Jimmy Swaggart & Jerry Lee Lewis - The Boys From Ferriday

(JIM Records, 2022)

JIM Records

Coinciding with the death of Jerry Lee Lewis on October 28, 2022, was the release of Jimmy Lee & Jerry Lee - The Boys From Ferriday on Swaggart’s JIM Records, the record label associated with his Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. A nine-song collection of standard gospel tunes, the release complicates Lewis’s immediate commercial afterlife which also includes another collection of spirituals Lewis was recording with T-Bone Burnett, begun after the singer’s 2019 stroke, the status of which is unknown, making this present release the last or next-to-last recording made by Lewis.

Recordings made late in an artist’s life are often important and generate the obvious question of whether the recordings are justified by artistic or cultural merit or are simply exploitation for financial gain. Notable examples of the former include Billie Holiday’s Lady In Satin (Columbia, 1958) and Last Recording (MGM, 1959); June Carter Cash’s Wildwood Flower (Dualtone, 2003) and Johnny Cash’s American V: A Hundred Highways (American, 2006) and American VI: Ain’t No Grave (American, 2010). These recordings revealed artists, diminished by age and/or illness, whose efforts remained fundamentally compelling and even historically crucial. The more important the artist, the more latitude warranted beneath the banner of homage-driven good intentions. But there are limits to such allowance

An example of the overt exploitation of an elderly or infirm artist was Anita O’Day’s final recording, Indestructible! (Kayo Records, 2006). The only travesty greater than committing these performances to tape (and then selling them) was the creepy way that O’Day and the recording were promoted, with references to a photo shoot that included the word “hot.” No, O’Day would have been better left alone to fade into the sepia-tinged fog of nostalgia rather than melt beneath the hot lights of now.

The same thing can be said for Jerry Lee Lewis’s contributions to The Boys From Ferriday. The singer’s frailty can readily be heard in his performances of “The Old Rugged Cross” and “It is No Secret.” The YouTube videos of the same further drive the point home as we witness an artist ravaged by illness and age singing sans his upper plate and stabbing a piano with his stroke-curled claw. Swaggart, though diminished, fairs infinitely better than Lewis, particularly on his eight-plus minute treatment of Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” which stands as the centerpiece of the release (but pales in comparison with the earlier YouTube performance.

As a producer, Swaggart was able to draw from the generous stable of musicians available to him and his ministry, as well as the engineering, mixing, and mastering talent, to produce a lush backdrop that can afford even the most fragile performances some dignity. Only, it is not enough to salvage Lewis's valiant effort. Like the loved one killed in a disfiguring accident, this is not the way to remember such an important artist.