Dorsey Dixon, a forty-year-old weaver then employed at the Entwistle Mill in East Rockingham, North Carolina, was tending his looms one rainy morning in the winter of 1938 when he heard the news of a deadly automobile accident on nearby U.S. Highway 1. After his shift, Dixon and another worker went to view the crumpled Ford in which two local residents had been instantly killed. “So we put out around there where they’d pulled the old wreck in,” Dixon later recalled. “And that car was completely demolished; it was tore up. And I was looking in on the floorboard and I seen bottles—broken bottles—and blood all mixed up there. ‘Course, they probably was Co’-Cola bottles. But it was glass, you know, all broken to pieces and mixed up with blood there on the floorboard of that old wrecked car. And the thought came across my mind that many times cars had wrecked and killed people and that whiskey was mixed up with the broken glass and blood. And that’s how I was inspired to write ‘Wreck on the Highway.'”