LALouisiana Famous People

Three cousins from Ferriday

Ferriday sits in Concordia Parish across the Mississippi from Natchez and has never held much more than 4,000 people. It produced three first cousins born within a year of each other: Jimmy Swaggart on March 15, 1935, Jerry Lee Lewis on September 29, 1935, and Mickey Gilley on March 9, 1936. One became a rock and roll pianist whose career collapsed when the press learned he had married his thirteen year old cousin, one became a country star with a Texas honky tonk named after him, and one became the most watched televangelist in America until a 1988 scandal. They learned piano in the same handful of houses.

New Orleans and the people who built jazz

Louis Armstrong was born in the Back o' Town district of New Orleans on August 4, 1901. He told the world for decades that he was born on July 4, 1900, and stuck to it until a baptismal record surfaced after his death. Jelly Roll Morton, born Ferdinand LaMothe in the city around 1890, claimed to have invented jazz in 1902 and had business cards printed saying so. Sidney Bechet, born there in 1897, was the first great jazz soloist on soprano saxophone. Buddy Bolden, born in 1877, led the band that everyone in the city credited as the first and left behind no recording at all.

Mahalia Jackson was born in New Orleans on October 26, 1911, and left for Chicago at sixteen. Fats Domino was born in the Lower Ninth Ward on February 26, 1928, stayed in that neighborhood his entire life, and was taken off his roof by boat after the levees failed in 2005. Ellis Marsalis raised Wynton and Branford in the city, both born in the early 1960s. Lil Wayne was born Dwayne Carter in Hollygrove in 1982 and signed to Cash Money at eleven.

The Longs, and the president Louisiana half claims

No president has been born in Louisiana. Zachary Taylor is the closest the state gets: born in Virginia in 1784, raised in Kentucky, and a Louisiana planter living near Baton Rouge when the Whigs nominated him in 1848.

The family that actually ran the place was the Longs. Huey P. Long was born near Winnfield in Winn Parish on August 30, 1893, became governor at 35 in 1928, paved thousands of miles of road, handed out free schoolbooks, and pushed a Share Our Wealth program that alarmed Washington. He was shot in a corridor of the 34 storey capitol he had built in Baton Rouge and died on September 10, 1935. His brother Earl won the governorship in three separate stints, and his son Russell sat in the US Senate from 1948 to 1987. Edwin Edwards, born in Marksville in 1927, won four terms as governor and later served eight years in federal prison.

Civil rights cases with names attached

Homer Plessy was a New Orleans shoemaker who boarded a whites only car on the East Louisiana Railroad on June 7, 1892, as a deliberate test case arranged by a local committee. The Supreme Court ruled against him in 1896 and the phrase separate but equal stood in American law for 58 years. Louisiana pardoned him in 2022.

Ruby Bridges, born in 1954 and raised in New Orleans, walked into William Frantz Elementary on November 14, 1960 with federal marshals on either side while white parents pulled their children out of the building. Leah Chase, born in Madisonville in 1923, ran Dooky Chase's on Orleans Avenue, where organizers met upstairs because it was one of the few rooms in the city where Black and white activists could sit at the same table. Andrew Young was born in New Orleans on March 12, 1932, and went on to become mayor of Atlanta and US ambassador to the United Nations.

Quarterbacks, novelists and one unexpected Boston Celtic

Bill Russell was born in Monroe on February 12, 1934, and his family left for Oakland when he was eight, which is why almost nobody places him in Louisiana. Karl Malone was born in Summerfield in 1963. Peyton Manning was born in New Orleans in 1976 and Eli in 1981, both sons of Saints quarterback Archie Manning. Terry Bradshaw came from Shreveport.

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans on September 30, 1924, as Truman Streckfus Persons. Anne Rice was born there in 1941 and set her vampires in the Garden District she grew up beside. Ellen DeGeneres was born in Metairie in 1958. Tim McGraw was born in Delhi in 1967. Britney Spears was born just over the state line in McComb, Mississippi, in 1981 and grew up in Kentwood, Louisiana, which is the town that claims her.

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