Hernando, Mississippi, was known as the Marrying Capital of America even before Myra Gayle Brown and Jerry Lee Lewis tied the knot there on December 12, 1957. Jerry Lee, for a minute (and late 1957 was his minute) was bigger than Elvis. He was a leering, piano-pounding, ass-shaking sensation. His first hit records, “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’,”sold in the millions. That landed him on American Bandstand with Dick Clark because America’s teenagers knew precisely what those songs were about.
After the brief ceremony at Spencer’s Wedding Chapel, just off Hernando’s court square, they drove Jerry Lee’s Cadillac convertible back to Myra Gayle’s parents house on Coro Lake, without so much as a wedding night alone. The fact that they were now legally Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis was still a secret. But when the tabloids found out that Myra Gayle was the daughter of Jerry Lee’s first cousin, and 13 years old, it turned into a career-killing scandal. But a scandal, especially one involving an outrageous rock-and-roll star, is publicity. So the story of Jerry Lee and Myra was therefore good for Hernando’s quickie wedding business, and business was already real good.
At the peak, when Hernando was a town of roughly 1,500 people, the DeSoto County Circuit Court Clerk’s office issued 114 marriage licenses in a single day. That’s about the number issued in a month now, in a town that’s 10 times bigger than it was then.
Bill Ballard is an attorney and a life-long resident of Hernando. His mother, Ruth, was the Deputy Circuit Court Clerk at the time. She and another deputy, Lurline Leigh, filled out the license applications. Bill remembers that sometimes the clerks were so overwhelmed with demand that Ruth Ballard would take the books home to their house across the street from the high school.
“I can’t tell you how many times on Saturday my yard would be full of couples waiting for a license,” Ballard recalls.
This was mid-century America, a country in a hurry to do everything, so getting married quick fit in with the times. There were a lot of reasons for a quickie wedding, including teenage passion or the result of that passion. With a $3 license, getting married in Hernando was both fast and cheap, and thousands of couples took the 26-mile drive from Memphis down two-lane Highway 51 to do it.
It was while on a high school band trip to Indianapolis that Rick Leigh, a drummer, discovered that his Mississippi hometown was famous.
“When we would go to eat, people would ask where we were from and we’d say ‘Hernando.’ Every time, someone would say, ‘That’s where I got married.’ It made us all feel good.”
Those were boom times for Hernando, then a country town, where the court square filled up on Saturday with people coming in off the farm with money to spend.
“On Saturday, you could hardly get around on the square,” says Rick.
“It was the biggest infusion of money to this town I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” says Bill Ballard. “Everybody who could reap a reward from the marriage industry did so.”
Soon-to-be newlyweds ran into teenage entrepreneurs hustling for tips before they could park outside the Circuit Court Clerk’s office. Spotting cars with out-of-state tags, local boys would offer to show couples where to get a license, where to find a ring or a dress and a minister, and then offer to escort them to the wedding chapel.
The family of Mills Barbee, a longtime judge, owned a general merchandise store on the square, and Barbee remembers an African-American minister offering a quarter for every couple steered his way. At least five local ministers (including one who advertised with a sign in his yard) plus three Justices of the Peace administered the vows, sometimes inside the courthouse, sometimes in stores on the square. But the center of the industry was the wedding chapel set up at Spencer House, a café and hotel that had stood on the square since 1857. Ironically, the two women who opened the chapel, Bess Winding and Nell Gunn, had come to Hernando from Las Vegas in 1956.
The marrying business spilled over into Rick Leigh’s family drugstore, which his grandfather (who was married to deputy clerk Lurline Leigh) had opened on court square in the 1920s. The store offered “a bit of everything,” according to Rick, including a display case of wedding rings, ordered from Chicago. His dad, Robert (who was known as ‘Ebbie’), brought a jeweler named Cliff Carter down from Memphis on Saturdays to size rings to fit the hands of new brides and grooms.
What was missing was a place for newlyweds to spend a blissful wedding night. The Hernando Motel, with cabin-style rooms, was the only one in town.
So why did all this happen? It was a combi-nation of law, location, and word-of-mouth that spread from Hernando to much of the country. Postcards that called the town “The Marriage Capital of America” were, as they say now, good branding.
The law was the thing. By the 1950s many surrounding states — including Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, and Louisiana — had written stricter marriage laws raising the minimum age, and requiring proof of age, a blood test, and a three-day waiting period between when the marriage license was issued and when the couple could say “I do.” Mississippi had simply not changed a law that many considered archaic. The Commercial Appeal railed against the way things were done in Mississippi and neighboring states complained that Mississippi, through its lax law, was enticing impressionable and hormone-driven teens to cross state lines. The part of the Mississippi law that was perhaps most scandalous to outsiders was the legal age; 14 for boys and 12 for girls.
“If you were tall enough to ask for a license, you could get one,” one local recalls today.
The marrying phenomenon started well before the 1950s. World War II and an uncertain future pushed a lot of people, including Memphis-based sailors and soldiers on weekend passes, to run down to Hernando, where couples could get married almost around the clock. Records kept by the DeSoto County Genealogical Society show a swell in applications as America prepared for war. On December 7, 1941, with everyone talking about Pearl Harbor, 15 couples (Aron Polk and Willie Carson, O.G. Thomas and Celestine Thomas, James Aldridge and Mattie Williams among them) filed for licenses. A week later, also on a Sunday, 22 more couples filed.
Jerry Lee Lewis has married four more times since that December day, for a total of seven. Another celebrity wedding of that era was more successful. Charley Pride and Rozene Cohan married in Hernando in 1956, while Pride was playing baseball with the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League. This was well before Pride became a country music star. Rozene and Charley have now been married 61 years.
In 1957, more than 62,000 marriage licenses wereissued in Mississippi. But the bubble finally burst when Governor J.P. Coleman pushed the legislature to pass a marriage law more in line with contemporary thinking. LIFE magazine, another remnant of days past, sent a reporter and photographer to capture the final frenzied days in the Circuit Court Clerk’s office, just before the law changed on June 30, 1958. By 1959, the number of licenses issued in Mississippi dropped to 20,000.
The era is gone but not forgotten. Brian Hicks, director of the DeSoto County Museum, says couples who married in Hernando still pass through town while looking back. An exhibit at the museum, with pictures and postcards, helps prompt memories of the time when those people were young and in love and in a hurry.
Brian Hicks has a favorite story: A man told him about the time when he was young and picked up his girlfriend in Memphis and they took off for the state line, not far ahead of a father who was determined that his daughter was not going to get married that way. The young couple parked their car on Hernando’s court square in a conspicuous spot where her daddy was sure to see it and go looking for them. Meanwhile, the young man and woman had jumped in the car of a friend who was waiting to take them to Tunica, where they could also get married.
They are still married today.
