Alive at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary

Until it closed in 2009, Tennessee's Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary was one of the most notorious penal institutions in America. Located in mountainous Petros, it was a forbidding rockpile hewn out of the rough countryside by its own inmates in 1896. In fiction, it housed Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic serial killer of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs. Its most famous inmate in real life was Martin Luther King's assassin James Earl Ray, who made national headlines when he broke out of Brushy Mountain in June 1977 and remained at large for two days before his recapture. On Oct. 17, 2001, Mark Collie came to Brushy Mountain with a sheaf of newly written songs about crime and punishment and an all-star band for a pair of performances that were recorded for a live album release. Mostly, though, Collie showed up at Brushy Mountain with a mission. God gave me the opportunity to get in there and share something that might make a difference, he says. I believed the songs could matter. I wanted to make something that people could find hope in, or redemption, or restoration, or forgiveness.