By Wesley Harris
Imagine if Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley, and Jimmy Swaggart had grown up in Ruston, Louisiana. Would the community be any different than it is today?
It could have happened had the Lewis family made different decisions.
The Lewis family became a vital part of Ruston from the very beginning of the railroad town. They operated Ruston’s first store. The Lewises married into the Kidds, another important family in Ruston’s early days. The stores operated by the Lewis family for over a century anchored the downtown area that saw its fortunes rise and fall with the times.
Before there was a Ruston, before there was a railroad across north Louisiana to spawn a new town, the Lewis family was living in Alabama under the family patriarch Jeptha Lewis. When Jeptha and quite a number of other family members died in the late 1840s, much of the remaining family moved west.
Led by several of Jeptha’s sons, the family crossed the Mississippi River at or near Natchez into Louisiana. According to family lore, one of the sons was always tardy when it was time to break camp and move on. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Ferriday, the son was nowhere to be seen and tired of always waiting on him, the family moved on without him. The story the family tells is that the son left behind was the ancestor of Jerry Lee, Mickey, and Jimmie.
The actual story may not be as colorful as the family legend. Seeking places to open up businesses, the large family moved into north central Louisiana but thought it best to split up and operate businesses in separate towns for the best financial outcomes. Andrew Jackson Lewis took his family to Vernon, then the seat for Jackson Parish. George Washington Lewis took his brood to Monroe. The two branches operated mercantile establishments through the 1850s and 60s through the conclusion of the Civil War.
Vernon suffered greater economic woes during the Civil War and the subsequent period of reconstruction, so Andrew Jackson Lewis moved from Vernon to Trenton, now West Monroe. With the entire family back together, they worked in merchandising until 1883 when the railroad across north Louisiana was finally extended west from Monroe to Shreveport and plans were made for the development of a town called Ruston.
Kathy McBride Cox, great granddaughter of Andrew Jackson Lewis, says no levee existed in Trenton at the time and the Lewis store and home flooded twice by the Ouachita River. “My great grandfather had had enough and heard about the new train track going to Ruston. He though there would be a good opportunity there.”
Andrew Jackson and George Washington and other family members moved to the new town and started the first store with a barrel of whiskey and a box of cigars and married into the Kidd family. At one point, a store named Lewis & Kidd was the go-to place for just about anything in downtown Ruston.
By the time of the move, George Washington and his wife’s grown children and grandchildren had migrated out of Monroe to Richland Parish.
Their son Leroy Milton Lewis and children lived a hardscrabble life farming in Richland and the adult kids decided to try their luck in Ferriday in Concordia Parish. Elmo had a son named Jerry Lee, daughter Ada had son Mickey with her husband Arthur Gilley and Irene married Willie Swaggart and bore a son named Willie Leon or just “Son.” Son and his wife had James Swaggart, nicknamed Jimmy.
The three cousins got their “musical gene” from their grandfather, according to Cox. “[He] could pick up any instrument whether stringed, a horn, harmonica—and after playing with it a bit—could play it. Jerry Lee got that gene because what else could explain the way he played a piano! I believe Mickey and Jimmy got some of that gene, too.”
The Ruston Lewises actively embraced public life, engaging in cultural pursuits, politics, public service, and growing their mercantile enterprise. If anyone found success in Ruston, it was the Lewises.
“Ruston was good to the Lewises and they in turn were good to Ruston,” Cox says.
While Lewises and Ruston prospered—the huge family home still stands on the dead end of East Alabama Avenue—the Lewis descendants in Ferriday found life hard. In his book “Unconquered” on the three cousins, J. D. Davis writes, “Ferriday was known for hardened men and disappointed women, and as a borough for the downtrodden poor consigned to battle the relentless forces conspiring to keep them that way. Ferriday was where God-fearing people prayed for a better life without expecting to find one; where there was punishing labor or no work at all; where plowed fields veered between parched and flooded, and brutal summer heat was interspersed with sudden, volent squalls. It was where men found refuge in liquor and fast women, if only momentarily.”
So, Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley, and Jimmy Swaggart grew up together in Concordia Parish, poor country cousins to the prosperous Ruston Lewises. But they learned to play the piano and sing and kick up their heels at a moment’s notice. And made their own success from their own talents.
Jerry Lee’s soaring rock ‘n’ roll career faltered after he married a 13 year-old cousin. But he rebounded and became a star. Mickey Gilley chose country music and recorded 17 number one hits, reaching the pinnacle of his career when the movie “Urban Cowboy” was patterned after his huge Pasadena, Texas bar. Jimmy Swaggart became the best known televangelist who preached and prayed and played the piano every Sunday before millions until an admission of sinful behavior brought down his ministry.
One can only wonder what mid-century Ruston would have been like had those three men moved here with the rest of the family. Would they have changed Ruston? Or would Ruston have changed them?
