Jimmy swaggart home free#

There are no overt references to the trio's troubles: the mysterious arson that destroyed Mickey's failing club outside Houston Jerry Lee's marriage to a 13-year-old cousin and the questionable circumstances surrounding the death of another wife Jimmy's taste for prostitutes, exposed in 1988 in a New Orleans motel. The exhibits in its two-room display area, put together by a committee of five citizens, take the sunny view.

Jimmy swaggart home free#

Their names decorate signs leading into town, and its two museums draw a small but steady stream of visitors.Р”Р„t the Ferriday Museum, a converted bank lobby opened in 1995 at the direction of the Chamber of Commerce, admission is free and hours are daytime only, 9 to noon and 1 to 4 daily. But Ferriday never renounced its famous cousins. Most of their relatives are dead, or long ago moved away. Lewis lives in Mississippi, Swaggart in Baton Rouge, Gilley in Branson, Mo. 'We wanted to be any place but Ferriday.'Р”Р„ll three made it out. They just got the scrappings.' Mickey, for his part, refuses to perform or talk much with either.Р”В«eyond their differences, though, the cousins were bound together by a desire to leave each other, and their hometown, behind: 'Sometimes we let our dreams run away with us as we talked of leaving Ferriday for the bright lights of New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville,' Swaggart wrote recently. In more recent writings, Swaggart, who many locals believe was the most musically talented of the trio, accuses his cousins of 'buying the lie of the devil that serving God is a life of povertyР”Р„nd hardship.' Jerry Lee's retort: 'Mickey and Jimmy, they don't have the depth I have. He also blames his kinship with Jerry Lee for the conservative Assembly of God's initial refusal to ordain him in the late 1950s. In his autobiography, 'To Cross a River,' Jimmy writes of his resentment at making $30 a week as a country preacher when Jerry Lee was taking home $80,000 a month. Jerry Lee has said he helped his cousins make their first country and gospel albums, respectively. Jimmy still brags of having talked their third-grade teacher into passing his cousin into the next grade. But the cousins' relationships were never easy each has taken credit for the others' early successes. Only Jerry Lee would be nearly ruined by marrying a 13-year-old cousin.Р”В®arly on in Ferriday, scandal was far away. The King and the Killer, in fact, were born in the same year, had fathers in jail, saw older brothers die in childhood, and learned to sing in black clubs and white churches. Lewis recorded the rock standards 'Great Balls of Fire' and 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On' and, for a time, rivaled his friend Elvis Presley. As a televangelist, Swaggart built one of the largest ministries in the world, his face once shown on televisions in more than 100 countries. Gilley, a Grammy winner, has had 17 records go to the top of the country charts. Lewis was so gifted by age 9 that his father mortgaged the house to buy a piano.Р”В®ach of the three high school dropouts achieved lasting fame and fleeting success. Swaggart says God first spoke to him when he was 8. While Swaggart considered a country music career and Gilley and Lewis briefly contemplated the ministry, all three came to their callings early. Mickey, Jerry Lee and Jimmy knew to stay on the white side of Mississippi Avenue, but nevertheless found comfort and musical inspiration at Haney's Big House, a black nightclub. 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.