band, with a steel-player and a fiddler. The guitarist was crippled and often painful to behold. One night as the band was playing, a large man with rolled-up sleeves walked into the Little Club. He drank six shots of whiskey, then asked if he might play the fiddle awhile. The fiddler handed him the instrument, and the large man commenced to make a series of harsh scraighing sounds, tapping an odd rhythm with his foot. This large man turned out to be Otis Brown, and he was the son of Elmo’s younger sister Jane. He and Jerry Lee were cousins. Someday, by means of some fancy Chinee arithmetic, they would be uncle and nephew as well.

Jerry Lee also played, as a solo act, in the Domino Lounge at the Alvis Hotel, on the corner of DeSiard and North Fifth in Monroe, not far from where his greatgrandfather’s mansion had stood a hundred years past. The man who ran the Domino Lounge was reluctant to hire Jerry Lee, but Cecil spoke up for his friend.

“I got a boy here,” he said, “who can play a piano better than anything you ever heard.”

“Get the hell out of here,” the man said.

“Just give me a chance,” Jerry Lee said. “Just give me a chance is all I want.”

“Boy, you got one chance,” the man said, “and if you can’t play that piano, I’m gonna kick your goddamn ass up between your fuckin’ shoulders.”

Jerry Lee played “Down Yonder,” an old song that he had learned from a 1951 record by a lady pianist named Del Wood The man hired him. By the time Jerry Lee quit the Domino Lounge he had made more than two thousand dollars in tips. When he came home to Ferriday, he showed the money to his mother.

“By God, Elmo!” she cried. “He broke into another store!”

By the summer of 1953, Jerry Lee had begun to work in the clubs along Highway 61 North on the outskirts of Natchez: the 61 Club, the Hilltop Club, the'Dixie Club. These were wide-open saloons, frequented by gamblers, whores, and drunkards. Jerry Lee played most often at the Dixie Club. Since this club was raided with regularity, and since Jerry Lee was still a minor, the owner installed a little door in the wall behind the bandstand. Whenever the barmaid up front gave the signal that the cops had arrived, Jerry Lee scurried through his door and waited outside in the bushes till the joint was clear..

In Natchez Jerry Lee discovered Nellie Jackson’s, which throughout his life he would extol as “the greatest whorehouse in the South.” Miss Nellie was a black woman, the daughter of freed slaves. She never told anyone her age, but it was a known fact in Natchez that she had been running a whorehouse in the same location since at least 1935. Four sixteen North Rankin Street did not look like much from the outside, but inside the music never ceased, the liquor never stopped flowing, and the girls—white girls, black girls— never quit crossing and uncrossing their legs in a way that showed that they wore no drawers beneath their little nighties. There was a jukebox, a piano, a table, and a bar; and over the door there was a man’s wooden leg, with the shoe and sock still on. Its owner had tried to get something for nothing, and Miss Nellie’s girls had ripped that thing from his knee, hinges and all. Off from this entertainment room were several bedrooms, one of which contained the first circular bed in the state of Mississippi. Another was Miss Nellie’s room, where' she slept and drank and played with her poodles. Occasionally Miss Nellie would visit one of the clubs out on Highway 61 and loudly applaud for Jerry Lee. She never forgot him, remembering him always as “that Ferriday music man.”

It was also in Natchez, in the summer of 1953, that Jerry Lee met a seventeenyear-old girl named Jane Mitcham, who Jived with her mother, Sallie, over on North Pine Street. They met at a rollerskating rink, and they lay together. About a month before Jerry Lee’s eighteenth birthday, Jane told him that his seed had taken hold within her, and that he must wed her. He explained to her that he had never bothered to divorce his first wife, that in the eyes of God and the sovereign state of Louisiana he was still married to I Dorothy. Crying and cursing Jane departed from him.

In Natchez Jerry Lee discovered Nellie Jackson’s, which throughout his life he would extol as “the greatest whorehouse in the South.”

A few days later, Jane’s brothers arrived in Ferriday bearing horsewhips and pistols, seeking to right the wrong that had been done to their dear sister.

Jerry Lee and Jane entered the Natchez Court House just a few minutes before it closed for the day, September 10. He gave his age as 21 and his address as that of Jane’s mother. Five days later they went to the town of Fayette, about 20 miles north of Natchez, and there they were married. He had become a bigamist at-the tender age of 17.

Jerry Lee and his new bride moved into a garage apartment on Louisiana Avenue in downtown Ferriday. From the beginning, Jane tried to get Jerry Lee to quit the clubs and settle down. After all, she ex■ plained, he was going to be a father. At the end of 1953 (after belatedly divorcing his first wife, on October 8, in Monroe), he took a job as a traveling salesman for the Singer Sewing Machine Company . He and another boy roamed through South Louisiana in a 1947 Pontiac that Jerry Lee had ■§ acquired. Cruising down Highway 167, p between Dry Prong and Tioga, Jerry Lee If had him one of his fine ideas. He shared this idea with his fellow employee, and the fellow employee agreed that it was indeed a fine idea; so they executed it.

They went about their business, knocking on doors. Whenever some bitch actually wanted to buy one of their machines, they happily took her deposit payment, put it in their pockets, and rolled on down the line. If—when—these plucked, confounded women complained to Singer, how could the company ever know whom among its many Lousiana salesmen had been the culprits?

This went on for some while. Then one day Jerry Lee and his fellow employee stopped for Cokes and a game of pool at one of those old country stores set way off from any town. In the cracked showcase below the cash-register, Jerry Lee saw a big blue-steel revolver. He didn’t ask the old man how much the gun cost; he just paid for the Cokes and left. Sometime after midnight, Jerry Lee and his fellow employee returned to the darkened store, forced open the door, and took the revolver from its case. They got into their car and drove off, toward the Avoyelles Parish line. They were laughing, playing with the gun, and they didn’t see the black-and-white car coming up behind them until it was too late.

They were locked in jail, then brought before a judge. With a voice of great compassion, the judge sentenced the boys to two years in prison. The Singer sales team regarded one another and breathed loudly. The young lawyer who had been assigned to defend the boys, and who did so with great deference and obsequiousness to the judge, and with an accent so swampish that even his clients barely understood him at times, eventually managed to get the boys’ sentences suspended because of their tender age.

It was the last day job that Jerry Lee ever held. He returned to Ferriday, and he pumped piano at the Dixie Club the very same night. ^