The branches of this extended family, as Frankie Lewis Terrell describes it, had much in common: they fought violently (Mickey's mother once took a shot at one of her husband's mistresses), drank and gambled to excess, believed in voodoo and never missed Sunday services at the Assembly of God church on Texas Avenue, where all three cousins performed. Son Swaggart had a few businesses, played the fiddle but eventually chose to scratch out a living as a minister. Elmo Lewis did odd jobs and spent time in jail. Arthur Gilley, Mickey's father, ran a taxi service and chased women. Mickey Gilley - whose mother Irene was sister to Jerry Lee's father, Elmo - came into world less than 12 months later, in 1936. In 1935, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Lee Swaggart were born their mothers, Minnie Bell Swaggart and Mamie Lewis, were sisters. Swaggarts, Lewises and Gilleys had been lured to town to pick cotton and bootleg whiskey. Huey Long made Ferriday safe for slot machines, and the gamblers arrived. Breweries and baseball bat factories opened. Southerners, Northerners, railroaders, real estate speculators, whites, blacks, Jews, Italians, even Chinese and Mexican immigrants moved here. Ferriday convinced the railroads to choose his field for their shops. But viewed in the Louisiana light, they are as close as cousins.īefore 1900, there was no town, only the Helena Plantation. highways 65 and 84, good and evil, in all their forms, seem to intersect: morality and promiscuity, holiness and sin, God and the devil. Locals brag that this town, a crossroads 100 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, 80 miles south of Monroe, has always been a semi-wicked place, a mixture of hell-raising Friday night and Jesus-praising Sunday morning. "People are not interested in perfect people." "All three are sort of notorious, which is good," says Amanda Taylor, the Concordia Parish librarian who helped put together one of the museums. In a town of only 4,500, two competing museums - one run by the Ferriday elite, the other by a devoted relative - trade in controversy.
Everyone here seems to keep a broken piano that is deemed a relic because it was supposedly destroyed by Jerry Lee's ungodly banging on the keys. Instead, writes author Elaine Dundy in her history of Ferriday, lightning "not only struck twice in the same place it struck three times."Īnd if those three bolts started some wildfires, well, all the better for Ferriday. But there was nothing planned about "this crazy town or our crazy family," says Frankie. The Ferriday Three they are called in these parts, as if the first cousins were defendants in a criminal conspiracy.
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