Just Another Crooked Lawman
The true story of shady Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser and his "ambushed" wife.
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My late mother-in-law was a wonderful woman, and I loved her very much. But her dog, Colby, was terrible. I love dogs, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t love that dog. He was stinky, he shed like crazy, and he bit me once. He also bit a cop, though, so he had his good qualities. Despite being neutered, he had a serious humping problem and a giant swinging dick. He would literally hump until he puked. He once got his dick stuck in a crocheted blanket and had to go to the vet to get the blanket removed.
At some point, I decided that Colby’s voice sounded like Mike Ehrmantraut, the cop-turned-criminal enforcer on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Whenever I saw Colby, I would launch into Mike’s monologue about bad guys and righteous criminals:
"I've known good criminals and bad cops, bad priests, honorable thieves. You can be on one side of the law or the other. But if you make a deal with somebody, you keep your word.”
A criminal is someone who breaks the law, but not all criminals are morally bankrupt bad guys.
Sheriff Buford Pusser was a bad guy, a bad criminal, and a bad cop. Mike Ehrmantraut and Colby the blanket-fucking, cop-biting dog would agree.
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I had never heard the name Buford Pusser until 2004 when Drive-By Truckers released The Dirty South. That record features two Patterson Hood songs — "The Buford Stick" and "The Boys From Alabama" — that re-examine the legend of Sheriff Pusser and the Dixie Mafia organized crime syndicate (also called the State Line Mob). I was excited when DBT performed both songs at Homecoming 2026, because as turns out, Patterson’s 2004 re-examination of Pusser was ahead of its time.
Pusser shaped and embraced his own make-believe.
Between 1964 to 1970, Buford Pusser served as sheriff of McNairy County, TN, a dry county on the Mississippi border near the Alabama state line. Pusser’s life story — at least his version of it — inspired the 1973 movie Walking Tall and the remake starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in 2004.
As Patterson explains it in the spoken word intro to "The Boys From Alabama":
Sheriff Buford Pusser was tryin’ to clean up McNairy County, Tennessee, from all them bootleggers that was bringin’ crime and corruption and illegal liquor into his little dry county. And for his troubles he got ambushed, and his wife was murdered, and his house got blown up, and they made a movie about it called Walking Tall.
In 2025, after reopening the cold case on his wife’s murder, prosecutors pointed the finger at Pusser, announcing that the former sheriff was now the prime suspect in the murder of Pauline Mullins Pusser, who died in 1967 at the age of 33.
Wrote the New York Times in 2025:
By then, Sheriff Pusser had been on the job for three years, and was well into a campaign of busting up gambling, prostitution and moonshine rings in the county. He was known for personally smashing up gambling equipment, like slot machines and gaming tables, with a pickax.
Pusser stood 6-foot-6, and his colorful life story contains a lot of tall tales and self-mythologizing. Which makes sense when you learn that Pusser was a pro wrestler in Chicago in the late '50s. Wrestling under the name Buford the Bull, Pusser likely got an education in the art of kayfabe, the performative wrestling art where fictional characters and feuds are depicted as real.
Pusser shaped and embraced his own make-believe. Walking Tall came out in 1973, and before Pusser died in a car accident in 1974, he planned to play himself in the sequel.
Nancy Einhart
Like many DBT songs, if you just listen to the opening bars of "The Buford Stick," you hear no hint that this band is from Alabama. With its grinding guitars and crash cymbal, the alt-rock sound is aggressive but not aggressively Southern — at least, not until Patterson says the word "britches." Or maybe "Buford."
Now Sheriff Buford Pusser's gotten too big for his britches
With his book reviews and movie deals
Down at the car lot making public appearances
For breaking up our homes and stills
I know he likes to brag how he wrestled a bear
But I knew him from the funeral home
Ask him for a warrant, he'll say "I keep it in my shoe"
That son of a bitch has got to go
Since Pusser is the epitome of an unreliable narrator, it’s difficult to parse truth from rumor, though many have tried. If you really want to deep dive, I recommend this Rolling Stone article from December 2025, as well as the two-part episode of the Behind the Bastards podcast entitled "Buford Pusser: The Worst Sheriff Ever."
Pusser liked to talk about the "practical joke" he played on his grandfather, wherein he fired his shotgun at the outhouse while his grandad used it — hilarious!
Pusser liked to talk about the "practical joke" he played on his grandfather, wherein he fired his shotgun at the outhouse while his grandad used it — hilarious! He also bragged that he had wrestled a grizzly bear and won, a dubious statement for which there is no evidence. Maybe the most interesting fact about Pusser is that he survived a terrible car crash at age 19 and briefly worked as a mortician's assistant after his brush with death — hence the lyric "I knew him from the funeral home."
As a law-enforcement officer, Pusser almost certainly committed extrajudicial killings and may have even been on the take with the local mafia he vowed to obliterate. When Pauline was murdered, local authorities took Buford’s story as gospel, and there was no autopsy. According to Pusser’s account of her "assassination," the sheriff responded to a disturbance call before dawn on August 12, 1967, and brought his wife.
Per Rolling Stone:
Pauline went with him. Maybe it was to save time on later travel, or because she was worried about him, or because he didn’t want to let her out of his sight; his story kept changing. Either way, Pusser and Pauline were the victims of an ambush, he said, by several of his enemies. Pauline was killed almost instantly. He attempted to battle them on a desolate road near the state line, and kept going even after his jaw was nearly shot off, he said, by a .30-caliber carbine.
No one was arrested for her murder. When Pauline's body was exhumed for an autopsy in 2022, investigators concluded that the simplest explanation was probably true: Pusser had killed his wife and probably beat her too. The autopsy indicated that Pauline had recovered from a broken nose before she was killed.
District attorney Mark Davidson pointed out that, as a wrestler, Pusser was accustomed to pain. Most people would "think really long and hard about putting a gun anywhere near our mouths and pulling a trigger, but he’s a former wrestler, violent guy, prior injuries to his face," said Davidson. "Our theory is he put a pistol inside his cheek and pulled the trigger and created a flesh wound."
Pusser got his soon after, in quite poetic fashion. He died after crashing his car on the way home from Memphis, where he had just finalized plans to play himself in his next biopic. Like the song says, "the lord works in mysterious ways."
The Tennessee state trooper who responded to the accident later said that Pusser was driving drunk and not wearing a seatbelt. However, the locals had their suspicions that someone had tampered with the shady sheriff's car, which Patterson hints at:
It wouldn't take my man long to do the job
Just a partially sawed through steering rod
And I wouldn't have to worry about the good Sheriff anymore.
In a heartbreaking video from 2025, Griffon Mullins says of his sister Pauline, "She was just not the type of person to tell you her problems. But I knew, deep down, there was problems in her marriage. If I only known now what I knew then, she would have never went back to Tennessee, and she would have been right here with me."
"The Buford Stick" ends by repeating a refrain we hear throughout the song: "watch out for Buford." Because although Buford Pusser bit the dust, there will always be more bad guys, more crooked cops and honest criminals. And there will always be more Paulines.