Every few years, when an up-and-coming musician releases an album after their high-profile breakup is splashed across the front pages of tabloids, people are surprised to re-learn that the inspiration for songs sometimes comes directly from the lives of people who wrote them. This has happened virtually since the beginning of songwriting itself, but contemporary music has become a constantly expanding repository of classics whose origins sprung up from their most painful and profound experiences, the relationships that dominated portions of the artists’ lives, or just chance encounters that lodged in their memories and touched their souls. In some cases, these artists intended to memorialize these important individuals, calling them out by name. But more often, their identities faded into obscurity while the songs about them became a part of the cultural firmament.
Mental Floss already made a list about one of music’s most famous muses, Pattie Boyd, whose relationships with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and then-future Rolling Stones member Ronnie Wood led to no fewer than 10 different songs. But scanning the recent (and not-so-recent) history of popular music, there are many men and women whose exploits, and their impact, became the basis for some stone-cold classics across many different genres. We’ve collected just a few of the biggest hits to reveal the real-life people now immortalized in art.
1. Johnny Cash // “I Walk The Line” (1956)
In the Johnny Cash biopic of the same name, the iconic country-western singer created the track as a defining moment in his musical career, which later became an interlude to woo June Carter. But a more detailed history of the song reveals that it was actually written specifically for and about his first wife, Vivian, in a powerful declaration of fidelity since he’d just married her a few years prior.