Jerry Lee Lewis

Jerry Lee Lewis was born in Ferriday on September 29, 1935, and grew up with the sacred and the secular side by side. He sang gospel with his cousin Jimmy Swaggart at Assembly of God meetings, and as an underage boy he listened from outside to Black blues players at Haney's Big House. At fifteen he enrolled at Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, and was expelled after three months, partly for playing a hymn with a boogie-woogie beat. Sun Records signed him in 1956. He died in Memphis on October 28, 2022, at eighty-seven.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frogmore Cotton Plantation and Gins — 6.9 mi
  A working cotton farm near Ferriday that tells the plantation story through the people enslaved there, with quarters, an ancient mound and a rare steam-engine gin.
• Vidalia Landing Riverfront — 9.0 mi
  A riverwalk on the Mississippi at Vidalia, built on the site of the old town that moved west in 1938 when the river was cut off.
• Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge — 27 mi
  A 25,000-acre bottomland refuge beside Catahoula Lake, a Ramsar wetland that is a major early-season stop for ducks on the Mississippi Flyway.
• Lake Bruin State Park — 31 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.

More markers nearby

• Frank Morris — steps away
• Haney's Big House — steps away
• Don José Vidal — 7.8 mi
• Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 — 9.0 mi