A Buford Pusser Soundtrack

And why the famous sheriff beat up Jimmy Buffett

One of the more interesting things I noticed in researching our latest two-part series, The Real Buford Pusser, about the legendary Tennessee Sheriff who may or may not have killed his wife Pauline, is Buford’s appearance in American music over the last half century. Jimmy Buffett, Drive-By Truckers, the country and rockabilly singer Eddie Bond — all of them sing about Buford, whose legend has been kept alive in popular culture by half-a-dozen remakes and re-imaginings of the hit 1973 film Walking Tall, including the 2004 version starring “The Rock.”

But while Jimmy Buffett never dedicated an entire song to him, as Eddie Bond and the Drive-By Truckers have, he slipped Buford into the lyrics of at least three songs over a 50-year period. The reason for this has to do with a run-in Buffett had with the hulking former sheriff in the early 1970s, when Buford was at the height of his fame, and a few years before Buffett eclipsed him with “Margaritaville.”

As Buffett recounted during a show in 1974, he’d successfully recorded an album in Nashville and decided to celebrate by drinking a half a bottle of tequila with a friend. Buffett was wearing a pair of golf shoes with the cleats removed, as you do, and when it came time to leave, he couldn’t find his rental car. To get a better view of the parking lot, he climbed onto the hood of a Cadillac, not realizing that this particular Cadillac belonged to Buford Pusser, who was in town for a Tennessee Prosecutors Convention.

As Buffett explained:

I was standing on the hood of this particular car and as fate would have it it belonged to a rather large man who came up behind me and threatened my life real quickly. And I hadn’t been in a fight since junior high school on the city bus in Mobile. He came up and said “Son you stay right there, you’re under arrest.” So I politely turned around and said, “You kiss my ass.” He didn’t. Instead he followed me over to the car which Sammy had found. I got in the driver’s side and Sammy got in the passenger’s side. My window was up, his was down and this fellow poked his head in and said “Would you like for me to turn this car over?”

Pusser proceeded to grab Buffett by the hair and pummel him and his friend, before Buffett finally hit the gas and they screeched out of there. Only later, upon returning to his hotel, was Buffett told that the man who’d assaulted him was Buford Pusser, whom Buffett knew, like pretty much everyone at the time, as the man behind Walking Tall.

Buffett immediately put the altercation to use. In “Presents to Send You," from A1A (1974), he sings:

There sits a fifth of Tequila
God I swore I'd never drink it again
But my last little bout I had my hair pulled out
By a man who really wasn't my friend
And I know I'll never see him again

The incident apparently stuck with him. Twenty-five years later, in "Semi-True Story,” from Beach House on the Moon (1999), he brings it up again:

Well, the picture is fuzzy
And the details are sordid
It was on the same day
God’s Own Drunk was recorded
A walking tall sheriff
And a big Cadillac
And me and my golf shoes
On the hood makin’ tracks
This daring young singer
Was under attack

But that wasn’t it. The album Equal Strain on All Parts, released in November 2023, two months after Buffett’s death, contains a song called “Close Calls,” in which Buffett reflects on his various brushes with fate over the years. Like the time he ran out of air while scuba diving in Pensacola (“I'm so glad Jack buddy-breathed me or I guess I would have drowned.”) But his run-in with Pusser is the song’s main event.

The chorus goes like this:

Close calls, close calls, I will survive
Brick walls, big balls, lucky just to be alive
I fought Buford Pusser in a honky-tonk joint
He whipped my ass, that's beside the point
Close calls, close calls, lucky just to be alive

You can imagine how many times Buffett must have told the story to people. It seems like a defining moment in his life. He tells a version of the same story here.

It would have been great to interview Buffett about it for a bonus episode.

I also came across the song “The Buford Stick” by Drive-By Truckers, which I’d never heard before. Kirksey Nix had mentioned it during an interview, because the song’s tone and content matched his own perception of Buford back in the day. (“He was a crooked cop and he was a killer cop,” Kirksey says in the first episode of the series.) The song is told through the point of view of a criminal who Buford pursued. I listened to it dozens of times while we were working on the episode. A commenter captures the vibe: “Fuck the powers that be.”

Finally there’s Eddie Bond, whose album Eddie Bond Sings the Legend of Buford Pusser came out in 1973. Bond is in full thrall to the Pusser legend, comparing him to Wyatt Earp and Matt Dillon, the fictional star of Gunsmoke, whose character was based in part on Wyatt Earp. The lyrics act like the soundtrack to Walking Tall, mentioning the unnamed ambushers who killed Pauline and how courageous Buford was for continuing to live in a “dirty rotten world that took his wife.”

Listening to those lyrics, and watching the film Walking Tall, and reflecting on Buford’s massive fame after the “ambush” that “took his wife,” I kept thinking about what was going through Buford’s mind in the years before he died in that car crash in 1974. While there’s no proof that Buford killed his wife, Mike Elam and others make a very compelling case that he played some kind of role in it. If that’s true, imagine what it was like to be Buford after Walking Tall came out.

A story he told to the cops, in order to avoid going to prison for the rest of his life, wound up capturing the national imagination and making Buford into a kind of demigod. Everywhere he goes he’s celebrated as a hero, and a man deeply deserving of sympathy for having lost his wife. As he was paraded around the country for speeches and press junkets or whatever, what was he thinking? If he did in fact kill Pauline, was he wracked with guilt, knowing that his fame was all based on a cowardly lie? Or did he manage to justify it somehow, and channel his self-hatred into beating up the occasional long-haired musician who decided to walk on his car in golf shoes?

As I mentioned in the second episode, we’ll have to wait and see what the autopsy says. For now here’s a photo of Buford on the set of the first Walking Tall, standing behind actress Elizabeth Hartman, who played his wife Pauline. He seems pretty content.