Message from Jerry's sister Frankie Jean to all Jerry Lee Lewis fans
Jerry's
sister Frankie Jean Lewis Terrell is running The Lewis Museum in
Jerry's birth place Ferriday, Louisiana. The museum has a unique
collection of pictures and memorabilia that can only be found there.
Frankie asked us to help her generate donations to help her pay the
taxes and keep this unique museum running. Any donation is more than welcome. Donations can be sent to:
The Lewis Museum
712 Louisiana Avenue
Ferriday, LA 71334
USA
If you would like her to write back to you, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Museum puts on the 'freak show'
FERRIDAY, La. — An Abba CD croons
"Dancing Queen" as Frankie Jean Lewis Terrell reclines dreamily on a
plastic chair inside the convenience store she owns in Ferriday, La.
She ignores the stale smell of beer and gestures frantically behind
her, to the Lewis Family Museum.
"What do you do with a white elephant?"
Terrell wants to know. A lopsided grin spreads across her face. "You
put it on display and have a freak show."
Terrell knows her fair share about
freak shows. She's the caretaker of the Lewis Family Museum, a maverick
stepchild to the official Southern shrine of Graceland — something
certain to irk its namesake Jerry Lee Lewis, who outlived, but never
outsold, Elvis Presley.
With her crooked smile, pale eyes and
wild hair, Terrell looks disarmingly similar to her famously rough
brother, '50s rocker Lewis. She closes her mouth and narrows her eyes
into hyphen-sized slits. "The Lewis Family Museum is the biggest freak
show there is," Terrell, 66, preaches.
In Ferriday, a Concordia Parish town of
about 4,000 some 13 miles west of the Mississippi River, few people
would disagree with Terrell's pronouncement that the museum is a temple
to the weird. In its unapologetic display of one famous family's
demons, the Lewis Family Museum transforms the painful into the
hilariously familiar.
Jerry Lee Lewis, who lives behind
graffiti-covered walls on a ranch in Nesbit, Miss., turned 70 in
September. In 2005 he won a Grammy for lifetime achievement. His star
has waned, but the music hasn't died. Lewis' next CD, "The Pilgrim,"
slated for release later this year, likely will be his last. Twenty-two
guest artists, including B.B. King, Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr and Eric
Clapton, recorded with the Killer.
The Lewis Family Museum affirms his
ever-so-humble beginnings. Alcohol, drugs and lawlessness set the
backdrop to the story of a poor sharecropper's son, Lewis, turned child
prodigy near rock 'n' roll's advent. They chronicle a crooner's rise
from the violent, booze-soaked nightclubs of Natchez, Miss., to his
immortalization in the bars of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and
"Great Balls of Fire."
If sin had a soundtrack, it would sound
very much like the wail of Jerry Lee Lewis' piano absorbing rage, which
is why Terrell also believes people travel from all corners of the
world — France, Japan, Australia — to walk across the floors of Lewis
family history.
"I guess people like that are a
curiosity to all of us," says Joan Svoboda, who visited from Nebraska.
"How come people visiting Memphis drive by Graceland?"
Unlike Graceland, the Ferriday museum
has few rules. Visitors may roam freely, from room to room. They may
take photographs and touch most everything, except the pianos. One, its
keys yellowed and jammed, is the first Jerry Lee Lewis ever pounded,
and it stands in a bedroom, its lid covered with framed family
photographs. Terrell says that ghosts of the living haunt this place,
but the dead don't stick around. She keeps glass bottles of whiskey
atop a black baby grand piano in the sitting room, a refusal to
sugarcoat her brother's dangerous climb to stardom.
"Once you come see this house and take
it all in, you're never the same once you leave," says Terrell, who
speaks with the frenetic pace of a street preacher.
She confesses to curling up on her
brother's bed at night, closing her eyes and pretending that time is
capable of stopping and rewinding. She can listen to the past anytime
she wants. She can replay it like a record.
"At night when I close my eyes, I can
hear Jerry playing the piano," Terrell says. She e-mails her brother at
least once a week, through her sister, musician Linda Gail Lewis.
Ferriday's other famous former
residents, Linda Gail Lewis, Jimmy Lee Swaggart and Mickey Gilley, all
enjoy corners of memorial in Terrell's museum, in the family home.
Visitors may prowl the bedroom of Linda Gail Lewis, touch her makeup
brushes (left on a nightstand) or let their fingers waltz across her
dresses.
The museum pays little attention to
Jerry Lee's marriage to his second cousin, Myra Gale, when she was 13.
The scandal sank Lewis' career at a time when some thought he would
surpass Presley in popularity. "You don't get inducted into this hall
of fame," Terrell cackles. "You get indicted." The infamous marriage
license of Lewis and Myra Gale hangs on a faux-wood paneled wall.
Visitors may think they've fallen
through a portal to the 1950s. The oven in the kitchen holds shellacked
bread baked decades ago on a Christmas morning by the now-deceased
matriarch Mamie Lewis, who on Sept. 29, 1935, birthed the Killer on a
four-poster bed exhibited in the home. The highchair of the man whose
music helped define rock sits in the corner. His tattered baby clothes
string a fine line above a bed. Their presence proclaims that even
Jerry Lee Lewis had to start somewhere.
"It's strange how life goes on in other
places and it just stops here," Terrell says sadly. "It's incredibly
strange," she repeats.
Terrell says the home has always been a
museum, but she officially started giving tours in 1960, lately adding
a small admission fee because of rising costs. Her convenience store
pays the taxes and utilities.
A chronic pack rat, she could wallpaper
three rooms with the letters she has saved since the age of 11. She
claims to have started the museum when she was 6 because she knew
"Jerry Lee was special." Neighbors came from miles to hear him play the
piano, and Terrell didn't want anyone to forget the music. That's why
she stayed on in Ferriday, a dust-laced Louisiana delta town about 100
miles north of Baton Rouge.
"It's good to never change an address," Terrell says. "Jerry Lee can come back and see his baby shoes."
She keeps a house in Ferriday, but
sleeps in the museum at night. She eats all her meals in its kitchen.
Even if she tried to leave, she says she thinks the house would drag
her back. The house isn't officially haunted, but Terrell believes that
memories, all great and terrible, have enchanted its rooms.
After
soaking up the Lewis saga — similar to a "Dallas" rerun minus the
millionaires — museum visitors may sit with Terrell in her convenience
store and drink something a Lewis would drink — usually whiskey, she
says. Fans enter for free. Critics have to pay a dollar and only get to
see one room. That's Terrell's rule.
| 
It's a grotesque half-acre unfit for animals, much less a young woman and her two daughters. 
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