Photo by Ruth Laney
The Killer, the Preacher, and the Cowboy
J. D. Davis tells the story of three cousins from Ferriday who hit the big time.
Growing up in Quitman, a small town in the piney woods of northeast Texas, author J. D. Davis was exposed early on to the famous trio from north Louisiana—cousins Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart, and Mickey Gilley.
Lewis and Swaggart are double first cousins. Lewis and Gilley are first cousins. Gilley and Swaggart are first cousins once removed. The men are related through maternal and paternal lines that Davis details in his 2012 book Unconquered: The Saga of Cousins Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart, and Mickey Gilley.
Lewis, known as “The Killer” for his wild way with a piano, was a huge hit in the fifties with such rock & roll classics as “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Gilley was a country-music singer best known for opening “the world’s biggest honky-tonk” in Pasadena, Texas—the model for the dance hall in Urban Cowboy. And Swaggart gained fame as a televangelist—and infamy for his fall from grace for allegedly consorting with prostitutes.
How it began: Listening to Jerry Lee Lewis in the seventies
“I’ve been gathering information since I was a kid,” Davis explains about his research on the three cousins. “I saw Urban Cowboy and the Jerry Lee biopic Great Balls of Fire. In 2009, I really began reading, and I went to Ferriday. That opened my eyes. A lot has been written, but the most compelling story to me is the fact that they are cousins who grew up very close. That’s what wraps their lives together.”
As a child in the seventies, Davis first heard Lewis and Gilley on Country radio. (Lewis’s rock career had nosedived after he married his thirteen-year-old cousin in 1957, when he was twenty-two. Fans shunned him, radio stations dropped him, and he struggled for years to regain his stature. Eventually he turned to Country music.) Gilley released such hits as “Room Full of Roses” and "Don't the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.”
“Their singing was great but it was their piano playing that really drew me in,” says Davis. I remember hearing Jimmy’s music every Sunday morning. He did an hour-long show—preaching, playing piano, and singing gospel songs.”
As a teenager, Davis became a huge fan of Lewis. He estimates he has been to more than fifty of his concerts—the first of which was at an outdoor music festival in Austin in the early 1990s, when Davis was a college student at the University of Texas. “I was absolutely blown away,” he recalls. “He was amazing. He was in his late fifties, but when he put his hands on those keys it was like he metamorphosed into a man twenty years younger.”
Fascinated by the three men from Concordia Parish who had achieved amazing success, after completing a master’s degree in liberal studies at Southern Methodist University in 2009, Davis decided to write a book.
Researching the Lewis, Swaggart, and Gilley Families
[Read this: No-Name Records and its mountain of Cajun music draw vinyl enthusiasts to the tiny town of Rayne.]
Born in Ferriday in 1935 and ’36 during the Great Depression, the cousins grew up poor, but each exhibited musical talent at an early age. They were raised in the Pentecostal church, and each had close relationships with their mothers.
None of the three men maintains a home there now, but in his research, Davis found plenty of relatives in Ferriday. He talked to Gilley’s sister Edna, who died in 2012 at eighty-seven. He also interviewed Lewis’s sisters Linda Gail and Frankie Jean. “I developed a pretty close friendship with Frankie Jean, who is a character herself,” he says. “They had a ton of information, not only on Jerry but on the other two cousins.”
He spent three years on the book, working nights and weekends while holding down his day job and raising three daughters. He made numerous research trips to Ferriday and also traveled to Memphis; Nashville; Baton Rouge; Houston; Branson, Missouri; and Cleveland, Tennessee.
He conducted about one hundred interviews, taping most of them. “There are so many interesting people in this family,” he says. “I’ve collected hundreds of family photos.
Ferriday: A Musical Haven
Davis describes Ferriday as “the perfect harmonic convergence of blues, gospel, and country. It was on the chitlin circuit. Will Haynie owned a club there called Haynie’s Big House. He was black and grew up dirt poor, but he became successful.
“Jerry would sneak in the back and listen to the blues. Sometimes Jimmy would go, too. Haynie allowed them to come in but told them not to let their rich uncle [businessman Lee Calhoun] know or he’d get in trouble.
[Read this: A look at Louisiana's reputation through the lens of Easy Rider.]
“Everybody played there—eighteen-year-old B. B. King, Irma Thomas, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland. It was one of the few places in the South where they could play and also have a place to stay, because Haynie owned a hotel in the back. People would come from Monroe, Alexandria, Shreveport. It was one of the most important blues joints in the South. It burned down in the Sixties.”
How They Made it Big: Conquered and Unconquered
Lewis was the first cousin to make it big with his breakout hit “Crazy Arms” in 1956. Meanwhile, Swaggart and Gilley, who both got married as teenagers, were sweating out a living—Swaggart as a dragline swamper and street preacher in Ferriday and Gilley as a pipe layer in Houston.
“When Jerry Lee became successful, Jimmy and Mickey were performing grueling manual labor,” says Davis. “That inspired them to find their own paths to success.” As he delved into their story, Davis was intrigued by “Conquered and Unconquered,” a game of derring-do the cousins played. “One of them would do a stunt and the others would have to do it, too, or be ‘conquered,’” says Davis. “They jumped from boxcar to boxcar or executed death-defying feats on their bicycles. They were always looking for a new, amazing feat that would best the other two.”
Meeting Mickey Gilley
It was Gilley who told Davis about the game. The author was in the audience in Baton Rouge last May when Louisiana Public Broadcasting honored Gilley as a Louisiana Legend. Before the event, the musician chatted about the book.
“He called me up for a date and I told him I didn’t like guys,” joked Gilley, seventy-six, who calls the author “Jim.”
“I think there’ll be a lot of interest in the book,” Gilley said. “The three of us are the key. What a situation. Three boys—I’m the youngest and the best looking. All of us went in separate directions, and all of us had success. You think about what happened with the three of us, it’s phenomenal—almost unbelievable.
“Jim pulled some things out of me that I hadn’t thought about in years,” said Gilley. “I told him stories of us growing up, about how as kids we had a game called ‘Conquered and Unconquered’: ‘I dare you to do that.’ We could’ve killed ourselves.”
[Read this: The last resident to leave the river community known as Atchafalaya was a beekeeper.]
Gilley, who now owns a theater in Branson, was the only cousin who cooperated with Davis on the book. “Jerry Lee and Jimmy [wouldn’t talk to Davis extensively],” he noted. “It irritates me. Here we are in the twilight years of our life and our careers and we can’t leave a legacy. I’d like to see a film done about us before I die.”
Davis has already fielded calls. “There’s been some initial interest from the movie industry,” he says. “I think the story is destined to be a film at some point.”
But for now, he’s enjoying good press for a book he hopes will be the definitive biography of three cousins who defied the odds. “I’m a native Texan, but I just find Louisiana fascinating,” he confesses.
“Their story is interesting and compelling on so many levels,” he says. “The Depression era in the South, music in the twentieth century, the duality of good and evil, the conflict between music and religion. It’s a really fascinating story on so many levels. It’s that human story that compelled me to write the book.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.
