BOY NAMED SUE

Boy Named Sue is one of Johnny Cash's most famous songs, sung for the first time at a prison concert in San Quentin and captured on video and record, one of the high points of his best prison album, the same album that gave us Starkville City Jail.

The song itself was a poem by Shel Silverstein, who I knew principally as the singer of a song about a prisoner who committed a burglary to raise enough money to get a front row seat to hear Johnny Cash sing. He was caught, sent to prison, and got to the front row seat to hear Johnny Cash sing in a prison concert. Shel was a friend of Johnny's, read him the poem, and Johnny set it to music without rehearsal during the San Quentin prison concert.

The story behind the name in the song involves a judge called Sue Hicks, a man, one of the lawyers in the famous Scopes monkey trial, but the starting point for the chapter had to be the starting point for the song:

"It was Gatlinburg in mid-July"

Gatlinburg it was.