Johnny Cash "Starkville City Jail"

The arrest drew national attention, and the Associated Press ran a headline saying Johnny Cash was in the jailhouse now. After posting bond he performed at the University of Mississippi the next day. Cash recorded many songs about prison, supported prisoners' rights, and played Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman in July 1974, with ticket proceeds going to the Prisoner Welfare Fund. In 1972 he testified before Congress about prison reform. Merle Haggard, then an inmate at San Quentin, said a late-1950s Cash show inspired him.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 13 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.
• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 14 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Waverley Mansion — 19 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 22 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Starkville — steps away
• First Presbyterian Church — steps away
• Oktibbeha County Blues — 0.6 mi
• Grierson's Raid — 0.9 mi