Don't FUCK with the Lewises
Where The Shakin' Began : Jerry Lee Lewis And Jimmy Lee Swaggart Grew Up In The Same Town. Then They Went Rock 'N' Holy Rollin' Down Separate Paths: Jerry Lee 'n' Jimmy Lee--sin 'n' Salvation
FERRIDAY, La. — The note on the door of Frankie Jean Terrell's house on Louisiana Avenue read, "Gone to Alexandria for the day . . . Frankie Jean."
The house is just a block from the old Assembly of God Church on Texas Avenue, where Terrell sang as a child with her older brother Jerry Lee Lewis and their cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart.
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| buddy holly album which i duetted with linda gail lewis on Oh, Boy! |
Her note was intended to ward off fans who come from as far as Australia--often on a side trip from Elvis' Graceland in Memphis--to see the old home of Lewis, the Wildman of Rock.
It's only about 280 miles from Memphis to Ferriday, a worn 'n' ragged town of 4,472 just west of the Mississippi River. Frankie Jean used to invite some of the fans in--but got tired of missing ashtrays, silverware and other items around the house.
She also has become leery of the reporters who have knocked on her door recently to ask about fire 'n' brimstone evangelist Swaggart. She thought they twisted her words to embarrass him.
But she had agreed--reluctantly--to talk to a reporter, after he promised in an advance phone call to show her clippings of the many interviews he has done with her brother.
"Welcome," she said, opening the door to the white, single-story frame house. She led the reporter on a tour. "It's so dusty in here," she said apologetically. "But Jerry wants me to keep it just the way it was when Mama died. He won't let me vacuum the carpet in her old bedroom because it's got her heel prints in it.
"Jerry wants to turn the house into a museum, but you never know with him. He hates the idea of people coming in here because the house is so personal to him. I ask him, 'Jerry, how can this ever be a museum if you don't let anyone in?' "
The living room was dominated by the TV set on a living room table--not the set itself, but the image on its screen: Jimmy Lee Swaggart, giving one of the deeply imploring performances that has made him the most charismatic of America's superstar telepreachers.
"I must have 300 of his tapes," confided Terrell, settling in the dining room area. "The tapes run here constantly. They're a comfort. Jimmy's a sweet man . . . and he's very concerned about Jerry (and his notorious ways). It's very frustrating to him that he can't bring Jerry over to the gospel. But Jerry can easily frustrate anyone."
Later in the day, another Ferriday resident also wondered about the town's cousins in sin 'n' salvation. He loves Lewis' records, but shakes his head over the rocker's outlandish image. The man also watches Swaggart's crusades on TV, but wonders why Swaggart needs to live in a million-dollar house in nearby Baton Rouge.
He said, "You know, it really is something to think that this little old town . . . Ferriday could give the world two people that have done as much as Jimmy and Jerry. . . . It makes you wonder if this town was blessed or if it was cursed."
Jimmy Lee Swaggart and Jerry Lee Lewis aren't the only names on the signs that greet motorists at both of the U.S. 84 entrances to town. Also listed: country singer Mickey Gilley, who is a cousin of Lewis and Swaggart's, TV newsman Howard K. Smith, whose family moved away when he was 3, and Mrs. U. B. Evans, a horticulturist.
Yet people who stop to take photos are mainly concerned with Lewis and Swaggart, says Anthony McCraney, 68, whose Exxon station is next to the sign on the eastern edge of town.
Lewis and Swaggart (and Gilley) were born within months of each other 51 years ago--and grew up in each other's houses. They attended the same church, walked to school together and even played the same piano. And, at some point, they each began making plans on how to escape the dead-ends of a small town. "We wanted to be any place but Ferriday," Swaggart once wrote.
Visitors often ask how two men with such vastly different public images be cut from the same cloth, but watching Swaggart and Lewis on stage, it's easy to picture either of them being just as big a star if they changed places. Their messages may be 180 degrees apart, but they deliver them with the same kind of fiery, ultra-emotional intensity that would have made Elmer Gantry proud. Circling the stage at one of his crusades, Swaggart sweats, cajoles, cries--and sometimes heads over to the piano and sings the praises of the Lord with all the feeling and phrasing of the most roots-conscious rocker. At the piano in a honky-tonk, Lewis can tell stories with soul-lifting Judgment Day fury.
Once visitors to Ferriday get through asking McCraney questions about the town's two most infamous sons, there's not much else to talk about.
This once-thriving farming and sawmill community now seems in desperate need of a life-support system. There's considerable charm and history a dozen miles away in Natchez, Miss., from the antebellum homes to the cobblestoned streets. But Ferriday is like a pair of discarded overalls. When the mayor drives a visitor around town, he spends much of his time pointing to vacant lots and telling you what used to be there.
There were more vacated stores than people in the tiny, two-block area that comprises downtown Ferriday on a recent, weekday afternoon. Pasternack's big hardware store was out of business. The Arcade movie theater is ancient history by now. Peggy's clothing store is long gone. A sign in what was once a shoe store reads, "Thank you for your patronage all the years. See us (at our new location) in Natchez." A Colonel Sanders is out on the highway, but you have to go 10 miles to Vidalia to get a Big Mac.
The few adults downtown this day were 40 or older--people who apparently never had the inclination, perhaps never the opportunity, to move. They sit in the Pass Time Lounge or in one of the many convenience stores and talk about the weather, the virtues of small-town life and, when asked, Lewis and Swaggart.
"I kinda feel like (the people in) Jimmy Carter's home town must have felt when people wanted to know all about Jimmy and his brother . . . Billy," said a long-time Ferriday resident, who was passing the day watching the traffic along the highway.
"Hell, the truth is, Jimmy Swaggart is probably more famous than Jimmy Carter now, and Jerry Lee Lewis . . . he's always been famous. He was famous around here before he ever had a record."
The Lewis, Swaggart and Gilley clans have a history that would have enlivened "Tobacco Road." In "Hellfire," his biography of Lewis, Nick Tosches tells of the ancestors who lived in the '20s over on Snake Ridge. The place isn't on a map, merely a now-forgotten settlement of poor farmers.
The migration to Ferriday was apparently prompted because a relative, Lee Calhoun, lived here. A big landowner, Calhoun was one of the wealthiest men in the county. The kinfolk--and almost everyone in Snake Ridge was related in some convoluted way--saw Calhoun as a way of getting a foot up during hard economic times. The migration included Lewis' parents, Elmo and Mamie. (Both Lewis and Swaggart were named after Uncle Lee.)
Wrote Tosches: "Lee Calhoun, who was already beginning to lose track of all the in-laws who had come to dwell on his dirt, had to back off and think a while about this latest (marriage). . . . Willie Harry Swaggart had married Elmo's sister. Now Willie Harry's son, Willie Leon, had married the sister of Elmo's wife, who was Willie Harry's sister-in-law and Willie Leon's aunt.
"Hellfire, Lee Calhoun thought, if this didn't make Elmo's nephew and brother-in-law one in the same. Then Lee Calhoun got to thinking that . . . if Willie Leon and Minnie Bell had a child, Minnie Bell might somehow wind up as the child's aunt as well as its mother, and its grandfather Willie Harry would likely pan out to be its cousin, and in the end that poor child would be lucky if it escaped without being rendered its own uncle."
But almost any of the Swaggart/Lewis/Gilley kin can outline alliances just as hilarious. Between customers, Hyram Copeland, an appliance salesman at the Sears store in Natchez, tried to piece together some of the family connections.
Copeland, a cordial, educated man in his late '40s who is a cousin to all three men, began, "My grandmother was Mickey's mother's sister and Jerry Lee's daddy's sister. My grandfather, who was a Gilley, was Mickey's daddy's brother. Jimmy Lee Swaggart's mother--uh, grandmother--was my mother's, I mean Mickey's mother's sister and she was Jerry's daddy's sister. . . .
The reporter was trying to take all this down by longhand and finally gave up. Copeland sympathized, "It is confusing, isn't it?"
Lewis terrorized Ferriday as a teen-age cut-up, scandalized it as a rock pioneer whose sexy records ("Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On" and "Great Balls of Fire") and uninhibited image made parents feel that maybe this Elvis kid wasn't so bad after all.
Those early hits were among the most influential ever in rock, earning Lewis a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but his career was nearly destroyed in 1958 when the English press learned that the 22-year-old rocker married his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Brown.
British promoters canceled his shows and American radio stations quit playing his records. It didn't make help matters that Lewis had already been married twice before--and divorced only once.
The "Ferriday Fireball," as Lewis has been called, has remained surrounded by controversy--and tragedy. One of his sons drowned in a swimming pool, a second died in a jeep accident. Lewis' fifth wife, Shawn, died of a drug overdose in 1983 under suspicious circumstances. "20/20" and Rolling Stone magazine both raised questions about Lewis' possible implication in the death.
But down here, Lewis is regarded with deep affection.
Ironically, the community seems more divided about Swaggart, who was a quiet boy who studied his Bible and never got into trouble.
These folks weren't concerned about Swaggart's description of much of rock 'n' roll as "pornographic," or his suggestion that the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II might have been the result of their failure to believe in Christ, or his frequent criticisms of Catholicism.
Even some of the people who get up at 6 every morning to watch his TV program here, however, wonder if the five-acre estate and $30 million school-ministry-TV complex is the best way to serve the Lord.
But most people don't want to be quoted when it comes to expressing reservations about Swaggart. The merchants, especially, don't want to alienate any of their customers.
"Certain groups really love him, others just think he is a big TV reacher with a whole lot of money," said insurance man Melton Martin, 47, himself careful not to take sides.
One man in Ferriday who is not afraid to be quoted about Swaggart--or anything else--is the mayor.
Sammy Davis Jr., the town's first black mayor, entered the City Hall conference room holding a Thompson submachine gun. He put the weapon on the table and watched as his visitors stirred uneasily.
"The city bought some of these years ago to keep the blacks in this town in their place," he said, savoring the irony of the situation. "I guess they never realized that a black man might be mayor one day and be the one to determine what's done with them."
Davis, 55, likes to bring out the prop because it reminds him of how far he--and other blacks--have come in this town. During the height of the school segregation conflict in the '60s, Davis was fired from his position of school principal because he defended 21 black teachers who had also been relieved of duties. Davis eventually took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and won his job back.
Things were so tense in the late '60s and early '70s that Davis helped form a group called Deacons for Defense. Its members patrolled black neighborhoods at night to guard against Klan attacks.
"There's still hatred here, but you work to change people," said Davis, who has a masters' in education. "We try to show (the whites) that we are going to do things straight across the board . . . fairly. That's something that wasn't seen when I was coming up."
But the guns aren't the only reminders of what Davis describes as the "racist" days in Ferriday. He also points to the "Welcome to Ferriday" signs--the ones that tell you this is the home of Lewis and the rest.
"I resented those signs the day they went up (in the late '70s) because they said that these (whites) were the only famous people that came from Ferriday," Davis said, determinedly. "If the city (instead of a private group) had put up the sign, I would have taken it down by now. Nothing against the people who are on the sign, but there are also other people (blacks) who have contributed to this town. I think we'll eventually put up our own city sign."
Davis is a friendly, beefy man in his mid-50s who has retired from the school system. His "business" is raising Rottweiler dogs, but his passion is the town--and his position as mayor. He is at City Hall from early morning to past midnight some days.
He said he never thought of leaving Ferriday, even during the height of the racial tension in the late '60s and early '70s, because "this is my home" . . . pure and simple.
"This is a Tombstone kind of place . . . a rowdy town . . . and Jerry Lee fit right in," Davis said, smiling affectionately.
"All the crazy tales you've heard about him are true. . . ," he continued. "He was a wild rebel. Sometimes I think Jerry wakes up each morning in a different world."
Lewis, Davis said, lived as a teen-ager on Mississippi Avenue, which was the borderline between the blacks and the whites, and he used to hang out at Haney's Big House, the black honky-tonk downtown.
Bobby Blue Bland, B. B. King and Big Joe Turner were among the acts that played Haney's, and Lewis would sneak in--the only white in the place--and always be asking if he could get up and play a number.
About young Swaggart, Davis recalled, "Jimmy was the other end of the spectrum . . . very laid back, very religious. He wasn't really one of the gang, but no one put him down. People respected his right to be the way he wanted."
However, Davis acknowledged some people today in Ferriday question Swaggart's motivation.
"I think Jimmy has isolated himself from people. (He) lives in a big house in Baton Rogue and raises millions of dollars for people overseas, but what's he done to help the poor people here?' Why couldn't he open a Bible bookstore or something here, to give local people a chance to work?
"Maybe Mickey Gilley could open a country music record store, too. The city has given a lot of recognition to these guys and it's time for them to give a little back to the city. We're aren't asking for handouts, but they could make some improvements here."
The black teen-agers sitting on some boxes outside one of the many convenience stores on the main highway knew about Swaggart--their mothers watch him on TV, they said--but they couldn't name any record by Lewis. "We listen to Prince and New Edition," one of the boys said. "Jerry Lee Lewis was years ago. . . ."
At a gas station down the road, three white teen-agers leaned against a car listening to the new single by the rock group Boston. They, too, knew about Swaggart--"I think he probably does a lot of good, but why does he keep attacking rock 'n' roll?"--yet also had trouble naming a record by Lewis. Finally, one of the boys said, "Didn't he do 'That'll Be the Day'?"
Thirty years ago, before even "Whole Lot of Shakin' Going on," everyone in Ferriday knew of Lewis.
Richard White, 53, operates a gas station and he often begins his day by having coffee with friends at Borcado's Restaurant across the street from Ferriday High.
"There wasn't a weekend that went by where that there wasn't some kind of major disaster with Jerry," White said, smiling. "I remember one night at the skating rink in Natchez. Jerry got into it with his big mouth and the next thing we know half the Natchez High School football team is heading our way. I think that night was the first time I heard anyone refer to Jerry as the Killer (his long-standing nickname).
"These guys are coming at us and I heard Jerry say something about his two buddies having knives and guns. So, Jerry looks at me and Cecil Harrelson and says, 'Don't use the gun on them,' and Cecil says back, 'OK, Killer, we'll leave them alone.'
"Now, there's someone you should talk to . . . Cecil. He was the toughest kid in town. He even made Jerry seem tame."
"Well, Richard had it pretty straight about what happened at the skating rink, but it's not where Jerry Lee got the name 'Killer,' " Cecil Harrelson said, sitting at a wooden table in a back room at his house near Columbia, about an hour's drive from Ferriday.
"That happened when Jerry and I were kids. I used to work at Duke's department store and I was waiting on this colored woman. I happened to look out the window and I saw Jerry pass by, and I shouted, 'Hey, Killer,' just the way someone might shout, 'Hey, Sonny' or 'Hey, Buddy.' I don't know why I said Killer, but this colored lady about freaked out. She jumped up and down, thinking a real killer was on the loose.
"I told Jerry about it and we both started calling each other the name. Later, it got to be an easy way to talk to people when you didn't remember their name. Jerry's like me; I can't remember a name and you meet millions of people in show business. So, we just called everyone 'Killer.' "
Harrelson was Lewis' best buddy. He worked with Lewis through much of the '60s and early '70s, a sort of do-it-all road manager, pal and adviser. He also married Lewis' youngest sister, Linda Gail, twice. He also divorced her twice--the last time being about 14 years ago. He now lives off a remote country road--an area that seemed even more isolated on this dark, moonless night.
Harrelson, a solidly built man with arm muscles as hard as a hammer, was reluctant at first to talk about those days. "I don't like to be in the limelight," he said on the phone. Once Harrelson started talking, however, he seemed to relish reliving the old days in his mind: tales of racing through town so fast that Lewis closed his eyes or jumped in the back seat to better protect himself in case of a crash.
The irony is that four years ago, while driving down a country road near his house, Harrelson swerved off the road to avoid hitting a deer. The accident left him nearly crippled.
"My legs are so still so sore you can't hardly touch them," he said. "Some days I can't even walk. The legs won't carry me. . . . I never have minded getting old. I just hate having to be old and crippled."
There has been lots of publicity in recent years about Swaggart reaching out to Lewis--to get Lewis to forsake his flamboyant life style and accept Jesus Christ. But Harrelson tells of the times that Lewis helped his cousin.
Harrelson mentions the time Swaggart asked for Lewis' help in making a gospel record.
"We ran into Jimmy Lee in Muncie, Ind., or some other small town and Jimmy said, 'Jerry, I'd like to cut some records that I could sell to church groups,' and Jerry invited him to come to Memphis and he paid for the recording session. In fact, Linda Gail sang on some of the songs.
"Jimmy Lee went out and sold the records at the churches, and we did the same thing a couple more times. Each time, Jerry would pay for the sessions and Jerry's musicians worked for nothing. The third time, the musicians said, 'Ceece, we'd like to get paid this time.'
"I jumped as high as I could jump. I said, 'You guys are going to charge that preacher to cut a dadgum session . . . a preacher.'
"And they said, 'But Cecil, he drove up in a brand new Lincoln and none of us have new Lincolns. . . . and I said, 'Boys, you've got a point there.' "
Most people questioned around town said they haven't seen Swaggart in Ferriday in years (actually he was here a couple of years ago to preach at the funeral for Gilley's father). But many of them watch him every weekday morning at 6 on TV.
The program on a recent morning was a round-table on issues facing the ministry. Instead of the passion and fury of Swaggart's Sunday sermons, he appeared more thoughtful, subdued. The topic: restoration of the fallen pastor.
Some of the people interviewed in Ferriday that day wondered if Swaggart isn't already in need of restoration.
Said one resident, "I think that (getting power crazy) just goes with the territory. I don't agree with much of what I hear about him. I don't even think his daddy approves of him anymore."
The motto on the sign outside of Swaggart's Furniture on U.S. 84, just a couple of blocks from Frankie Jean Terrell's house, is "Why Pay More." Inside, the store is crammed, warehouse-like, with rows of sofas and tables.
W. L. Swaggart--known around town as "Son"--is a tall, thin man in his 70s who was a lawman before he became a minister and, later, opened the store. People around town seem confused about him. Some think he has made a lot of money and wonder why he lives frugally in a house trailer across the street from Terrell's house. Others think the store--and several other businesses--around town are owned by his son Jimmy Lee.
"Son" all but took a full step back when a reporter identified himself.
Before any question was asked, he said politely, but firmly, that he doesn't talk to reporters. He didn't like the way he was quoted in a couple stories. He said goodby and moved away.
An employee, Doris Poole, did, however, respond to the suggestion of a riff between the Swaggarts.
"How could anyone say a thing like that? He's so proud of Jimmy Lee. He's one of his biggest contributors. We are all proud of Jimmy Lee. We're also proud of Jerry Lee and Mickey. They were all good kids," she said. "I grew up with them, went to school with them."
Stiff initially, she began to reminisce. Like others, she seemed to enjoy talking about the early days when the kids all lived here.
She remembers Swaggart as a quiet child, with little of the charisma or flair that he exhibits today.
"The change in him has to be due to God," she said. "He was quiet, very reserved. Jimmy Lee will tell you himself, before God delivered him, he had a temper and everything."
Invariably, the talk drifted around to the controversy . . . the big house in Baton Rouge.
"Let me tell you something that most people don't know about Jimmy Lee. He could be a multimillionaire in his own right with his records. He takes nothing from the sale of those records. Everything he gets goes back into the ministry."
Terrell was considering the question about how two people who once stood side by side in church could end up so different.
"I've often thought about that, but I don't know how it happened," she said. "Jimmy's mother and father were strongly religious, devout Christians. My mother was a Christian, but she and Daddy wanted Jerry to go into a music career and whatever Mama and Daddy wanted, they got. I suppose they didn't think he would wind up (with such a controversial life style).
"But you know we all pray for Jerry. Jimmy does and I call the '700 Club's' prayer line . . . Pat Robertson's '700 Club' prayer line."
She paused.
"Let me tell you something . . . Jerry has seven more payments to make to the government (on back taxes). When that's paid, I feel like he'll go with Jimmy. He used to preach you know . . . when he was 16, 17, 18. I still have some of his sermons. He was a wonderful preacher."
Meanwhile, Terrell tries to maintain the old family house the way Lewis wants it. As she walks the guest to the door, she stops by an organ that Lewis used to play. She sees a fingerprint on the shiny wood and wipes it off.
"Jerry would hate to think someone had touched it," she said. "He even hates the fact that I bought a microwave for the kitchen."
It was late in the day and Sheriff Hubert Lee McGlothlin was alone in his office in nearby Vidalia. McGlothlin, 46, was mayor of Ferriday before Davis and he still lives there--right across the street from the old Assembly of God Church. If you get the feeling that hundreds of people attended that little white frame church in the '50s, it may help to know the congregation only numbered about 65 most Sundays.
McGlothlin was surprised when Davis' resentment of the Ferriday signs was mentioned.
"I don't think we've done enough to honor these men," he said. "The city of Ferriday should have a museum for them. I tried to do it when I was mayor, but people over there just don't have the motivation. I don't know if it was jealousy or what.
"Cities have soybean festivals and peach festivals, but we're talking about people here--people who made something of themselves. That's what this country is all about. Besides, tourists would come here from all around the world and Ferriday could use that money. The town hasn't got much going for it any more . . . farming, oil . . . everything is bad. Sometimes it seems like the only thing left are memories."
Jerry Lee’s Legacy
The Lewis family has opened a museum in their Ferriday home. Within it live the stories and spirits that forged rock’s Killer.
He’s back in the news. Rock & roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis — currently residing in Ireland for tax reasons — received a round of boos last month from an Italian audience after he kicked a photographer.
In Ferriday, Louisiana, Frankie Gean Terrell hears the report and sighs.
“He’s really a very kind person,” she says.
Then she reminds herself: the brother she calls “Darlin'” once tried to kill her. The family was living in Angola, where their father was working a construction job. Frankie Gean climbed into a baby carriage and asked Jerry Lee to push her. He did — down a ravine. Then he shouted, “We won’t ever see you again,” and walked away.
Yes, she explains, the photographer in Italy must have made her brother upset.
“Still,” she scolds, as if Darlin’ could hear her now, “you just don’t kick people.”
It’s morning in the Jerry Lee Lewis museum in Ferriday, Louisiana. One tour is scheduled this afternoon — a couple and their daughter, from Germany. Frankie Gean is also supervising the work at the family-owned drive-through convenience store and daiquiri shop next door, and two of her daughters are busy packing for an Aerosmith concert in Biloxi.
Frankie Gean raised her family in this house, and lives here now with her husband, Marion Terrell, and their youngest daughter, Melinda. According to Frankie Gean, the house was moved to this site by her Uncle Lee. Calhoun in 1929, and it served for years as the meeting home for the Lewis clan. Jerry Lee eventually bought the house for his mother, and when she died he sold it to Frankie Gean for a dollar.
Most of the clan, including first cousins Jerry Lee, evangelist Jimmy Lee Swaggart and country singer Mickey Gilley, have moved on from this small central Louisiana town in search of bigger audiences and congregations. But when Frankie Gean Terrell is away from the home — even as far as the store — she gets nervous.
The museum is dedicated to the family’s famous son, but it’s really a monument to the dark-haired woman who is affectionately called “Killer-ette” by her children. It’s Frankie Gean — Jerry Lee’s younger sister by nine years — who is custodian of her remarkable family’s home and history. When Jerry Lee would, scribble a sermon on a piece of paper and drop it on the floor, Frankie Gean would follow behind and scoop it up. Today she stores these tattered documents in a bank vault.
“I’ve been planning a museum here all my life,” she says. “Mother and Daddy always talked about people coming to look at Jerry’s things someday.”
It is the best unpublicized attraction in Louisiana. This week about eight fans made their way here. Most come from England and Northern Europe. American visitors are rare.
Plans for the museum include a souvenir shop, a double-tiered tour- featuring home movies, and brochures printed in several languages. A telephone machine will play tapes donated by Jerry Lee and Jimmy Lee. But the museum’s only current advertisement is a wooden sign, and it hangs in the garage. A volunteer ‘at the local chamber of commerce stares blankly when asked for directions. A phone call to the mayor’s office receives a similar response, although it is offered that Jerry Lee’s sister lives in Ferriday, and that “she’s a real nice lady.”
So far, the faithful who find Ferriday are those who come as if on a pilgrimage. Many spoon dirt from the front yard into plastic bags. Often they take off their shirts to reveal Jerry Lee Lewis tattoos; a man named Jay Halsey of London has 25 of these. Two other men have announced plans to leave their wives and children to come here to work as butlers.
“Why do they worship that yellow-headed idiot so?” asks Frankie Gean. “I have often wondered about that. And I said that to Mother one time and she hit me so hard that I didn’t ever ask that question again.”
***
Portraits of the Killer look down on Frankie Gean as she drinks coffee at her kitchen table. Two of her daughters, Mamie and Marian, are packing for their trip to Biloxi.
“We’re a hell-raising family, you know,” admits 24-year-old Mamie, who like her sisters has Uncle Jerry’s thick blonde hair. “I’m not going to sit here and play the innocent role. Everybody here can raise some hell.”
“If you studied any of the great composers-when they partied they got very excited,” says Frankie Gean.
Wayne Terrell, Frankie Gean’s only son, walks in the front door and joins the debate. Wayne is 32 and bears a striking resemblance to Jimmy Lee Swaggart,who is Frankie Gean’s “double first cousin,” and who was born here in the living room.
Recently Wayne has been leading most of the tours here. He’s a good storyteller with an endless stock of memories: when he was 14 he went to work for Uncle Jerry as a roadie. His job description was to pack the electric piano, “among other things.”
He recalls one day when a man knocked on the door of Jerry Lee’s Memphis home, announcing that he was regional director of the Internal Revenue Service. Wayne gathered his uncle’s rings and hid them in his underwear. After the IRS finished seizing the Killer’s worldly goods, Jerry Lee would dig up a stash of cash and, says Wayne, “off to Furniture World we would go!”
Wayne looks around at his family, laughing. “This happened twice when I was there.”
“It’s happened twelve times,” adds Frankie. “I’ve kept up with it.”
“We’re just a fun-loving bunch,” decides Mamie.
But, continues Wayne, who clearly takes after his mother in his interest in family folklore, the Lewises “come from a long line of wild people.”
The family ran a successful moonshining still for years. “They’d make Mama sit down behind the bushes on a long road,” recounts Wayne. “And if anybody would come down that road she was told to shoot them.”
“That’s the honest-to-God truth,” says Frankie Gean, turning to her daughter. “Well Mamie, I guess you grew up in quite a different little household. Quick, Mamie, tell Michael what you think of you upbringing. Be honest.”
“I’m strong from it.”
“And where do you get your strength from?”
“From you.”
“Thank you,” says Frankie Gean, satisfied.
***
“Living with Jerry Lee Lewis was extremely colorful,” recalls Frankie Gean, “and there wasn’t a day of boredom.”
From the start her big brother was made to feel special, she says. He would wake up and take breakfast at the Starck upright piano — the one his parents mortgaged their house and belongings to buy. There he sat, and there he’d amalgamate gospel, boogie-woogie, country-western and the blues into the still unnamed form of rock & roll. He’d play this non-stop until late at night.
“And he would play, play and play,” she says, “until I thought I would go insane.”
Then their mother would go to his side and lift his arm. “She’d say, ‘Elmo come look! Frankie come look!’ And we’d all gather around and she’d say, ‘Look at the hairs!’ And she’d say, ‘Jerry, every hair on your arm is perfect.’ And he would go, ‘It certainly is.’”
When Linda Gail, their youngest sister, took up the piano, she also earned such praise. “I asked, ‘Why won’t Linda help me wash dishes?’” remembers Frankie Gean. “‘Please make her help me.’ And Mother would say, ‘These hands can’t touch dishwater, Frankie. These hands play the piano.’”
When Frankie announced that she didn’t care for the piano, her family took her to the nearby church and prayed over her. And she heard about Linda’s perfect hands once too often, she took her sister’s palm and slammed it into the heater. Back to church.
She still bears the scar,” says Frankie Gean. “I felt so bad about that. Don’t look at me strange — the perfect hand and the perfect hair will finally push you to things.”
The two oldest children were much too similar to ever get along, says Frankie Gean. Once Jerry Lee brought home an injured grasshopper, and decided to nurse it back to health. He placed a white cloth on the floor, and set the little bug’s broken leg with a matchstick. “When I saw that,” remembers his sister, “I said, ‘Jerry, here’s your grasshopper,’ and I just made a greasy spot out of it. That’s awful. No wonder he tried to kill me…
“Oh, we fought. At the dinner table on holidays we always had a fork fight. He would say mean things, and I have such a temper. I’d take a fork and try to kill him — actually tried to stab him. Daddy and Mother would always block.
“And then I got a gun after him. One time. He hit at me, and I took the gun and shot right above his head and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ It’s so embarrassing, I never told anybody that. But he never hit at me again. For weeks he’d say, ‘Were you really going to kill me?’ And I’d say, ‘Of course not. I bluffed you.’
“And he never ate at the table, not ‘No Greater Than I Am’ — not Jerry Lee. He called us peasants…
“All the kin people would be out in the fields working. Mother would be pulling the sack, putting the cotton in it, Daddy would be right behind her, and I would be helping with Linda. He had a car, and he’d ride up — I have witnesses — he would ride up and down the gravel road along the river, and he would scream, ‘Work you peasants, work! For I don’t have to work! For I’m wearing the white shirt! I am the GREAT I AM!”
“The Great I Am!” Frankie Gean shakes her head, trying to clear the air of the blasphemy. “Oh Michael, how can I love him so?”
Mamie Terrell looks up from her suitcase. “They’re just alike,” she offers.
“The same,” nods Wayne.
“You’re just not as crazy as he is,” amends Mamie.
“Thank you. Thank you,” replies her mother, adding thoughtfully: “But I might have been…”
***
One day Marion Terrell, Frankie Jean’s husband, burst through the front door and screamed, “Curse the day you were ever born a Lewis!” He had just learned that he was being held responsible for some of Jerry Lee’s considerable debts. Frankie Jean remembers how she received the curse, and that she fell back into her chair, devastated.
Today is a calmer day, and Marion enters the house quietly. He is a curly-haired man with a self-possessed air of intelligence, and — like he does today — he has often pondered the family into which he married. “Throughout history, all of your great men, your brilliant men–”
“They were mean, weren’t they?” asks Frankie.
“They’re a breed of their own. They’re just like taking a Shar Pei and comparing him to a Scottie.”
“Who makes them like that? Their mothers?”
“No, it’s all in the genetic make-up–it’s in the DNA.”
“It wasn’t Mother’s fault, was it?”
“No, that’s years of breeding, Frankie. Every so often it comes to the surface. ”
“I guess so. Why am I so rebellious, though?”
“You’re no different than Jerry. He never gave one damn.”
“That’s the way I am. Born that way, and I shall die that way. I could lay down out there in that street and people wouldn’t accept me.”
“Well, let me ask you something. If you had been accepted, what would you have been?
“I haven’t thought about that.”
“You’d have been an ordinary person.”
“Well, thank God I wasn’t accepted. Thank you. It makes me feel wonderful. I guess the punishment has paid off — of being a Lewis.”
***
Working for Uncle Jerry was a “rock & roll party.”
There was the time, remembers Wayne Terrell, when the tour plane was stopped by the DEA. “\ said, ‘OK everybody, take all the drugs and put it in one jacket and we’ll say some idiot left it on the plane.’ It worked, he recalls. “They never did thank me for that.”
Wayne turns over other boyhood memories in his mind: “We demolished the house, we wrecked beautiful cars, rolled Rolls Royces, sank ski boats out in the lake with guns… I mean, for a 15-year-old, it was just great.”
His time at Jerry Lee’s side, says Wayne, should qualify him to work in any emergency room: “I took my uncle to the Doctors’ Hospital on Getwell Road in Memphis,” he remembers. “He had passed out and was turning different colors, so I put him over my shoulder and took him in.”
But while the Killer was in the hospital, Wayne and his family learned of plans to commit him to an asylum. Wayne headed back down Getwell with a crowbar. “I broke him out of a window… I went in, pulled a catheter out of his private pans and things out of his nose. He fell out in the bushes and started fighting with the bushes.
“Then I put him in the Rolls Royce and he drove a hundred and thirty miles an hour all the way home, driving with his hospital gown on. You could see his whole butt.
“I’ll never forget — I was laughing, and he turned around and said, ‘You better shut up, boy.’ And I stopped laughing.”
It was during a tour date in Sydney, Australia that Wayne had a chance to save his uncle’s life. “He was taking Placidyls — the same thing that killed Mama Cass. And he was eating Chicken Cordon Bleu, and he passed out with the chicken in his throat.”
Wayne was two floors above Jerry Lee when he heard what was happening. He jumped onto the fire escape and ran to his uncle’s side. When he reached the gasping body, he recalls, “I stuck my finger in his throat and dug and dug and dug. I took both of my knees and I fell on his chest, and I broke one of his ribs and cracked another — chicken and blood from my finger shot on my face.”
Wayne holds out his hand and displays a small white spot. “I have a scar on my finger from his teeth. I should have gotten a medal for saving him. But the producers were just mad because they had to shut the show off.”
“But Uncle Jerry thanked you, didn’t he?” reminds Frankie Jean.
“He sure did,” says Wayne.
His teen-aged years have been a hard act to follow, admits Wayne. He currently works in the family store in Ferriday, and contends that his notorious name has kept him from getting a job elsewhere in town. He also works at developing his anistic talent. There’s never been a famous artist from the family, he says. He’ll be the first.
***
Texas Avenue runs alongside Louisiana Avenue, and it’s the location of another popular destination for Jerry Lee Lewis fans in Ferriday. The family’s Assembly of God Church — originally financed by Uncle Lee — is located here, within sight of the Jerry Lee Lewis museum.
Both Frankie Gean and Jerry Lee sang for services in this white, woodframe building. Jerry Lee’s performances always earned the most applause, but when his younger sister sang, the church received the greater blessing. When she opened her mouth, she remembers, the spirit of God would rain down. There were prophecies and healings then, and people spoke in tongues.
“Jerry Lee always resented that,” says Frankie Gean.
One night at a revival a preacher was casting a demon out of a person’s body. “If anybody feels a tightness in their throat,” he announced, “the demon has entered you.”
Frankie Gean felt the tightness. She refused to eat for weeks, and eventually she passed out. Not until hospital x-rays showed no demon did she consent to put food between her lips.
There is a longstanding Lewis tradition for glimpsing visions of hell. As family legend has it, when Grandfather Lewis was on his deathbed, the old man screamed that he was seeing demons and was damned for eternity.
According to Wayne — and corroborated by biographers of Jerry Lee Lewis — the Killer lives in fear of meeting his grandfather’s fate.
“He really feels like he’s going to die and go to hell if he’s not careful,” says Wayne. “And I think that’s the reason his life has been spared so many times — because of his beliefs and his sincerity.”
Meanwhile, Frankie Gean has a reoccurring dream about Jimmy Lee Swaggart, whom she used to wonder if she loved more than her brother.
“He and I are always in this dream together. I know it sounds crazy — since I was very young I’ve had this dream, that no one makes it to heaven but us two. Now I know this sounds like a slam on Frances (Swaggart’s wife), but I’m sorry. It’s my dream. We go up to this beautiful place, and we get there by struggling and working all of our lives. And we’re so happy.”
***
The Germans are here.
The couple and their daughter have already seen Graceland, and then they drove south to Mississippi to Elvis’ boyhood home. Now they walk carefully around the Ferriday museum, where they study every picture, the gold records, Mamie Lewis’ old cook book, Jerry Lee and Myra’s embossed wedding matches, and the collection of Jerry Lee’s engraved guns that now belongs to the family.
“This is better, than Graceland,” says the man, speaking in halting English. “Graceland was too plastic.”
On the wall is an original poster from Jerry Lee Lewis Day, held in Ferriday in 1958, one year after what the family calls “The Year of the Record” -when “Great Balls of Fire” was released.
Today in Ferriday, however, it is difficult to find any evidence of Jerry Lee. A sign on the main road had his picture on it, but that’s been painted over.
By the end of the year the Chamber of Commerce plans to open “The Ferriday Museum,” which will include exhibits on Lewis, Swaggart and Gilley, as well as other famous Ferriday natives, including journalist Howard K. Smith.
The museum committee plans to notify Terrell, says chairwoman Amanda Taylor, adding that they are still in the beginning stages of development.
Frankie Gean isn’t satisfied. “For years nobody has recognized Jerry Lee here, and I’m taking the bull by the horns. When Jerry Lee saw that they painted over the sign, he was mad. He said that he wasn’t coming back.”
The Jerry Lee Lewis museum (It also may be called “Home of Jerry Lee Lewis and Family”) doesn’t yet have a fixed admission. Hours of operation (2-5 on weekdays, 12-5 on weekends) are approximate. The recorded announcement (at 318n57-4422) isn’t operating yet.
One of the biggest challenges for the museum is to obtain the original upright Starck piano. Frankie Gean has filed an injunction to retrieve the piano from the IRS.
On their way out of the museum, the German man turns to Frankie Gean. “I like Jerry Lee Lewis best,” he tells her. “I also like Elvis — but don’t tell Jerry Lee that.”
Frankie Gean gives him her word.
***
Mamie Terrell is trying to leave for Biloxi, but her mother stops her with one last question.
“You haven’t said what you wanted to say. I can see it in your eyes — you’re holding back.”
“I got to go, Mama.”
“Have you enjoyed living in this house?”
“No.”
Frankie Gean is pleased by her daughter’s candor. “And why? There’s too much Lewis hell here?”
“There’s not enough me.”
Frankie Gean’s passion for preservation sometimes tests her family’s ability to reside in a museum. The kitchen table, for example, is the metal hospital table onto which Frankie Gean and Linda Gail were delivered. One day Marion could take it no more, and he sawed off the leather straps. Leather straps, he said, have no place in the kitchen.
Memories, however, assume many forms in the Jerry Lee Lewis museum. “When I go to sleep at night, I think about all the things that happened here, over and over,” says Frankie Gean. “I can see Daddy spanking Jerry. I can see Mother trying to hold on to Linda.”
And she hears music.
There are six graves underneath the Jerry Lee Lewis museum. They were there when Uncle Lee moved the house here, and every few years they sink into the swampy earth, until someone has to crawl under the house to fill them in.
Perhaps. says Frankie Gean, this is why so many things have gone wrong for her household.
The family has always noticed unusual occurrences in the house: voices, music, the smell of whiskey.
Melinda Terrell is Frankie Gean’s youngest daughter, and the last one living at home. She has grown accustomed to seeing ghosts, but she can’t forget the night she heard her older sister Marian screaming. She ran to her bedroom to see her trying to get up, and she saw a force greater than hell pushing her back down.
Marian won’t sleep in the house anymore, says Frankie Gean.
A Catholic priest once attempted an exorcism here. Then he told the family they should leave. “He said, ‘This house has possessed you. Your (deceased) mother tells me that she wants you to get out of here.'”
An expert on the supernatural arrived from Pennsylvania, but said that the house was too evil to write about. “I was kind of insulted about that,” says Frankie Gean.
When Melinda was around eight, a woman from Las Vegas who heard about the family came to live in the house. One Sunday morning she was in the living room, watching Jimmy Lee Swaggart on television. It was a wonderful sermon. recalls Frankie Gean. The woman got up and walked past Melinda, took off her clothes and killed herself with a gun.
“That was the ugliest Sunday morning,” says Frankie Gean.
“The worst,” says Melinda.
There are other weird things here, adds the teenager. Like that big white body that’s been traversing the hallway since she was a child.
And sometimes a woman comes over to Frankie Gean and sits beside her. When Frankie Gean turns to her, she vanishes.
When asked where the spirits come from,
Frankie Gean looks around at her house and museum, at the pictures, at the furniture, at everything left just as it’s always been, and will be as long as she is alive.
“They come from people lingering,” she says.
***
There are innumerable and conflicting stories about Jerry Lee Lewis and his Ferriday family. The Killer’s career has been dogged with controversy ever since he married his cousin. Myra, and it continues to this day.
“We’re all persecuted: says Wayne Terrell. “People turn around and they say ‘Oh Jerry Lee!’ ‘Oh, his nephew!’ They have referred to me as a gun runner, a dope dealer, a hit man, a homosexual. Anything you can come up with, I’ve had the title.”
It will surprise some visitors to the Jerry Lee Lewis museum when their tour guide brings up subjects that other families might keep in the closet. Frankie Gean was, however, raised in the religious tradition of giving testimony.
“If you don’t exalt yourself and if you tell the truth,” she says confidently, “it turns out wonderful.”
“You tell the truth and there’s a certain mysticism behind it,” agrees Wayne. “And all of a sudden it just takes off like a bird…”
This family doesn’t truck with the “tooky-wooky” books and movies and television shows that movies and television shows that “candy-coat” the Lewis life. The truth is in the nitty-gritty, says Frankie Gean.
The crazed, honest truth.
Around her, the collected artifacts of an extraordinary clan might seem quiet. The red bricks of the house appear silent concerning any raging spirits outside. underneath or within.
But last December when Jerry Lee Lewis returned home. he walked around the house and touched each dish, table and photograph, until his eyes brimmed with tears and he left within the half-hour.
“One time he came in and said, ‘Where’s Mama?’And he looked at me and said, ‘Why did I say that. Frankie? I’m not crazy….if you could have seen his face.”
And every time she talks about moving, says Frankie Gean, “I wake up in the night and I can’t breathe: Her husband has to take her to the hospital, where they give her a shot of whatever they give her.
“This house is more than sticks and a few bricks: she explains. “It’s a living thing to us. I’m not insane — I haven’t gone into the woodwork, and this is not a Bette Davis movie. But this home here has a special comfort about it. It also has a lot of hell in it.”
And the house, she says,like the music it has known and born, will make a believer out of you.
Obituary for Marion Gene Terrell
Funeral services for Marion Gene Terrell, 73 of Ferriday, LA will be held at Young's Funeral Home- Ferriday on Monday, April 2, 2018 at 2PM. Interment will follow at Lee Calhoun Cemetery- Clayton, under the direction of Young's Funeral Home.
Marion Gene Terrell was born on Monday, October 16, 1944 in St. Jospeh and passed away Wednesday, March 28, 2018 in Ferriday. Marion had an unconditional love for his family. He was a hardworker and a very likeable guy that was the "Rock" of his family.
He was preceeded in death by his wife- Frankie Jean Lewis Terrell; father- James T. Terrell; mother- Ethel Prince; daughter- Jerry C. Terrell; and sister- Mary Jane Adams.
Survivors include: son- Boyce W. Terrell of Las Vegas,NV; 3 daughters- Mamie Terrell Jones & husband Jeffrey of Ferriday, LA, Marian J. Terrell of Ferriday, LA, and Linda Terrell Green & husband James of Tampa, FL; 2 granddaughters- Connor E. Davis of Houston, TX and Madelyn K. Green of Tampa, FL; brother- J.T. Terrell; twin sister- Martha Rice; and 2 sisters- Faye Bebee and Lola Patt.
Pallbearers will be James R. Green, Jeffrey D. Jones, Amos O. Montgomery, and Wayne Thompson. J.T. Terrell will serve as an honorary pallbearer.
The family will receive friends at Young's Funeral Home- Ferriday on Monday, April 2, 2018 from 12noon til service time at 2PM.