FERRIDAY, La. -- Frankie Lewis Terrell puts down her bottle of whiskey, closes the window to her drive-through liquor store and walks next door to begin the tour of 712 Eighth Ave., the family home that became a museum.

Pictures of first cousin Mickey Gilley sit atop a table. The birthing quilt of the first cousin Jimmy Swaggart lies on the very bed where, Frankie claims, the televangelist was "conceived in sin." And then there is the kitsch of big brother Killer: the golf clubs from O.J. Simpson, the Killer's rifles, his baby shoes, and, preserved for posterior uh, posterity: the Killer's potty-training toilet.

"That," says his baby sister, her chest swelling with pride, "is where Jerry Lee Lewis of Ferriday, Louisiana, learned to do his business."

Perhaps no town in America revels more in the messiness of life -- especially the lives of its favorite sons -- than Ferriday, five miles from the Mississippi River in northeast Louisiana. And certainly no single family has produced, in one generation, three pop culture figures as well-known, talented and notorious as Gilley, Lewis and Swaggart. From one little place, one small family, came three Southern archetypes: tortured country music singer, over-the-top rock star and disgraced preacher.

The Ferriday Three they are called in these parts, as if the first cousins were defendants in a criminal conspiracy. But there was nothing planned about "this crazy town or our crazy family," says Frankie. Instead, writes author Elaine Dundy in her history of Ferriday, lightning "not only struck twice in the same place it struck three times."

And if those three bolts started some wildfires, well, all the better for Ferriday. Damage can be entertaining. Everyone here seems to keep a broken piano that is deemed a relic because it was supposedly destroyed by Jerry Lee's ungodly banging on the keys. In a town of only 4,500, two competing museums -- one run by the Ferriday elite, the other by a devoted relative -- trade in controversy.

"All three [men] are sort of notorious, which is good," says Amanda Taylor, the Concordia Parish librarian who helped put together one of the museums. "People are not interested in perfect people."

Locals brag that this town, a crossroads 100 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, 80 miles south of Monroe, has always been a semi-wicked place, a mixture of hell-raising Friday night and Jesus-praising Sunday morning.

Here, at the junction of U.S. highways 65 and 84, good and evil, in all their forms, seem to intersect: morality and promiscuity, holiness and sin, God and the devil. Such opposing forces naturally conflict. But viewed in the Louisiana light, they are as close as cousins.

Before 1900, there was no town, only the Helena Plantation. Then J.C. Ferriday convinced the railroads to choose his field for their shops. In 1906, Ferriday was incorporated.

The new town was wide open. Southerners, Northerners, railroaders, real estate speculators, whites, blacks, Jews, Italians, even Chinese and Mexican immigrants moved here. Timber companies took the best wood out. Breweries and baseball bat factories opened. In the 1920s, Gov. Huey Long made Ferriday safe for slot machines, and the gamblers arrived.

Coming to town

Swaggarts, Lewises and Gilleys had been lured to town to pick cotton and bootleg whiskey. They stayed to build families. In 1935, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Lee Swaggart were born; their mothers, Minnie Bell Swaggart and Mamie Lewis, were sisters. Mickey Gilley -- whose mother Irene was sister to Jerry Lee's father, Elmo -- came into world less than 12 months later, in 1936.

The family was more colorful than rich. Arthur Gilley, Mickey's father, ran a taxi service and chased women. Elmo Lewis did odd jobs and spent time in jail. Son Swaggart had a few businesses, played the fiddle but eventually chose to scratch out a living as a minister.

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. 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.

While Swaggart considered a country music career and Gilley and Lewis briefly contemplated the ministry, all three came to their callings early. Swaggart says God first spoke to him when he was 8. Lewis was so gifted by age 9 that his father mortgaged the house to buy a piano.

Each of the three high school dropouts achieved lasting fame and fleeting success. Gilley, a Grammy winner, has had 17 records go to the top of the country charts. As a televangelist, Swaggart built one of the largest ministries in the world, his face once shown on televisions in more than 100 countries. Lewis recorded the rock standards "Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On" and, for a time, rivaled his friend Elvis Presley.

Never close cousins

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. Only Jerry Lee would be nearly ruined by marrying a 13-year-old cousin.

Early on in Ferriday, scandal was far away. But the cousins' relationships were never easy; each has taken credit for the others' early successes. Jimmy still brags of having talked their third-grade teacher into passing his cousin into the next grade. Jerry Lee has said he helped his cousins make their first country and gospel albums, respectively.

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. 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 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 poverty

and hardship." Jerry Lee's retort: "Mickey and Jimmy, they don't have the depth I have. I got all the talent. They just got the scrappings." Mickey, for his part, refuses to perform or talk much with either.

Beyond 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. "We wanted to be any place but Ferriday."

All three made it out. Lewis lives in Mississippi, Swaggart in Baton Rouge, Gilley in Branson, Mo. Most of their relatives are dead, or long ago moved away. But Ferriday never renounced its famous cousins. Their names decorate signs leading into town, and its two museums draw a small but steady stream of visitors.

At 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. The exhibits in its two-room display area, put together by a committee of five citizens, take the sunny view.

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. Volunteer staffers discuss these topics if pressed, but make clear that the museum's attractions are its donated pictures and mementos.

Under glass is a huge diamond "MG" that Mickey has worn around his neck. In a corner sits an old piano of Jerry Lee's, its keys broken. The jacket from an early album of Jimmy's, "Some Golden Daybreak," hangs on a wall. Jimmy's wife, Frances, even passed along a copy of the only picture of the three cousins together as adults, taken a decade ago at a rare family occasion.

"Everything here is well researched and accurate," says librarian Taylor. "But you go on down to Frankie's place. You'll hear a lot of stories. You have to decide for yourself which ones to believe."

The Lewis House, as Frankie's museum is known, doesn't open until 1 p.m., and the door stays unlocked past 8 -- even later by appointment. 712 Eighth Ave., where Jerry Lee spent some of his youth, is impossible to miss. There's a bright orange ball of fire on the mailbox, a piano sculpture on the lawn and a blue sign listing Jerry Lee's best-known songs.

Inside, Frankie says, "The stuff here is very real, very old and very strange."

Memorabilia comes from both family and fans. There is a Little Rock cookbook autographed and sent by President Clinton, who phones at least once a year. Five of Jerry Lee's marriage certificates are on display. Frankie even keeps a check for $10,403.99 that Elvis made out to her in 1971. ("He was on drugs then," she explains. "Elvis thought I was selling him a car.")

Family secrets

Frankie says she respects the town museum, but says it's too conservative for her taste. She delights in exposing her family's secrets. She maintains the Lewises are Jewish (an assertion Jerry Lee has publicly denied), and openly speculates that he killed one of his ex-wives. Nevertheless, brother and sister remain close; the Killer visits a couple of times a year.

"You're talking about a man who plays piano 15 hours a day," she says. "He's a little loony."

Her theories about the cousins are both psychological -- Mickey has an inferiority complex; Swaggart was disgraced because he never had a girlfriend as a teen-ager and was not allowed to drink Coca-Cola -- and biological. Why is the family successful? "I think it's from all the cousins marrying," Frankie says. "There are cousins marrying that no one talks about in our family. They kept the genes all pure. With pure genes you get some special traits.

"You also get a lot of sadness."

Neither Ferriday nor its favorite sons are what they used to be. The Arcade Theater, where Jimmy first heard God, is gone. A few years back, the town's submachine gun-toting mayor, named Sammy Davis Jr., was indicted. "You don't even have much music anymore," says Gene Tumminello, who volunteers at the Ferriday Museum. "No one is teaching it, not even at the high school."

In Baton Rouge, Swaggart still sings and plays the piano on Sundays, but before a small congregation in a mostly empty complex. Jimmy Swaggart Ministries never recovered from the exposure of his sin in 1988.

Jerry Lee Lewis still performs, but his career never fully recovered from the revelation of his marriage to his cousin 40 years ago. Financial troubles dog him, says his sister, and the Killer has expressed his disgust with the demon influence of popular music.

Mickey Gilley lost millions in a dispute with the partner in his Pasadena, Texas, roadhouse, celebrated in the movie "Urban Cowboy." On July 4, 1990, it burned down; the cause has never been determined.

Gilley, though, seems the most comfortable with the town. He has good relationships with both museums, and fliers for his Branson theater are readily available in Ferriday. This spring, the town renamed a street for him.

"But I don't think it's easy for any of them, and they can't depend on each other," says Frankie.

Meanwhile, the museums are growing slowly. The Ferriday Museum is starting to get bus tours, and Frankie says she may open branches of the Lewis House next year in Nashville and London, spreading the story of her family's pain.

"That's all I do: sell booze and talk about this family and this town all the time," she says, sighing. "It's fun, and heartbreaking, to relive the music. I hope that for somebody, it's worth it."

Pub Date: 12/04/98