“Picking flowers” wasn’t the charge written on his citation, but one of the seven times Johnny Cash found himself briefly in police custody was because he just wanted to take a few daisies home with him.
Though the Man in Black is an icon of American culture in part because of his advocation for prison reform (and many other causes), Cash never actually spent any time in prison. There were more than a few nights in a jail cell, like when he got caught at the Mexican border with a stash of pills, but one of his strangest arrests happened in Starkville, Mississippi in May of 1965.
Earlier in the night Johnny had played a show at Mississippi State University and had been hitting the bottle pretty hard, as he tended to do in those days. The year before he’d played a show there and wound up hanging out at the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house and he was such a hit that the organizers invited him back once more, this time at a bigger venue. But this time when the show was over he didn’t go mix it up with the frat bros and instead went back to his motel to drink.
Well, after a few stiff ones, the motel room got pretty boring and he’d run out of cigarettes so he decided to take a walk around town to try and find a store that was still open at 2 in the morning and somehow or another wound up taking a “shortcut” through a farmer’s field and that’s where it all went downhill.
Cash told the story while playing his iconic 1969 concert at San Quentin Prison:
“You wouldn’t believe it, one night I got in jail in Starkville Mississippi for picking flowers. I was walking down the street … and uh, you know, going to get me some cigarettes or something. ‘Bout two in the morning, after a show. I think it was. Anyway, I reached down and picked a dandelion here and a daisy there as I went along, and this car pulls up.
He said, ‘Get it the hell in here boy, what are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m just picking flowers.’ Well, thirty six dollars for picking flowers and a night in jail. You can’t hardly win can ya? No telling what they’d do if you pull an apple or something … I’d like to get back at the fella down in Starkville Mississippi…that still has my thirty six dollars.”
Cash spent the night in the Oktibbeha County Jail after being charged with public drunkenness (Oktibbeha is a dry county to this day), indecent exposure, and trespassing.
As you’d expect, Cash wasn’t exactly pleased with his arrest and wound up kicking his cell door so hard that he broke a toe. He later ditched his shoes and gave them to his 15 year old cellmate named Smokey Evans who was also picked up that night for public drunkenness, saying “Here’s a souvenir. I’m Johnny Cash.”
This incident inspired a song titled “Starkville City Jail”, which Cash sang to the inmates at San Quentin that night.
Some of the lyrics go:
Well, I left my motel room, down at the Starkville Motel,
The town had gone to sleep and I was feelin’ fairly well.
I strolled along the sidewalk ‘neath the sweet magnolia trees;
I was whistlin’, pickin’ flowers, swayin’ in the southern breeze.
I found myself surrounded; one policeman said: “That’s him.
Come along, wild flower child. Don’t you know that it’s two a.m.”
They’re bound to get you.
‘Cause they got a curfew.
And you go to the Starkville City jail.
Although Johnny was quite enraged the night of the arrest, he quickly moved past the incident and later invited the police officer who arrested him to a show.
A few years after his death, a petition was raised by a MSU group to have him pardoned, which happened during a November festival called Johnny Cash Flower Pickin’ Festival in 2007.
Does illegally picking flowers make Johnny one of the biggest, baddest criminals to ever sing country music? Certainly not, that title probably belongs to Merle Haggard. But does it add even more flavor to the rich backstory of one of country music’s, and America’s, most important figures?
It absolutely does.
