Jerry Lee Lewis Told Elvis He Played Piano Better — Then Elvis Sat Down at the Keys D

The 4th of December, 1956, a Tuesday, 41° and gray, 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. Carl Perkins had that studio booked for the whole afternoon, and it was supposed to be his day. Jerry Lee Lewis was 21 years old, hired help at $15 for the session, and had not yet had a hit in his life. And Elvis Presley was not on the schedule at all.

Nobody who was in that room talks about the singing first. They get to it, but they don’t start there. What they start with is a note. The F above middle C on Sam Phillips’s upright piano had been sticking for 3 weeks, and at 4:00 that afternoon, it went down and did not come back up. My name is Harlan Pruitt.

In December of 1956, I was 41 years old, and I tuned pianos for hire all over Memphis, Idlewild Presbyterian, two funeral homes on Union, the ballroom at the Peabody Hotel, and a converted radiator shop at 706 Union Avenue, where a man named Sam Phillips made phonograph records. I had tuned that studio upright 19 times in 3 years.

I knew every soft hammer and every dead string in it. I thought I knew everything that instrument could do. I was wrong. Let me put you in the room, because it was not much of a room. 18 ft by 30 ft. White acoustic tile on the ceiling in a pattern of little holes, a linoleum floor, four microphone stands, and a control room behind a window where Jack Clement sat with his back curved like a question mark.

There was no echo chamber. Sam got his echo by running the sound down a hallway into the bathroom and back. And if a person flushed that toilet during a take, you started over. It smelled like cigarettes and burnt coffee. And the coffee came from Taylor’s restaurant next door at 7:10, where you could get a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich for 35 cents if you asked for it that way and the man behind the counter was in the mood.

Carl Perkins was cutting a song called Matchbox that day with his brother Jay on rhythm guitar, his brother Clayton on the stand-up bass, and W.S. Holland on the drums. Sam had brought in a piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who had come to town that fall with nothing but an upright piano style and an absolutely unshakable opinion of himself.

That was Jerry Lee Lewis. 21, blonde, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, sitting on that bench like he’d bought it. I was down on one knee at the treble end with the action half out, working, and he talked to me the entire time. Not conversation. Declaration. You tune this thing? 19 times. “You ought to tune it lower,” he said.

“Sounds like a church.” I told him it was supposed to sound like a church. He hit a run down the keyboard with his right hand fast and said, “Mister, I’ll tell you something for nothing. There ain’t a man walking in the United States plays one of these better than me. Not one.” And Sam Phillips’ voice came out of the control room talkback, flat as a griddle.

“Son, you want to be careful who walks through that door in this town.” 40 minutes later, the door opened. It was 20 past 4:00. Elvis Presley came in out of the cold in a light-colored jacket with the collar up and he had a young woman with him, Marilyn Evans, 19 years old, a dancer he’d met working in Las Vegas, and he stood just inside the door the way a man stands in a house he used to live in.

He was 6 ft tall, thinner than the pictures. His hair was black that year. He’d been born light brown and started dying it that spring and it had gotten too long for December. The room did a thing I have never seen a room do since. Everybody kept doing what they were doing and everybody stopped. Because here is what that visit meant and you have to understand it or none of the rest lands.

Two years and five months earlier, on July 5th, 1954, a truck driver had stood in that exact room and cut That’s All Right with Scotty Moore and Bill Black and Sam Phillips had put it out on his own little label. Then, on November 21st, 1955, Sam sold that boy’s contract to RCA Victor for $35,000 and there were men in Memphis who thought Sam Phillips had lost his mind and there were men who thought he’d robbed a bank.

$35,000 and in the 14 months since, that boy had sold more records than the rest of the room combined would sell in their lives. Carl Perkins put his guitar down on a folding chair. He did not put it down hard and he did not put it down soft. Sam came out of the control room and shook Elvis’s hand and said, “Well, look what the cold blew in.

” And Elvis said, “Mr. Phillips, I heard Carl was working. I didn’t come to take the room. “You couldn’t take it if you wanted it,” Sam said. “It’s rented.” That got the first laugh. Johnny Cash was there, too, standing over by the wall in a dark jacket, quiet the way he was. And Sam put the four of them together and got on the telephone to Bob Johnson at the Memphis Press-Scimitar and told him to send a photographer over right now.

George Pierce came with the camera about an hour later, and that is how the picture got taken that people still hang on their walls. But before any of that, there was the piano. Elvis walked straight over to it because he always did. And he put his hand on the case and looked down at Jerry Lee sitting on the bench.

Jerry Lee did not move. I want to be clear about that because it is the whole spine of this thing. Every other person in that building had moved when Elvis Presley came through the door. Shifted, straightened, turned. Jerry Lee Lewis sat there with both hands on the keys and looked up at him like a man being asked for directions.

Elvis said, “You mind if I get in there a minute?” And Jerry Lee said, “I’m working.” Nobody breathed. The tuning lever was in my hand and I had a felt mute between two strings and I did not take it out for what felt like a week. Then Jerry Lee said the thing. He said it pleasantly, which somehow made it worse.

“Besides, I heard you play on the radio. You beat on it. I don’t beat on it. There ain’t nobody in this room plays this instrument better than me, and that includes you. If you have ever been in a small room when a young man says the true, dangerous thing out loud to a person twice his size in the world, you know exactly what that quiet sounds like.

It is not silence. It is people deciding whether to laugh. Elvis took his hand off the piano case and he said, “Well, you’re likely right about that. I don’t know anything about music. In my line, you don’t have to.” Now, he said it easy and half the room laughed and Carl Perkins laughed loudest because Carl needed something to laugh at right then. Jerry Lee did not laugh.

He turned back around and played and I have to tell you what he played because I am a piano man and it is the only thing I am qualified to testify about. He played a boogie in C with his left hand pumping eighths and his right hand doing something up in the treble that I could not follow with my eyes.

He played the whole length of that keyboard. He played the wood. He hit the last chord with the flat of his hand and the low strings kept ringing for 4 seconds. It was the loudest thing I ever heard come out of that box and I had tuned it 19 times. It was also, from where I was kneeling, a small massacre.

Two hammers went out of alignment in 90 seconds. And that F above middle C, the one I had come to fix, went down under his hand and stayed down, dead key, right in the middle of the instrument. So, there I was, 41 years old, on my knees in front of the four most talked about young men in the state of Tennessee with my back to all of them, prying the action apart while nobody said a word.

And somebody crouched down beside me. It was Elvis, down on his heels with his forearms on his knees, close enough that I could smell hair oil and cold air on his jacket. He said, “What’s it doing?” I showed him. The hammer butt had swollen in the damp, and it was binding on the flange, and the fix was to shim it and dry it, and I did not have the right shim in my case.

He said, “What do you need?” I said, “Something stiff and thin, cardboard.” He went out the front door onto Union Avenue in the cold without a coat, and he came back 2 minutes later from Taylor’s with a book of matches, and he tore the cover off it and handed it to me. Taylor’s Restaurant, 710 Union Avenue, printed in red.

I cut it, shimmed it, and that F came back up. Elvis said, “You just fixed a piano with a matchbook.” I said, “I fixed it for tonight. Tomorrow, it’s a piano problem again.” And he laughed, and while he was still crouched there, he said something I did not expect. He said his mother, Gladys, used to save up to have a woman named Miss Ruby come by and give him lessons when they were in Tupelo, in the shotgun house on Old Saltillo Road, two rooms, and he never took to it, and he’d learned everything he could actually do from watching hands in church. He said, “I know about eight chords. I’ve been getting by on eight chords since I was 10 years old.” Then he stood up and rubbed his knees and went back to being the most famous person in Memphis. The next hour was loose. Johnny Cash had his wife, Vivian,

waiting and left early to go shopping, and he took a lot of the room’s quiet out with him when he went. Sam got on the talkback and told Jack Clement to roll tape and not to stop rolling it for anything. Elvis started telling about Las Vegas. He’d been out there in the spring and had gone to see Billy Ward and his Dominoes at the Sands and their young singer Jackie Wilson had done Don’t Be Cruel, Elvis’s own record, the one that sat at number one that whole fall and done it, Elvis said, better than he had. He said it four different times. Four. He kept coming back to it like a sore tooth. He got a thing on the end of the line, Elvis said, and he sang it the way Jackie Wilson had and then the way he had and the difference was the difference between a bricklayer and a jeweler. Jerry Lee said, from the bench,

then why is your name on the record? And Elvis said, that’s a fair question. By 6:00 there were 60 people on the sidewalk on Union Avenue looking in because word in Memphis traveled faster than any telephone and Sam sent Jack out to lock the front door. Carl Perkins picked his guitar back up. Somebody started Blueberry Hill.

Then a hymn came from somewhere. I think it was Carl. And then another one. And the thing turned into what every gathering of Southern musicians turns into by the second hour, which is church. And Jerry Lee Lewis played every bit of it from that bench and would not get up. Then, at 20 minutes to 7:00, he did it again.

He looked over his shoulder at Elvis and said, you going to sing all night standing up? Or you want to show us them eight chords? Sam Phillips said, Jerry, and Elvis said, no, sir. It’s all right. He crossed the room. Jerry Lee slid down the bench about 8 in, which is the least a man can move and still be said to have moved.

Elvis sat down. And here is the part only I saw because it was my instrument and my whole trade is watching hands. Before he played a note, he laid his fingers on the keys and pressed each one from middle C up an octave without making a sound, just testing the weight, feeling for what was sticking, the way you check a step before you put your weight on it.

He found the F I’d shimmed. He pressed it three times. Then he moved his whole hand position up a step. He played the entire next 20 minutes in a key that kept him off that F and not one person in that room besides me knew he had done it. He played in G, left hand walking, right hand in block chords, thumb doubling the melody.

It was not fancy. It was not fast. It was the way a man plays who learned it on a bench beside his mother. He started just a little talk with Jesus. And the room went I don’t have a better word for it. Carl Perkins stopped playing guitar. W. S. Holland put his sticks across his knee. Marilyn Evans, who had been sitting on a folding chair by the wall with her coat still on, leaned forward and put her chin in her hand.

Jack Clement came halfway out of the control room and stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame. Sam Phillips took his glasses off. Nobody was talking. Under the singing, you could hear the radiator ticking and a car going by on Union with a bad muffler. If you grew up going to a country church, you know the particular sound of a piano being played by somebody who is not performing.

It is slower than you expect. It leaves holes in it. And in those holes, other people start singing because that is what the holes are for. That is what happened. Elvis left holes, and the room filled them. He went from that into Peace in the Valley, and he sang it low, almost under his breath. And he told them while he was playing that this was his mother’s favorite, that Gladys had a Red Foley record of it, and that he was going to sing it on television in January if they’d let him.

He did, too. January 6th, 1957. But that was still a month off, and nobody in that room knew it. And then, Jerry Lee Lewis came in. He did not take over. 21 years old, $15 for the day, the loudest opinion in Memphis, and he leaned in over Elvis’s left shoulder and sang the tenor part above him, clean and quiet.

And he put his right hand down on the top end of the keyboard and put in four notes, total four. Like a man laying a napkin down. They sang three verses that way. Two men on one bench, and Carl Perkins came in under them on the bottom. I have tuned pianos for 46 years. I have been in sanctuaries at midnight, and I have been in the Peabody Ballroom with 300 people.

I have never once, before or since, heard four voices find each other that fast in a room that cold. When it stopped, nobody clapped. That is how I know it was real. People clap when they’ve been entertained. Nobody in that room had been entertained. Elvis put both hands flat on the keys, quiet, and said, “That’s about all I’ve got.

” And Jerry Lee Lewis said, and I was eight feet away, and this is exactly what he said, well, you ain’t a piano player. Elvis said, no, sir, I’m not. And Jerry Lee said, but I’d have sat down and listened to that. That was the whole apology. That was as far as that man was ever going to go, and everybody in the room understood that it had cost him something to go that far.

George Pierce took the picture around 7:00. Four of them around that upright, Elvis on the bench, Jerry Lee standing at the treble end with his hand on the case. Bob Johnson ran it in the Press Scimitar the next day and called them a million-dollar quartet. And that name stuck to it for the rest of everybody’s life.

Six months after that, Jerry Lee Lewis cut Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On in that same room and did not need anybody’s permission ever again. The four of them were never in a room together again. Not once. They were all alive for another 20 years and it never happened twice. There are two things about that night I never learned, and they still work on me.

I never found out whether Elvis knew that I saw what he did with his hand, that he moved the whole thing up a step to keep off a key a stranger had shimmed with a matchbook 40 minutes earlier. He never looked at me while he played. I have decided he knew. I have no way to know it. And I never learned what Jerry Lee said to him at the door when they left, because they went out together into the cold and stood on the sidewalk on Union Avenue for about 90 seconds, and I was inside packing my case, and by the time I got to the window, they were shaking hands. This is a dramatized fictional story inspired by Elvis Presley’s life and career. Events and dialogue depicted here have been fictionalized for storytelling and entertainment purposes. I still have the matchbook. Not the cover. I cut the cover into a shim and it is still inside that piano’s action as far as I know. Doing its job

70 years later. The rest of the book, the part with the matches, went into my tool case that night and never came out. Taylor’s restaurant, 710 Union Avenue. Red printing, 11 matches left. That is the strangest souvenir in Memphis and it has never been worth a dime to anybody but me. Here is what I want from you.

Not the whole evening. One choice. Jerry Lee Lewis, 21 years old, sitting on that bench, looked at the biggest name in America and told him to his face that he played better. Was that a young man being arrogant or a young man refusing to be small in the one room where he had a right not to be? Tell me which one you think it was.

I read every comment that comes in and if you ever sat in a church where somebody sat down at an upright and the whole place stopped talking without being asked, you already know exactly what I’ve been trying to describe here and you know why I’ve carried it this long. I have more of these, the ones from down on the floor with the tools out.

I’m telling them one at a time. Stay with me and I’ll bring you the next one.