Brothers grew up in one, and according to bluesman 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 of 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 is 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". Springsteen also references "shotgun shack" in "Reason to Believe" from his 1982 album Nebraska, with the line, "In a whitewashed shotgun shack, an old man passes away / they take his body to the graveyard, and over him, they pray." Gallery See also Culture of the Southern United States Tiny House, the 21st century successor to the shotgun shack Enfilade (architecture) – similar design in grand European architecture of the Baroque period List of house types Railroad apartment Terraced house Creole cottage References External links Shotgun House (at Bywater Neighborhood Association) (includes many example photos) Shotgun House Project for New Orleans Discussion of appropriateness of new shotguns for rebuilding NOLA A New Orleans shotgun converted into a two-story three-bedroom house (the Spring 2008 This Old House project) Project Row Houses - An example of art and social activism, based on 22 shotgun houses rescued and renovated in Houston's Third Ward Shotgun House Preservation in Miami Commissioner Ken Russell Moves to Save West Grove's Shotgun Homes Miami Today article American architectural styles Haitian architectural styles Vernacular architecture House styles