In a moment that has left countless hearts stirred and tearful, Frances Swaggart has spoken publicly for the first time since the passing of her husband, evangelist and gospel icon Jimmy Swaggart, revealing the quiet, deeply personal wish she shared with him in his final days — and the promise he kept just before he slipped into eternity.
With her voice trembling and eyes glistening, Frances sat down during a family-led memorial broadcast at Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, surrounded by her son Donnie and grandson Gabriel. As she began to speak, the room fell silent.
“It wasn’t about money. It wasn’t about legacy or cameras or numbers,” she said softly. “All I asked him for… was one last song. Just him, the piano, and the Lord.”
According to the family, just three days before his passing, Jimmy requested to be wheeled into the sanctuary, alone, in the early hours of the morning. No lights. No microphones. Just a man and the piano he had played for over seven decades.
He sat for a while in silence. Then, with trembling hands, he began to play — not a rousing hymn, but a quiet, unfinished melody he had written decades earlier during a personal spiritual storm. The title, scribbled in faded ink on a page nearby, simply read: “He Waited for Me.”
Gabriel, holding back tears, recalled watching from the doorway.
“He barely sang. He just spoke the words. But I’ve never felt the presence of God like I did in that room. He was saying goodbye — not just to us, but to everything he had ever carried.”
Frances added, “I was standing just behind the curtain. I didn’t want him to know I was there. I just wanted to hear him play — just one more time.”
As he reached the final line of the song, Jimmy paused, closed his eyes, and whispered the last lyric he would ever speak this side of heaven:
“He waited for me… and now, I’m going home.”
That final performance, recorded quietly by a staff member who had been asked to archive Jimmy’s final weeks, was never meant to be released. But at Frances’s request, it is now being prepared for release as his final song, to be shared with the congregation and the millions who followed his voice for generations.
“This was our promise,” Frances said. “Not to the world — but to each other. We began with a song. And he left me with one.”
Jimmy Swaggart didn’t leave this world with applause or cameras.
He left with a melody — soft, sacred, and promised.
And in that final note, he gave Frances exactly what her heart longed for:
not one last sermon…
but one last song.