Raymond Hall (3)

Author, composer and songwriter Raymond Hall, a long-time collaborator of Jimmie Rodgers, spent 55 years in prison and was pardoned in 1976. In 1983, after Raymond Hall's death, a neighbor, touched by Hall's story, erected a monument over Hall's grave near Memphis, Tennessee in USA, with the names of the songs that Ray had written on it - "Moonlight Skies," "Southern Cannonball," "Gambling Polka Dot Blues," and "T.B. Blues" among others.

"Moonlight Skies" is actually a fairly detailed report on how Hall himself wound up in the jailhouse in the first place, with names named, but so powerful and personalizing is Jimmie's handling of the song that everyone thinks of it as his own. The ethics and ironies and happenstance related in the song attach themselves to Rodgers as closely as if he had written it.