Music, Faith, Death, and Texas

A eulogy for a hellion and a final tribute to a longtime friend

The man stumbled out of the long sedan as I stood in line outside Rockefeller’s on a humid night in September 1987. With someone assisting him, he mumbled loudly and somewhat incoherently while being escorted into the front entrance to the club, a former bank building on Washington Avenue in Houston.

The man was younger then than I am now, but on that night, Jerry Lee Lewis looked as old as my grandfather to my then 22-year-old eyes.

I took a seat at a table near the stage. Marty Racine, the music critic at the Houston Chronicle, had given me the comp ticket, citing a conflict that was sending him to another show. “Keep me posted and let me know if anything crazy happens,” Marty said, following up the statement with raised eyebrows and the laugh of a smoker who had just quit cold turkey and hated the feeling.

With his sister, Linda, holding his arm and longtime guitarist Kenny Lovelace leading the intro music, Lewis shuffled slowly to the piano and slurred out greetings to the 300 or so fans who weren’t quite sure what they were about to see. Then the muscle memory kicked in, and Jerry Lee took off. For the next hour, from only a few feet away, I saw a man possessed.

After racing through 20 songs, ending with a lovely “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the man known as The Killer shuffled off again. At the time, I was convinced he wasn’t long for this world. Given all his struggles and wounds — internal, external, and mostly self-inflicted — it wouldn’t have been a surprise.

Somehow, Jerry Lee Lewis survived for 87 years, not leaving this mortal coil until three days before Halloween. You can’t say his life was one well lived, especially when you consider he had seven wives, including a marriage to his 13-year-old second cousin and two women who died young. He also endured the loss of two children to accidents, shot his bass player in the chest, was arrested several times (including once for drunkenly waving a gun after crashing his car into the front gates of Elvis Presley’s Graceland), lost more than half of his stomach due to drinking and drugs, fought long battles with the IRS, and made multiple trips to rehab.

But the titles of two of his final three albums, both recorded when Jerry Lee was in his 70s, were accurate. After outliving his fellow members of the inaugural class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the “Mean Old Man” was the “Last Man Standing.”

Mourning a 35-Year Friend

Music, memories, death, and Texas have been on my mind a lot recently. As readers of my meanderings may recall, in late September, I was working on a magazine story in my home state when I got word that a close friend was dying.

The Present

As I’ve written, Cecile was kind, funny, and never knew a stranger. She was deeply faithful, a seeker, searcher and connector of people and ideas. She also smoked like a chimney, cussed like a sailor, and could hold her liquor as well as many journalists I know.

No wonder we got along so well.

We met when Cecile came to the Chronicle as the newspaper’s religion editor soon after that 1987 Lewis concert. Previously, she had worked at the Greensboro News & Record, where she and a team of reporters were nominated for a Pulitzer for a series on the televangelists who had become so popular during the Ronald Reagan era. One of those televangelists, as it turns out, was Jimmy Swaggart — Lewis’ first cousin.

Cecile and I had a running joke: Every time something significant in my life happened, she was off covering the Pope. It happened so many times that — even though she had moved back to South Carolina when John Paul II became ill — I called and asked her to let me know as soon as possible when the papal end was nigh.

Her desire was to be cremated and buried in Kentucky with her late husband, Jace, so there was no immediate service. Given friends and family are scattered across the country, her brother decided to hold a celebration of life this past weekend. So as the Houston Astros played in the World Series, Texas was being well represented in South Carolina.

Keeping Your Distance

The birth of rock and roll coincided with my father’s teenage years, and the inevitable nostalgia package tours that since have been commonplace started with mine. It’s one reason I found my 13-year-old self at The Summit — ironically now home to Joel Osteen’s ministry — watching a 1950s nostalgia tour featuring Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, The Drifters, Danny and the Juniors and The Marvelettes in September 1978.

My Grandmother, Elvis, and Me

It was my third concert, having seen Elvis twice at age 6 and age 9, but the only one I went to solo with my dad. But the fun ended with an emergency room run on the way back to Texas City. I started suffering abdominal pains and thought my appendix was about to burst, but fortunately it was just gas from a pre-concert fast food indulgence. The irony was not lost on us that, given all of my dad’s health problems over the years, I was the one who landed in the hospital that evening.

I wanted to take my father to see Lewis at Rockefeller’s, but his health problems had resurfaced after a temporary respite in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His spine had been wrecked by the dysplasia that had in turn resulted in spasmodic torticollis, and by April 1987 he had been forced to have several vertebrae in his back fused. Days before Lewis concert, still wearing a back brace, he tripped and fell and had to have arthroscopic surgery on his knee.

Recently, I interviewed Dave Alvin, who I saw on his first tour as a solo artist at Rockefeller’s that same year. I was always surprised that Alvin’s first band — The Blasters — had not played with Lewis. They seemed like a natural match, and we both agree that Lewis’ “Live at the Star Club — Hamburg” is one of the best, most intense live albums ever recorded.

But after Lewis’ death, the always wise Alvin summed up The Killer perfectly in a Facebook post.

“What is there to say? One of those separate the art from the artist situations,” Alvin wrote. “A truly wild, crazy, rock and rolling, honky tonking, messed up, dangerous, more than little insane, innovator and unique piano pounder with hellhounds eternally on his trail. Though he was one of my musical heroes, I always kept my distance from him and feel absolutely fine about that … If there is an afterlife, I think I'll keep my distance from him there as well.”

A Fearful Thing

I arrived in Columbia last Friday, a full 24 hours before the small church service that preceded the celebration of life at a local art gallery. I stopped by the University of South Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, where I spent a week in 2019 as a visiting professor thanks to Cecile, and briefly spoke to one of her colleagues. The rest of the day was spent editing photos from events shot earlier in the week and writing down thoughts that eventually led to this essay.

But the words weren’t there at the time. I decided to wait until they were.

The Saturday morning service was lovely, as the priest from Trinity Church reminded the group of Cecile’s endless curiosity while living in an increasingly “incurious” and polarized world. He noted she chose to ask questions rather than cast judgment, a lesson we all can (and should) learn.

During the service, Cecile’s cousin Isabel Phillips read “’Tis a Fearful Thing,” a poem written by Yehuda Halevi. An 11th and 12th century Andalusian Jewish physician and philosopher, Halevi is considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets and is celebrated for both his religious and secular poems.

Faith is personal, and it’s not something I frequently espouse about, especially in my writing. But given the beauty of this poem and the fact this essay already has referenced evangelists, the Pope, and a beloved Episcopalian who wrote about religion, I believe it’s worth repeating here:

‘Tis a fearful thing

To love what death can touch.

A fearful thing

To love, to hope, to dream, to be —

To be

And oh, to lose

A thing for fools, this.

And a holy thing.

A holy thing to love.

For your life has lived in me.

Your laugh once lifted me.

Your word was a gift to me.

To remember this brings painful joy.

‘Tis a human thing, love.

A holy thing, to love what death has touched.

Sitting with Kim and Valerie, two of Cecile’s best friends, and her godson, I stared at a picture on an easel of her holding one of her beloved Boston terriers. I looked down at my phone and pulled up a picture I had taken the night before while walking to find dinner.

Clouds were pressing down on the sunset, seemingly sitting on the light as I walked down the street in Columbia. I looked down an alleyway and took the picture you see below.

It felt as fitting a farewell as Halevi’s poem.

Later that night, several of Cecile’s longtime friends — people I had heard stories about for decades but a couple of whom I was meeting for the first time — gathered in my room with the leftovers from the celebration. We sat and talked and shared as the TV, on mute, showed Game 6 of the Astros/Phillies World Series.

The Astros won the game and the Series — hooray for Dusty Baker! — in thrilling fashion. Even though it was late, everyone stayed together until the final out, then went our separate ways with promises to stay in touch.

Unlike Jerry Lee, these are people you want to keep close, not at a distance. Cecile, in her own way, taught that to everyone she met. And for that, I’m eternally grateful.