Kasey Chambers released “We’re All Gonna Die Someday” on her 1999 album “The Captain” in a more joyous take on the phrase recently used by Sen. Joni Ernst.
Recently, during a town hall event in Iowa, Sen. Joni Ernst was confronted about a Republican bill that would cut Medicaid. A voter argued that people would die as a result of the bill. Sen. Ernst replied, ““Well, we all are going to die.”
Following some outrage, Sen. Ernst subsequently doubled down on the adequacy of her response, seemingly mocking critics with a video of herself taken in a cemetery.
Sen. Ernst’s now infamous statement reminded me of a kinder use of the phrase in a song by Australian singer-songwriter Kasey Chambers. In “We’re All Gonna Die,” Chambers has a more joyous take on the reminder of death. She uses the phrase as a sing-a-long that ultimately reminds us mortals to enjoy life because we are all gonna die.
Well, it hurts down here on Earth, Lord; It hurts down here on Earth; It hurts down here ’cause we’re runnin’ out of beer; But we’re all gonna die someday.
“We’re All Gonna Die” appears on her outstanding 1999 album,The Captain.
4 Non Blondes had its first full Bay area performance in 30 years at the BottleRock Napa Festival, performing their hit, “What’s Up.”
The BottleRock Napa Valley at the Napa Valley Expo on May 24, 2025 featured a number of superstars, including Justin Timberlake and Benson Boone. But many in the audience were waiting for one of the great songs from the 1990s performed by 4 Non Blondes, “What’s Up.”
4 Non Blondes reportedly gave one of the best shows of the weekend. The band played both old and new songs, including “Monomorphic,” while referencing recent political events. The crowd, of course, was especially fired up for the band’s classic 1990s anthem “What’s Up.” Check out the video below.
With the exception of a short reunion charity performance in 2014, the BottleRock Napa show was the first full performance by the San Francisco area band in the Bay area in more than 30 years. Lead singer Linda Perry, who has been writing for and producing other artists, explained that she wanted the band to reunite to reclaim its past. The show featured lead singer Linda Perry along with bassist Christa Hillhouse, guitarist Roger Rocha, and drummer Dawn Richardson. Perry also pointed out 4 Non Blondes’ original guitarist Shaunna Hall who was watching the show.
BottleRock Napa Valley every year features a number of musicians to start off the summer along with wine and food in the Napa Valley in California.
Bobby Darin sang about him and Robert Redford portrayed him: Tom Murton worked to reform prisons and was eventually fired after discovering dead prisoners inside the Arkansas prison system.
Tom Murton, who was born in Los Angeles on March 15, 1928, went on to become one of the most famous reformist prison wardens in popular culture. And that is despite the fact that few may remember his name and the fact that he served as a warden for less than a year. But Robert Redford portrayed a character based upon Murton, and Bobby Darin sang a song about him.
After helping establish the correctional system in the new state of Alaska in the 1960s, Murton was hired to reform the Arkansas prison system in 1968. Arkansas’s new governor Winthrop Rockefeller wanted Murton to be the first professional penologist to head the system, which included the Tucker State Prison Farm and Cummins State Prison Farm.
Arkansas Prison Farms & Dead Bodies
The prisoners at the large prison farms endured harsh conditions, sexual assault, torture, beatings, and more. The prisons used a “trusty” system, where prisoners were assigned to act as guards but instead were perpetrating abuses.
Later, an Arkansas Times article described the prison: “Under the blazing Delta sun, long-line riders armed with pistols, rifles and shotguns patrolled the grounds on horseback while rank men worked fields full of cotton, rice, soybeans and cucumbers. Men who didn’t work hard were punished like slaves. Should a rider shoot a man trying to escape, he was given a free pass out of the prison. A long leather strap was another instrument of terror. Because men were housed in barracks, rather than cells, they had little protection at night against roaming thieves and sexual predators.”
As the new head of Tucker State Prison Farm, the 39-year-old Murton began instituting reforms. He eliminated corporal punishment, improved the prisoners’ diets, and reformed the parole system.
But Murton did too good of a job. After an informant told Murton of bodies buried on the prison grounds, Murton began digging up dead prisoners. Records indicated more than 200 men had “escaped” since 1915, but when he started discovering dead bodies in unmarked graves, Murton suspected foul play.
Although Governor Rockefeller’s administration was not implicated in the discovery, the state was embarrassed by the developing news. Murton was fired in spring 1968 two months after the first discovery of the bodies. The governor stopped the exhumation, claiming the bodies were from a pauper’s field.
According to Wikipedia, Murton was told to leave the state or face arrest for digging up the bodies. He left town for Alaska and never worked at a prison again.
Murton was likely blackballed from further penal work in Arkansas, but he continued to advocate for reform, testifying before a U.S. Senate Committee on juvenile delinquency in 1969 and appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970 to talk about Arkansas prison conditions.
Personally, though, times were rough for Murton. Without work, he suffered in poverty and his family life fell apart, losing his wife to divorce. Eventually, his life rebounded after writing a book about his experience and taking a teaching job at the University of Minnesota. After his time as warden, he co-authored books related to his time as warden, taught courses, founded the Murton Foundation for Criminal Justice, and worked as a duck farmer in Oklahoma.
Bobby Darin’s “Long Line Rider” About the Arkansas Prison
Others outside the legal system also took note of Murton’s courage. Bobby Darin, who had hits with “Splish Splash” and “Mac the Knife” had been inspired to turn deeper to folk and political music after the death of Robert Kennedy. And one of his greatest political songs was about Tom Murton’s discoveries in Arkansas.
The pop singer’s turn to write a song about the Arkansas prison was likely also inspired by his work as an actor, having spent several days in a prison in 1967 filming his role in The Cage. The TV drama appeared as an episode in The Danny Thomas Show. According to Shane Brown’s excellent book Bobby Darin: The Ultimate Listener’s Guide around the time of taping that episode, Darin told a newspaper interviewer, “I was affected far more by that experience than I ever want to get into . . . I saw 18-year-old faces and older, hardened faces. We are criminals by not insisting that psychiatrists run prisons rather than just being consulted once in awhile.”
The title to Darin’s song about the Arkansas prison scandal — “Long Line Rider” –refers to the a segment of the brutal trusty inmates who served as guards. The riders rode horses and carried guards, enforcing their own laws on the prison grounds. Darin’s song specifically referenced the dead bodies that Murton had discovered and that the state tried to cover up.
There’s a funny taste in the air Big bulldozers everywhere Diggin’ clay Turnin’ clay. And the ground coughs up some roots Wearin’ denim shirts and boots Haul ’em away Haul ’em away. Hey, long line rider, turn away.
The song unfortunately did not become a best seller for Darin. His older fans likely wanted him to maintain his old style of singing, and younger listeners may have been reluctant to buy albums by a balding older man that there parents had followed. But Darin did some great work in this era of his career, and his turn to rock and folk was authentic. And one of the reasons we are still talking about what happened in Arkansas today is because of Bobby Darin’s song.
Darin backed up his beliefs and his music with his actions. In January 1969 he was scheduled to sing “Long Line Rider” on The Jackie Gleason Show. The show’s producers, however, were not happy. Depending on the source, they either asked him to sing another song or to cut the line from “Long Line Rider” that made a clear reference to Governor Rockefeller,”This kind of thing can’t happen here /Especially not in election year.”
Darin refused to comply with the censorship, and he walked off the set. Darin explained, “I don’t care if I never do another TV show in my life. They are not going to interfere with my right to express myself.”
Fortunately, we do have on YouTube a powerful performance he gave on TV earlier in November 1968. “Long Line Rider” is not only great commentary on a forgotten injustice, it rocks.
Brubaker & Robert Redford’s Portrayal
People did not forget about Murton’s work after Darin’s song.
In 1980, director Stuart Rosenberg released the movie Brubaker. The film is a somewhat fictionalized version of Murton’s experience in Arkansas (filmed in Ohio). Robert Redford starred as the young prison warden trying to reform a brutal prison and literally uncovering dead bodies.
Tom Murton helped with the fim. He retired from his teaching position and served as a technical advisor for the movie. He was reportedly satisfied with the film despite it taking some liberties with his life story.
The movie opens with a fictionalized version of the new warden going into the prison undercover as a prisoner. Later, Redford’s warden uncovers the brutality inside of the prison as well as dead bodies buried on prison grounds.
The movie was a commercial and critical success, nominated for the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1981.
Afterward
We cannot measure the impact of the horrendous prison conditions in Arkansas in the 1960s and 1970s. One judge in 1970 called it a “dark and evil world.” There was never a full reckoning that revealed the information about the men buried on the prison grounds. Regarding the three bodies found in 1968 before the digging stopped, some claimed they had been buried there for many years and had not been murdered. But we still do not know for sure who they were or how they ended up there.
And we can of course only guess about the impact that the prison conditions had on the living prisoners there and even the guards. Surely, many of the men subjected to the horrendous conditions were changed by what they experienced, and many of them probably carried those effects through the rest of their lives.
We do not know about most of the prisoners and the effects of the trauma. We do know that one of the prisoners at the Tucker Unit in 1970 was a 16-year-old boy named Don Harding, sent to the adult maximum security prison after escaping from the Arkansas Boys Industrial School serving a burglary charge. While at the Tucker Unit, adults repeatedly violently brutalized the skinny kid. That experience, along with the boy’s organic brain damage and other childhood abuse, likely contributed to him destroying the lives of others. Having failed to kill himself several times in his life, he later was convicted of murdering several men and was executed in Arizona’s gas chamber in 1992.
How many other prisoners from that time in Arkansas carried the effects out into the world?
Regarding the prisons themselves, while Murton was pushed to the sidelines of government, others took note of the prison conditions in Arkansas that he highlighted. InHolt v. Sarver, a federal judge in 1970 held that the conditions at the Arkansas prison constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the U.S. Constitution. A series of reforms brought some improvements to the Arkansas system in the 1970s and 1980s.
Finally, after the film Brubaker, Tom Murton published two more books, The Dilemma of Prison Reform (1982) and Crime and Punishment in Arkansas: Adventures in Wonderland (1985). He died of cancer at age 62 on October 10, 1990, in Oklahoma City.
In October 2024, Sturgill Simpson played a sizzling cover of William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water.”
In addition to his classic original version, William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” has been covered by artists such as Otis Redding, Gram Parsons, The Byrds, Percy Sledge, and more recently Sturgill Simpson. Not a bad group.
“You Don’t Miss Your Water” is one of the great heartache songs. The song recounts how we often do not appreciate our lovers until they are gone. The singer explains, “But now that you left me / Oh, how I cried out, I keep crying / You don’t miss your water ’til your well run dry.”
The live performance below by Sturgill Simpson (aka Johnny Blue Skies) is from October 25, 2024. Check it out.
Glen Sherley’s first brush with fame came while in Folsom Prison when Johnny Cash sang one of his songs. Despite his talents, though, Sherley could not escape his demons.
Singer-songwriter Glen Sherley was born in Oklahoma on March 9, 1936. Between his birth and his self-inflicted death in Gonzales, California on May 11, 1978 at the age of 42, Sherley’s life had several highs and lows. He is most known for his brief brush with fame when Johnny Cash performed one of Sherley’s songs during his famous 1968 concert at Folsom Prison.
When Cash performed the song, Sherley sat in the audience. He was serving time for armed robbery.
Greystone Chapel
Sherley wrote songs while in prison. He and his wife had had a son, Bruce, and a daughter Ronda. And his extended family often visited him, giving him tapes to record his songs. One of those tapes made it to Johnny Cash.
Prior to Johnny Cash’s 1968 performance at Folsom Prison, Floyd Gressett, a Folsom preacher and friend of Cash’s, gave Cash a copy of Sherley’s song “Greystone Chapel.” Cash liked the song about the chapel at Folsom, and he decided to perform it at the show. On January 11. with Sherley in the front row, Cash surprised the inmate by introducing him and singing his song. Cash later recognized it was a “terrible thing” to single out Sherley in such a setting, but the other inmates cheered.
The recording of the show was released as the album At Folsom Prison (1968) was a crossover hit for Cash, resurrecting his career. And as singer-songwriter Marty Stuart explained, the Sherley’s song “was kind of the heart of that record.”
Cash was not Sherleys’ only encounter with fame while in prison. After being transferred to Vacaville Prison in California, Sherley befriended country singer and former television personality Spade Cooley, who was serving life in prison for the murder of his wife. Sherley and Cooley even wrote a song together in 1969 called “Big Steel Prison Gate.”
And in 1971, another one of Sherley’s songs was recorded by a country star. Eddy Arnold recorded Sherley’s “Portrait Of My Woman.”
And then Sherley was given the chance to record his own album live while still in prison in 1971. The record company originally released the album as entitled Glen Sherley, and later it was re-released as Glen Sherley Live at Vacaville California (Bear Records).
Also in 1971, an episode of This Is Your Life was devoted to Johnny Cash. The show featured a video of Sherley in prison thanking Cash. You can see Cash’s jaw drop when the announcer introduces Sherley. And then Cash tears up at the warm tribute (starting around the 6-minute mark in the video below).
Release from Prison
Sherley was paroled from prison later in 1971. Johnny Cash welcomed him to freedom at the gates of the prison. Cash began a mentorship trying to help Sherley on the outside with his career and life.
The former country star who had befriended Sherley in prison, Spade Cooley, however, was not around to provide additional support. Although Cooley had been granted parole effective a year earlier, he died of a heart attack in late 1969 while giving a concert on furlough before he could be released.
Sherley remarried in 1972. Cash took Sherley on tour. Sherley’s children Bruce, 14, and Ronda, 11, for the first time saw their dad perform, not in a club, but at the Los Angeles Forum with an audience of 17,000 people.
Later that year, Ronda moved from California to Nashville to live with her dad. But she saw him struggling with the change from prison to the musician’s life. She later explained that although he knew how to be in prison, “he didn’t know how to be the person people wanted him to be out here.”
A Flower Out of Place
In 1974, Sherley, apparently with support from Johnny Cash, hosted a TV special recorded at Tennessee State Prison called A Flower Out of Place. Sherley performed some songs, alone and with Johnny Cash, while introducing other acts like comedian Foster Brooks, Linda Ronstadt, and Roy Clark.
In watching the special, one may wonder whether Sherley was nervous or maybe back on drugs. Though his song performances are still very good, the title of the special captured an aspect of Sherley’s life outside the joint.
Out of prison, Sherley could not escape whatever demons haunted him from his past. Sherley, whose migrant farmer family moved from Oklahoma to California when he was young, was apparently in trouble often since a young age, often while drunk. In the 1950s, he committed crimes with little planning, such as robbing a man of a cash roll of one-dollar bills or holding up an ice cream company for $28 with a toy gun. By the time Cash met Sherley at Folsom, his armed robbery career had sent him to serve time in several penal institutions.
And once out of prison, Sherley again had behavior issues, carrying a gun and finding solace in drugs and alcohol. Eventually, reportedly he threatened to kill Johnny Cash’s bass player and road manager Marshall Grant (“I love you but what I’d really like to do to you, I’d like to get a butcher knife and start cutting you all to hell”).
So, reluctantly, Johnny Cash, who had turned his own life around to become sober, dismissed Sherley from his performing group. The setback for Sherley preceded other problems such as more drugs, alcohol, and Pall Malls, eventually becoming estranged from his wife and kids.
Sherley’s Downward Spiral
And despite great talent and a taste of fame, Glen Sherley ended up losing his star. He worked other non-music jobs, including feeding cattle at a cattle farm. Like many who struggle after life in prison, his use of drugs and alcohol contributed to the downward spiral.
According to Wikipedia, in May 1978, while high on drugs, Sherley shot another man in California. But it is hard to find any details about that shooting anywhere else, so I am not sure if that is true.
But we do know that on May 11, 1978, Sherley, who did not want to go back to prison, stood on his brother’s porch and committed suicide by shooting himself with a gun to his head.
Johnny Cash paid for Sherley’s funeral. Sherley was buried outside Bakersfield, California, a place made famous by another singer-songwriter who had attended a Johnny Cash concert while in San Quentin prison, Merle Haggard.
Sherley’s Legacy
Knowing Sherley’s story, it is hard to separate the man’s life (as well as his incarceration at the time) from the music while listening to Glen Sherley Live at Vacaville California (or the re-released version with bonus tracks Glen Sherley: Released Again). The narration and lyrics to the live performances often remind the listener of the singer’s situation.
But it is also hard to ignore that Glen Sherley was a great talent who showed much potential. With a booming voice, he sounds great, and his songs at their best show flashes of Cash, Haggard, Paycheck, and Jones. For example, his version of “Portrait of My Woman” illustrates a tenderness that outshines Eddy Arnold’s cover.
In his live performances, perhaps he understandably at times tries a little too much to copy Johnny Cash’s swagger. And maybe that swagger, trying to copy Cash’s bravado without understanding how Cash eventually embraced his vulnerability too, helped keep Sherley playing the tough guy in his life even when he needed help.
And of course, in the 1970s, there was not the type of understanding or mental health support that someone getting out of prison would need. Despite all Johnny Cash tried to do for Sherley, he could not have understood that Sherley needed much more than a guitar and an audience to adjust to life and freedom.
Sherley largely remains a footnote to the Johnny Cash story, unfortunately. Even his hosting and performing in the A Flower Out of Place TV special was later edited to completely exclude Sherley in a DVD release as well as scrubbed from a Johnny Cash album called A Concert: Behind Prison Walls (2003) (even while it includes the drunk comedy routine of Foster Brooks).
There exists more music that Sherley wrote and recorded as demos while in prison. His family has talked of releasing some of it, although so far the only additional music are three extra bonus tracks added to the Bear Records release of Glen Sherley Live at Vacaville California. And below, his daughter plays one of the tapes. She introduces the unreleased song “My Last Day,” a song about a man on death row. If there are more songs like these recent releases, I hope some day we get to hear more of Sherley’s music stored on cassette tapes in a box.
