He begins this section by boldly stating “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down” and then goes on to show his solidarity with “the prisoner who has long paid for his crime” as well.Ĭash, who believed in corrections, used to frequently visit state prisons and was famous for his free prison concerts. Cash uses the rest of the song to answer this question. The song begins with the line ‘why I always dress in black’ - A common question that his fans shared. The song later became popular for its scope of including a gender-bending interpretation to address the various LGBTQ+ identities, especially the transgender and genderfluid individuals. Cash carried out the moderations in his voice perfectly to fit the song’s mood – going deep to fit the rage in his voice and ending with a bang to show how much he despised the name. The song followed Cash’s style of talking-blues, where he used the spoken word format with the basic accompaniment of a string and a percussion instrument. The song, however, hilariously ended on a note of humour with Sue saying, “If I ever have a boy, I’ll name him Bill or George or Frank”, anything but Sue – “I hate that name”. At that moment, Sue choked up and embraced his father for igniting the “gravel in your gut and the spit in the eye”. So, he sought revenge on him, and at the climax of the story, when both had pulled their guns out and aimed at the other, Sue’s father justifies his selection, “It’s that name that helped to make you strong”. His father had left him but not before naming him “Sue”.įor his entire life, he cursed that man for embarrassing him. Originally written by singer-songwriter, poet and cartoonist Shel Silverstein, ‘A Boy Named Sue’ followed a rather dramatic descent in the narrative, with a boy narrating the story of how he grew up without a father. He was at the height of his career when he performed ‘A Boy Named Sue’ at the San Quentin Prison in California in 1969. He was at some of the lowest points in his life and was able to recover himself and work on his artistic explorations and experimentations. The 1960s were a period of transition in Cash’s life.

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