Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story

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First published in the United States of America by Delacotte Press 1982
New edition with Foreword published by Grove/Atlantic 1989
First published in Great Britain in Penguin Books 2007
Reissued in Penguin Books 2009

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

The foreword was published as ‘Days of Doom’ by Greil Marcus in California Magazine, April 1982, copyright © 1982 by New West Communications Corp. It was subsequently republished in Greil Marcus’s Dead Elvis. Reprinted by kind permission of Greil Marcus.

Lyrics from ‘Another Place, Another Time’ by Jerry Chesnut.
Used by permission of Passkey Music, Inc.
Lyrics from ‘A Damn Good Country Song’ by Donnie Fritts.
Used by permission of Combine Music.
Lyrics from ‘End of the Road’ by Jerry Lee Lewis.
Used by permission of Knox Music.
For photo credits, please see here

ISBN: 978-0-141-92442-7

Foreword

I want to be very clear about this. Nick Tosches’s Hellfire is the finest book ever written about a rock ’n’ roll performer—nothing else comes close. But that is hardly all it is. Sooner or later, Hellfire will be recognized as an American classic.

In outline, the Jerry Lee Lewis story is well-known. Born in Ferriday, Louisiana, in 1935, Lewis was a hellion whose soul was pitched between the threats of the Holy Ghost and the charms of the devil—the latter taking the form of boogie-woogie piano. He stole, he preached, he went to Bible school, he was expelled from Bible school, he made music, and in 1957 Sun Records of Memphis released his “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” a record that has not left the radio, nor the mind of anyone who has ever heard it, in over a quarter of a century. Lewis became an international star. Almost immediately the news of his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra Gale Brown—it was his third marriage, and his second bigamy—destroyed his career.

Thrown back into the honky-tonks, Lewis continued to perform and became addicted to pills and alcohol. In 1968 he made a deal with the mostly southern, mostly God-fearing part of white America: he would, on record if not on stage, abjure music of sin—rock ’n’ roll—for music of guilt—country. He became a star for a second time. Before long he was a big enough star to do as he pleased, and he again recorded rock ’n’ roll. But the years of dissipation and profligacy, and that old conflict between heaven and hell, caught up, and once more his life collapsed around him. Time and again he was arrested, sued, divorced, hospitalized; his property was seized by the Internal Revenue Service, and he buried the second of two sons. When he entered a Memphis hospital in the summer of 1981, newspapers across the country reported that he was not expected to live; some even printed his obituary. When he did leave the hospital, he announced that from that day on he would devote his God-given talent to the praise of God. It was a promise he had first made as a teenager, and no one expected him to keep it.

Out of these materials, which are both commonplace and the natural stuff of legend, Nick Tosches has made a book that can be read along with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Parson Weems’s Life of Washington, William Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, and Van Wyck Brook’s The Ordeal of Mark Twain. It is, as well, a book that sent me back to Michael Wigglesworth’s 1662 Puritan poem “The Day of Doom” (“They have their wish whose Souls perish with Torments in Hell-fire / Who rather choose their Souls to lose, than leave a loose desire”), and to Faulkner—to “Barn Burning,” Absalom, Absalom!, and especially “Compson: 1699–1945,” the postscript to The Sound and the Fury (“Who loved not the idea of the incest which he would not commit, but some Presbyterian concept of eternal punishment”)—in search of the sources of Tosches’s voice.

Hellfire has no truck with irony, that alibi of desiccated modernism. It is instead a strict and elegant rendering of perhaps the oldest and most enduring version of the American story: having blessed America above all other communities, God will judge its members more harshly. It is a notion that has produced much of the best and much of the worst in American life; it has led as surely to the Puritan witch trials and to the so-called Christian right of our day as to the compassion and terror of Lincoln’s second inaugural address. On this ground, Wigglesworth and Faulkner meet; they meet Jerry Lee Lewis, who at first refused to sing “Great Balls of Fire” because he recognized the song as an obscene blasphemy. At the same time, Tosches’s book joins a special and peculiarly unexamined tradition of American biography. Like the books by Franklin, Weems, Herndon, and Brooks, and like our best nineteenth-century novels, it is a poetic, imaginative statement that means less to illuminate the American’s predicament than to judge it. Hellfire is not so much a “true story”—though no book could be more scrupulous about dates, places, record labels, crimes; about getting the story straight—as an implacable tract.

In contrast to the doorstop genre that has taken over American biography, in which the life of the most trivial figure is excavated down to its most meaningless detail, Tosches’s book is small and short. Like the biographies mentioned above, it is both an argument about values—where they come from, where they lead—and an example of the first American literary genre, the sermon. What makes the book so strange and so compelling is that the sermon comes not from some fixed, eternal set of religious values, like the sermons Lewis’s first cousin, the TV evangelist Jimmy Lee Swaggart, often delivered on the subject of Jerry Lee, but from a transmutation of such values: from inside Lewis himself. It is a sermon in which the cadences of Lewis’s life and the cadences of sin and salvation have created their own, new rhythm. Hellfire is the Jerry Lee Lewis story not as he might want it to be told—no matter how formally honest he might be, revealing every last moral and legal crime—but as a judgment he might dream, and from which he cannot awake.

Thus Tosches’s language passes back through Faulkner, and back through preachers like Wigglesworth, to their source—the Bible. Tosches weaves the most prosaic, seemingly anomalous details—chart positions of Lewis’s records, copyright data, particulars of marriage licenses, dates of barnstorming rock ’n’ roll tours—into that language, until Hellfire reads like nothing so much as twentieth-century Apocrypha. Tosches starts carefully, building the Lewis genealogy without ornamental portents or omens, describing without melodrama the arrival of Pentecostalism and the outbreak of speaking in tongues in young Jerry Lee’s hometown of Ferriday, then dropping flashing, seemingly classical lines here and there—“[He] slowly fell to that place where fame repeats its own name”—until the reader is ready for a passage like this one, ready to accept it at face value, with all the irony a reader might have brought to it burned off:

The booze and the pills stirred the hell within him and made him to utter hideous peals. At times he withdrew into his own shadow, brooding upon all manner of things—abominable, unutterable, and worse. At times he stalked and ranted in foul omnipotence, commanding those about him as Belial his minions. He was the Killer and he was immortal—damned to be, for as long as there were good and evil to be torn between in agony. He would sit backstage in a thousand dank nightclubs, and he would know this, and he would swallow more pills and wash them down with three fingers more of whiskey, and he would know it even more. He would walk like a man to the stage, with his Churchill in one hand and his water glass of whiskey in the other, and he would pound the piano and sing his sinful songs, and he would beckon those before him, mortals, made not as he to destruction from the womb; he would beckon them to come, to stand with him awhile at the brink of hell. Then he would be gone into the ancient night, to more pills and more whiskey, to where the black dogs never ceased barking and dawn never broke; he would go there.

This is hardly the only sort of prose in Hellfire—just as typical is, “The hit records continued to come for Jerry Lee throughout 1970, and his concert price rose to $10,000 a night”—but this prose is the essence of the book’s weight. The use of the semicolon; the devastating close with that endlessly reverberating “he would go there”; the placement of the biblical “and he would know this,” brought down to an earth we can feel beneath our feet with the sardonic, no-hope smile of “and he would know it even more”—this, from a man whose previous book, Country, was just a little too hip, is bedrock American writing.

The strength, commitment, and sensitivity to rhythm in the writing provides the necessary credence for the context Tosches builds: a struggle between old-time Fundamentalist religion and modern-day celebrity, between the wish or the will never to “leave a loose desire” and the consciousness that such a wish demands the destruction of both the body and the soul. The context in turn makes sense of Jerry Lee’s story and links it to a story all Americans share—if only in pieces.

Hellfire is driven by the need to understand what forces shaped music as powerful as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and to understand what shape those forces caused the man who made that music to take once he had made it. And it is driven by the need to make that understanding real to other people. In Tosches’s book we are offered sins galore, but there is not a titillating moment in its pages. While one can be happy one is not Jerry Lee Lewis—and the ending of Hellfire is as bleak and terrifying as one will ever read in a biography of a person not yet dead—one can never feel superior to him. Even so, empathy is not the test of biography; implication is. Anyone who has ever said yes to “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” will likely find a place in Hellfire.

—Greil Marcus

It was three o’clock in the morning, and the master bedroom of Graceland was still. Elvis Presley lay in his blue cotton pajamas, dreaming. A small bubble of saliva burst softly at the corner of his lips, and, breathing heavily, he turned. It was the same old dream.

He walked through Tupelo in the late afternoon on a summer’s day toward the home of the virgin Evangeline. He was smiling as he turned a corner and entered a street where lush hackberry trees swallowed the sun. There was the house of her father, where she waited, wrapped in that magic, unholy thing from her mama’s bottom drawer.

He felt a chill. He was naked. Pleasance became dread, and he flushed with panic. He would retreat across town, where his mother was not dead, and there fetch his clothes. If he hurried, there was time. He took a shortcut through a backyard that he recognized, but he was soon lost, running scared in a strange, unfriendly place until he came to a meadow like none he had ever seen, and afternoon became night and the meadow became endless and he screamed.

The telephone at his bedside was ringing. It was one of the boys downstairs, calling to tell the boss that there was trouble.

Robert Loyd, a Graceland security guard, had watched nervously as the 1976 Lincoln Continental sped up the gravel driveway and struck the gate.

“I want to see Elvis,” the driver had shouted, with a voice as harsh as the clangor of chrome and wrought iron that preceded it. “You just tell him the Killer’s here.”

The guard recognized him and told him that Elvis did not want to be disturbed. This displeased the Killer. He pulled out a .38 derringer, and his eyes, which were already partly closed, tightened with a further wrath.

“Git on that damn house phone and call him! Who the hell does that sonofabitch think he is? Doesn’t wanna be disturbed! He ain’t no damn better’n anybody else.”

Elvis motherfucking Presley—his heart hastened—setting up there in that goddamn mansion pretending he’s God, and all he is is some fat old dope addict who dyes his hair like a goddamn woman. As the words of Job admonished: “They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave.” To the grave, to the grave, to the grave. He almost laughed, but instead spat in disgust, then commenced howling anew. He did not relent, and the guard went to the phone.

“Elvis says to call the cops,” the boy at the house told him. The Killer howled and waved his pistol toward the manor.

The guard did as he was told, and a patrol car arrived in less than a minute. Officer B. J. Kirkpatrick peered into the Lincoln and saw that the Killer had the derringer pressed against the door panel with his left knee. He pulled the door open, and the gun fell. He picked it up and found that it was loaded.

“I’ll have your fuckin’ job, boy,” the Killer hissed.

Kirkpatrick drew him from the car, spread him, frisked him, and locked his wrists. More patrol cars came, and the Killer was taken away.

Riding slowly, against his will, the prisoner glared into the slow river of dark night, wondering what had gone wrong. The thought must have come to him, and just as quickly fled, that there were no Breathalyzers in Old Testament days. This must mean something. He must have thought about singing a song, the old one about meeting in the morning; but he didn’t. Then at last he grinned and shook his head, for he knew that the cold, brilliant handcuffs would not long contain him.

The God of the Protestants delivered them under full sail to the shore of the debtors’ colony, fierce Welshmen seeking new life in a new land. From Savannah they traveled westward into the wilderness, across the Canoochee and the Ohoopee, the Oconee and the Flint and the furious Chattahooche, to the Choctaw-cleared thickets of the Alabama Territory. Some stayed there, and some moved west again, farther this time, clear to the Mississippi in a covered wagon, then to the other side, to Louisiana.

“Hell,” Jerry Lee Lewis would tell you in the middle of the night, which he seemed to have the power to evoke, to drape about himself, at any hour; “Hell,” he would tell you, looking asquint at the veins in his wrist, receding into the memory of his father’s tales and the tales of his father’s brothers; “Hell,” he would tell you, “they got a big history, the Lewises. Wild drinkers. Wild gamblers.” Then the final wild son would look away from his veins and regard the whiskey in the one hand, the cigar in the other. “Fuck-ups, I guess,” he would say, then laugh or cast an evil murmur, depending on which night he was in the middle of, which cloak he wore.

In Louisiana, on the eastern bank of the Ouachita River, where the city of Monroe now stands, not too far from where the final wild son was born, Jean Filhiol ordered there to be built a fort, in the autumn of 1790, that the settlers of Ouachita Post might be safe from the Chitimachas.

The settlement comprised some two hundred men and women, only seventy-five of whom bore arms. Commandant Filhiol, who had founded the Post in 1785, described his fellow pioneers as “the scum of all sorts of nations.” He complained of their indolence and reported that “They excell in all the vices” and that “The women are as vicious as the men.” He wrote with embarrassment that “The savages, though savages, who have occasion to see them, hold them in contempt.”

The fort was completed in February, 1791, and named in honor of Don Estevan de Miró, the provincial governor who had ordered the establishment of Ouachita Post. By 1800, when the French flag replaced the Spanish in Louisiana, Fort Miro had begun to grow into a town.

It was here, to Fort Miro, that Thomas C. Lewis came about the time that America purchased Louisiana from Napoleon, in 1803. Trafficking in land and law, he became one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Ouachita Parish. In 1812, when Louisiana entered the Union, Thomas C. Lewis was the parish judge. He and his wife, Lucinda, and their four sons and two daughters lived in a mansion on a bluff overlooking the river. They owned slaves great in number and various in hue, and drank from crystal.

On the first day of May, 1819, the steamboat James Monroe came up the Ouachita to Fort Miro. It was the first such boat to visit Fort Miro, and the citizens renamed their town in its honor. Judge Lewis disliked President Monroe, whose name his town had indirectly come to bear, so he decided to secede. He and a neighbor, Patrick Harmonson, obtained through the Fourth Legislature at its first session an act that created from their adjoining properties the town of Lewiston. Though the actuality of Lewiston was ignored and finally forgotten, the town has never been abrogated. To this day, some five hundred acres of Monroe, running north from DeSiard Street along the river, still legally comprise the town-within-a-town that Judge Lewis named in honor of his blood.

In the autumn of 1819, not long after the making of Lewiston, Judge Thomas C. Lewis passed away. His wife followed him in the spring, and the Lewis estate, valued at $8,973, was divided equally among the children.

John Savory Lewis, the great-grandfather of the final wild son, wed a girl named Jane, and, like his father before him, ruled one of the greatest plantations in Monroe. But it was not meant to last. Louisiana seceded in 1861 and fought the War of Independence. The drunkard Grant took Vicksburg, just seventy miles east of Monroe, in the summer of 1863, and John Lewis knew that what his father had wrought from dirt and courage had been wrought to fall, and that his true patrimony was neither the niggers nor the fancy crystal nor the fawning compliance of the townsmen, but only, and supremely, the dirt and courage, which all the ordnance of the North could never wrest from him. In 1865, it fell, as John Lewis had known it would.

“He’d take his fist, hit a horse, knock that horse to his knees. A hell of a man, Old Man Lewis. Then they turned all the slaves loose.” This is what the final wild son said of the great-grandfather whom he never knew. He said it as if he were reading an epitaph, and he said it with pride.

Born to the manor in 1856, John Lewis’s son Leroy saw the manor fall before his childhood was done. During the years of Reconstruction, many of Judge Lewis’s descendants moved to Ruston, a newly founded town some twenty miles west of Monroe. There the Lewises established a wealthy aristocracy of doctors, lawyers, and congressmen, an aristocracy that exists in Ruston to the present day. But Leroy M. Lewis stayed in Monroe. He worked as a clerk in a drugstore, then, for seven years, as a physician’s assistant. After that he became a school-teacher, and it was while teaching that he met and fell in love with his fifteen-year-old first cousin, Arilla Hampton. They were married in 1886.

Leroy continued to teach for four years after his marriage, but he grew restless of the city and began to make frequent trips to the wild countryside of Richland Parish, which lay east of Monroe, beyond the Lafourche swamp. His stays in the country grew longer, and finally he bought a farm there. But he had been raised as a city boy, and he did not know how to work a farm. He short-planted his cotton and almost starved.

Leroy and his family moved from one small farm to another until settling finally, in 1909, at a place called Snake Ridge. Located about ten miles southwest of Mangham, near Big Creek, the community of Snake Ridge had been settled by poor farmers in the 1820s. It got its name during the flood of 1828, when William Tom Hewitt, one of the founding settlers, saw the ridge protruding above the muddy Mississippi backwater and observed that it was as crooked as a snake. Although Snake Ridge, like its neighbor Nigger Ridge, has never been acknowledged on any map, the old-timers who live there still call the place by the name that William Tom Hewitt gave it back before their daddies were born.

By the time that Leroy Lewis moved to Snake Ridge, Arilla had borne him four sons and seven daughters. On account of all the moving from farm to farm, the children hadn’t got much book learning, but they all came to be better farmers than their father, and they all had a gift for making music. Leroy played the fiddle, and his sons played it, too; and the girls loved to play guitar and sing. There was music every night.

Leroy was a good man, but he was a bad drinker, and whatever he didn’t ruin by bad farming, he ruined with whiskey. Music was his pleasure when drunk and his penance when sober, and somehow it kept everything from falling apart. He would take that bottle sometimes and ride that New Orleans & Northwestern from Mangham to Rayville, that Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific from Rayville to Monroe. He would drink till his mind and his body gave out, and then he would drink some more, till his purse gave out; then he would drink some more, till finally everything that there was to give gave out. Then he would return to Snake Ridge. Singing about Jesus or women without underwear, Leroy M. Lewis would return. And when he did, none was happier to see him than his favorite boy, Elmo.

Elmo Kidd Lewis, Leroy’s seventh child and second son, was born on January 8, 1902, in Mangham. Handsome, with fine black hair, a tough jaw, and a grin that reminded his daddy of Old Man Lewis, Elmo was the tallest man in Snake Ridge before he even had call to put a razor to his face. Of all Leroy’s boys, Elmo worked hardest and made the best music. He was kind as only a strong man can truly be, but he drank like a weak man. Leroy warned him about this, as he himself had been warned so many times by the Baptist preacher in Mangham. Elmo would just grin. Then his daddy would start grinning back at him. Then that bottle would come out, and Leroy would tell his son about what had come before him: about how Old Man Lewis could knock a horse to his knees with one blow; about the big house on Ouachita Cliff, right where that new Mulhearn Funeral Home was now; about the hundred and fifty slaves and the morning of their freedom, when those slaves walked three miles down the road, turned around, and were back before dinner; and about the dirt and the courage.

Cancer ate Leroy Lewis’s stomach, and he died in 1937. By then his favorite son had two little boys of his own. They sat on their daddy’s lap, and he touched his face to theirs and told them about what had come before them. Not the part about the dirt and the courage, but the part that was like a fairy tale.

One of the little boys was to perish. The other, upon whom the Lewis patrimony fell, was to rise further than old Judge Lewis himself, further than any of the men in his daddy’s tales, before falling even further. He was the final wild son, and he knew it, just as he knew what those men in the tales felt when it thundered but didn’t rain.

Nick Tosches

HELLFIRE

The Jerry Lee Lewis Story

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

HELLFIRE

THE BEGINNING

Foreword

A GATHERING OF SHADES

DIRT