Popular and Southern Culture
The shotgun house plays a role in the folklore and culture of the south. Superstition holds that ghosts and spirits are attracted to shotgun houses because they may pass straight through them, and that some houses were built with doors intentionally misaligned to deter these spirits. They also often serve as a convenient symbol of life in the south. Elvis Presley was born in a shotgun house, Aaron Neville of The Neville Brothers grew up in one, and according to blues man David Honeyboy Edwards, Robert Johnson died in one. Shortly before his death in May 1997, Jeff Buckley rented a shotgun house in Memphis and was so enamoured with it he contacted the owner about the possibility of buying it. Dream Brother, David Browne's biography on Jeff and Tim Buckley, opens with a description of this shotgun house and Jeff's fondness of it.
One of the more widely known references to a shotgun house was in the 1980 Talking Heads song "Once In A Lifetime". The first line of the song is "And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack".
The John Mellencamp song "Pink Houses" was inspired when he was driving along an overpass on the way home to Bloomington, Indiana from the Indianapolis airport. There was an old black man sitting outside his little pink shotgun house with his cat in his arms, completely unperturbed by the traffic speeding along the highway in his front yard. “He waved, and I waved back,” Mellencamp said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “That's how 'Pink Houses' started.”. In Bruce Springsteen's song "We Take Care of Our Own", from the album Wrecking Ball, he refers to shotgun houses, singing "We take care of our own, from the shotgun shack to the Super Dome".
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