Jerry Lee Lewis's birthplace — Ferriday, Louisiana

Jerry Lee Lewis was born on September 29, 1935, in Ferriday, Louisiana, a small town on the Mississippi River in Concordia Parish. He grew up there alongside his cousins Jimmy Swaggart — who became an evangelical preacher and televangelist — and Mickey Gilley — who became a country music star — in a family environment saturated with Pentecostal Christianity and the music that ran alongside it. The particular tension in Lewis's life and music between the sacred and the secular began in Ferriday: the church condemned the kind of music he wanted to play, and he spent decades unable to fully resolve the conflict.

He taught himself piano on the family's upright, absorbing gospel, country, and the R&B he heard on Black radio stations across the river. He attended the Southwest Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, briefly, was expelled for playing boogie-woogie versions of hymns, and returned to Louisiana before eventually making his way to Memphis. At Sun Studio in 1956, he recorded "Crazy Arms" and then "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" — a performance so physically intense and musically commanding that when he appeared on The Steve Allen Show in July 1957, the response was the kind that launches careers overnight.

Ferriday has a small museum — the Delta Music Museum — dedicated to Lewis, Swaggart, Gilley, and the other musicians connected to the area, including Aaron Neville's Louisiana roots. The town is modest and the museum reflects that modesty, but the concentration of musical talent from a single small Louisiana town is genuinely remarkable: three cousins, three entirely different careers, all beginning in the same Ferriday households.