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. At the piano in a honky-tonk, Lewis can tell stories with soul-lifting Judgment Day fury. 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. 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. 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. “We wanted to be any place but Ferriday,” Swaggart once wrote. And, at some point, they each began making plans on how to escape the dead-ends of a small town. They attended the same church, walked to school together and even played the same piano. Lewis and Swaggart (and Gilley) were born within months of each other 51 years ago-and grew up in each other’s houses. 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. Smith, whose family moved away when he was 3, and Mrs. Also listed: country singer Mickey Gilley, who is a cousin of Lewis and Swaggart’s, TV newsman Howard K. Jimmy Lee Swaggart and Jerry Lee Lewis aren’t the only names on the signs that greet motorists at both of the U.S. It makes you wonder if this town was blessed or if it was cursed.” Ferriday could give the world two people that have done as much as Jimmy and Jerry. He said, “You know, it really is something to think that this little old town. 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 loves Lewis’ records, but shakes his head over the rocker’s outlandish image. Later in the day, another Ferriday resident also wondered about the town’s cousins in sin ‘n’ salvation. It’s very frustrating to him that he can’t bring Jerry over to the gospel. and he’s very concerned about Jerry (and his notorious ways). “I must have 300 of his tapes,” confided Terrell, settling in the dining room area.

Jimmy swaggarts home