There’s a gathering thrub of drums. An anticipatory pick scrape. Then that deathless guitar riff, as urgent and insistent as a fire alarm. For those who heard it first on The Clash’s 1979 EP The Cost Of Living, I Fought The Law surely could only have been forged in the crucible of British punk. But for anyone who leaned in and listened, Joe Strummer’s opening line betrayed the song’s true provenance: ‘Breaking rocks in the hot sun.’
The reality is that had been written two decades earlier and an ocean away, by the Texan guitarist Sonny Curtis, a compadre of
