- P. Willey et al., “Preservation of Prehistoric Footprints in Jaguar Cave, Tennessee,” Journal of Cave and Karst Studies 67, no. 1 (April 2005): 63. For another poignant description of an experience “ambling and searching” in the caves of Tennessee (in this case, an amphetamine-enhanced one), see the 2003 interview with Johnny Cash published in this journal: Johnny Cash, “You Have to Call Me the Way You See Me,” Southern Cultures 21, no. 3 (Fall 2015): esp. 10–11.
- Associated Press, “Human Footprints from 4,500 Years Ago Found,” October 2, 1983.
- Jay D. Franklin, “Excavating and Analyzing Prehistoric Lithic Quarries: An Example from 3rd Unnamed Cave, Tennessee,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 26, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 199–217; and Joseph C. Douglas, “Minerals, Moonshine, and Misanthropes: The Historic Use of Caves in the Upper Cumberland,” in Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland, eds. Michael E. Birdwell and W. Calvin Dickinson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 15–34.
- A Lady [Mary Ann Loughborough], My Cave Life in Vicksburg, with Letters of Trial and Travel (New York: D. Appleton, 1864), 78, 114, 118.
- W. Fitzhugh Brundage, A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894–1901 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); and Ruth Nichols Keenoy and Robbie D. Jones, “Caving and Clogging: Keepin’ Cool in Tennessee’s Caves,” in Looking Beyond the Highway: Dixie Roads and Culture, eds. Claudette Stager and Martha Carver (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 167–184.
- The FBI case notes and reports cited in this section are quoted at length in Kay Wood Conatser, Billy Dean Anderson: A Criminal Life (self-published, 2013), and currently remain in that author’s possession. For more background on Anderson, see William Lynwood Montell, Killings: Folk Justice in the Upper South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 138–143; and Montell, “‘That’s Not the Way I Heard It’: Traditional Life and Folk Legends of the Upper Cumberland,” in Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland, eds. Birdwell and Dickinson, 122–139.
- Pat Strickler, “The Jesse James Legend (cont’d.),” Life, June 12, 1970, 72; Allan Gurganus, “Why We Fed the Bomber,” New York Times, June 8, 2003, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/opinion/why-we-fed-the-bomber.html, accessed May 29, 2018.
- Email communication with Ben King, December 6, 2017; lyrics to Ben King’s unpublished song “Billy Dean” are in author’s possession.
- Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, Tompall Glaser, Wanted! The Outlaws, RCA Victor AAL1-1321, 1976; Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); and Chet Flippo, “From the Bump-Bump Room to the Barricades: Waylon, Tompall, and the Outlaw Revolution,” in Country: The Music and the Musicians, eds. Paul Kingsbury, Alan Axel-rod, and Susan Costello (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), 312–327.
- “The Prisoner’s Song,” Vernon Dalhart, Victor 19427-B, 1924; “Lonesome Road Blues,” Henry Whitter, OKeh 40015, 1924.
- “The Prisoner’s Song”; “Pancho & Lefty,” track 8 on Townes Van Zandt, The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, Poppy LA004-F, 1972; “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean,” track 1 on Waylon Jennings, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean, RCA LSP-4854, 1973; and “Red Headed Stranger,” track 6 on Willie Nelson, Red Headed Stranger, Columbia KC 33482, 1975.
- On the Outlaw movement broadly, see Michael Bane, The Outlaws: Revolution in Country Music (New York: Doubleday, 1978), and Michael Streissguth, Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris and the Renegades of Nashville (New York: IT Books, 2013). On the Austin music scene, see Archie Green, “Austin’s Cosmic Cowboys: Words in Collision,” in “And Other Neighborly Names”: Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore, eds. Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 152–194; Stephen R. Tucker, “Progressive Country Music, 1972–1976: Its Impact and Creative Highlights,” Southern Quarterly 22, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 93–110; as well as the more recent work noted below.
- “To Beat the Devil,” track 2 on Kris Kristofferson, Kristofferson, Monument SLP18139, 1970; “Honky Tonk Heroes,” track 1 on Waylon Jennings, Honky Tonk Heroes, RCA APL1-0240, 1973. Nashville’s quick commoditization of the outlaw movement, embodied in the made-to-order success of The Outlaws compilation album, was itself one of the motivating factors in the more anti-establishment impulses animating the so-called “progressive country” movement, which took shape simultaneously in and around Austin. For more on the distinctions between Tennessee and Texas brought to the foreground by the outlaws and their fellow travelers, see especially Travis D. Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Jason Mellard, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). Still, as Bill Malone pointed out some time ago, the outlaws’ “rebellion” from and against mainstream country music was a fundamentally fraternal one, “at base little more than an effort to assert their artistic independence within the confining context of a corporate musical structure.” The key word there is within, since as Malone and others have pointed out, the quite mainstream, thoroughly commercial success the outlaw movement ended up enjoying “did more to preserve a distinct identity for country music than most of their contemporaries who wore the ‘country’ label.” Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 404–405.
- For Walker’s countercultural irreverence, see especially “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” track 6 on Jerry Jeff Walker, Viva Terlingua, MCA Records MCA-382, 1973. The quote above is from the liner notes to Jerry Jeff Walker, Jerry Jeff Walker, Decca DL 7-5384, 1972, and is reproduced in Tucker, “Progressive Country Music,” 101. For an exceptional discussion of the Viva Terlingua recording sessions, as a window into the cultural and ideological divides separating the country scenes in Austin and Nashville during this period, see Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks, ch. 4.
- The information about Coe’s family is taken from the original worksheets of the 1940 Census, which are available online at “1940 Census,” National Archives, accessed May 29, 2018, https://1940census.archives.gov/index.asp. The description of Akron appears in Alfred Winslow Jones, Life, Liberty, and Property: A Story of Conflict and a Measurement of Conflicting Rights (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1941), 67–68.
- “Cell #33,” track 2 on David Allan Coe, Penitentiary Blues, SSS International SSS-9, 1969; David Allan Coe, The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, Columbia KC 32942, 1974; and Larry L. King, “David Allan Coe’s Greatest Hits,” Esquire, July 1976, 71–73, 142–144.
- David Allan Coe, “Nothing Sacred,” D.A.C. Records LP-0002, 1978; and David Allan Coe, Underground Album, D.A.C. Records LP-0003, 1082. On the writing of “Take this Job and Shove It,” which became a hit for the outlaw country singer Johnny Paycheck after he recorded it in 1977, see Dorothy Horstman, Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy: Classic Country Songs and Their Inside Stories by the Men and Women Who Wrote Them, rev. ed. (Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press, 1996), 323. For a sense of the outcry provoked by the underground albums, see Neil Strauss, “Songwriter’s Racist Songs from 1980s Haunt Him,” New York Times, September 4, 2000, E1; and Angus Batey, “What is the most offensive album of all time?,” The Guardian, October 21, 2010, accessed May 29, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/oct/21/offensive-albums-ice-cube-david-allan-coe.
- Coe quoted in Denise Edgington, “The Reddest Neck in Town,” Houston Press, May 30, 2002. Hubbs’s discussion of Coe’s music appears in Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), quoted here at 7, 153. Equally strong discussions of the gendered discourse in outlaw country music (and white southern musical culture more broadly)—particularly the role played by a performative, if at times multivalent, masculinity—can be found in Ted Ownby, “Freedom, Manhood, and White Male Tradition in 1970s Southern Rock,” in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, eds. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997): 369–88; Jason T. Eastman, “Rebel Manhood: The Hegemonic Masculinity of the Southern Rock Music Revival,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41, no.2 (2012): 189–219; Travis D. Stimeling, “Narrative, Vocal Staging and Masculinity in the ‘Outlaw’ Country Music of Waylon Jennings,” Popular Music 32, no. 3 (2013), 343–358; and Mellard, Progressive Country, esp. ch. 4. The argument I offer here about the gendered subtexts in the outlaw recordings has benefited from all of these readings—but most notably from Hubbs’s writing on Coe.
- See, for instance, “10 Badass David Allan Coe Moments,” savingcountrymusic.com, accessed May 29, 2018, https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/10-badass-david-allan-coe-moments-75th-birthday-special/.
- Keenoy and Jones, “Caving and Clogging,” 177.
- “Acquisitions for Prison Libraries: A Selected Bibliography, by David Allan Coe, and a Response, by Christine L. Kirby,” ed. Susan McDonald, Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 7, no. 1 (1983): 29–33.
- Of course, it is possible that Coe had a more personal connection to a “Cell #33” that dated to his own years spent in various detention centers. One way or another, though, the number clearly had a special significance to him as well as to Wilde: Coe’s third album, The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, includes a track called “The 33rd of August”—which, it just so happens, is another song sung from a jail cell. “The 33rd of August,” track 4 on David Allan Coe, The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy; Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, and Essays (New York: Perennial Library, 1966; London: Collins, 1989), 843, 854, 856. The first six editions of the poem, published between February 1898 and May 1899, all listed the author as “C.3.3.” on the title page; although the author’s identity was hardly a secret by that point, it was only with the seventh edition, published in June 1899, that the publisher included “Oscar Wilde” on the title page as well. Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 526.
- There is a rich through line on the themes of authenticity, working-class identity, and outsider-hood in country music scholarship; see, among others, Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Hobsbawm is quoted in Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Free Press, 1959; New York: Norton, 1965), 25.
- Mary Emily Robertson Campbell, The Attitude of Tennesseans toward the Union, 1847–1861 (New York: Vantage Press, 1961); James B. Jones Jr., “‘Fevers Ran High’: The Civil War in the Cumberland,” in Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland, eds. Birdwell and Dickinson, 73–104; and Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 7.
- Clinton County News, quoted in Conatser, Billy Dean Anderson, 126.
