A Boy Named Sue
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"A Boy Named Sue" is a country song, written by Shel Silverstein and made famous by Johnny Cash.
It tells the preposterous yet moving tale of a young man's quest for revenge on the father who gave him the name Sue, traditionally a girl's name. At the climax of the song, when Sue finds and faces his father, he learns that he was given the name "Sue" as a way of making sure he grew up strong, his absent father being unable to protect him. He forgives his father and they have an emotional reconciliation. In the last lines, Sue says, "And if I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him . . . Bill or George, any damn thing but Sue! I still hate that name!"
Johnny Cash was at the height of his powers when he recorded this song live at the notorious San Quentin Prison in California. The concert was recorded for broadcast by the BBC on February 24, 1969 for the Johnny Cash At San Quentin album, it shot to #1 on the Country Charts and #2 on the Pop Charts in the U.S. Years later Silverstein wrote a follow-up named "The Father Of A Boy Named Sue" in which he tells the old man's point of view of the story.
Late 1960s public decorum being what it was, compared with the 21st century, the line "I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you Sue!" was censored in the Radio version to leave the line to the listeners imagination, and the final line was edited to take out the "damn". Both the edited and unedited versions are available on various CDs.
The song has an unusual A-A-C B-B-C rhyme scheme, broken only to mark the dramatic midpoint and comic ending, and is full of vivid images such as "he kicked like a mule and bit like a crocodile". The song is mostly recitation rather than conventional singing.
[edit] Inspiration
The title, but not the plot, was inspired by the male attorney Sue K. Hicks of Madisonville, Tennessee, a friend of John Scopes who agreed to be a prosecutor in the Scopes Trial. Sue was named after his mother who died after giving birth to him. However, while this may have inspired Silverstein to write the poem, there may have been another reason why Johnny Cash recorded it. Johnny Cash was a fan of popular western novelist, Zane Grey, whose first name at birth was Pearl.
