Remember When Johnny Cash Played a Frat House, Went to Jail, and Wrote a Prison Song About It?

Johnny Cash might not have been the convict who “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” as he sang about in “Folsom Prison Blues”. But he was, in fact, the “wild flower child” who police picked up while patrolling the streets of Starkville, Mississippi, around 2 a.m. on May 11, 1965, that he sang about in “Starkville City Jail”.

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Cash did, however, take some creative liberties. For example, there was no Starkville City Jail in 1965. Police took the country music icon to Oktibbeha County Jail. And while the song paints Cash as a peaceful floral enthusiast wrongly arrested for loving nature, he had spent the last several hours drinking with Starkville’s finest. Also, he was on private property. But again, creative liberty is the ultimate songwriter perk.

Still, the Man in Black would have had reason to believe the city of Starkville held her in high esteem. The previous spring, Cash performed on Mississippi State University’s campus, extending his show by an hour and a half because he was enjoying himself so much. Later that night, Cash went to a party at the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house and put on an impromptu show there, too.

When Cash returned the following May, he might have assumed he had some starpower built up to protect him from a PI charge. He didn’t.

The Night (Technically Morning) Johnny Cash Was Arrested in Starkville, Mississippi

As country music and Starkville, Mississippi, legend tells it, police happened upon a visibly intoxicated Johnny Cash during the wee hours of May 11, 1965. As Cash described in the intro of the live recording of his commemorative song, “Starkville City Jail”, he was innocently picking dandelions and daisies by the roadside. The only problem, of course, was that he was actually on private property. When police confronted him, the situation escalated, and law enforcement officers arrested him for public drunkenness.

“Thirty-six dollars for picking flowers and a night in jail,” Cash said in the song’s introduction. “G**damn, you can’t hardly win, can you? No tellin’ what you’d do if you pull an apple or something.”

Just like he mentions in the song, Cash was so angry over his arrest that he kicked the walls of his cell until he broke his toe. When he got out the next morning, he left his shoes behind with a teenage cellmate and told him who he was.

“At eight a.m., they let me out, and I said, ‘Give me them things of mine’ / They gave me a sneer and a guitar pick and a yellow dandelion / They’re bound to get you ‘cause they got a curfew, and you go to the Starkville City Jail,” the song ends.

Cash immortalized his Starkville arrest on his 1969 live album, At San Quentin. Fifty-two years later, the Mississippi Country Music Trail immortalized the piece of Magnolia State history with a historical marker located in Starkville at 33° 27.964′ N, 88° 48.901′ W. If you’re lucky, there might be a few dandelions nearby to pick before the law shows up.

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