Found this from June 2014 about the song and thought I'd share. Basically it's a true story about one of Isbell's relatives. Maybe this is common knowledge, IDK. Author takes some shots at the "South" which are pretty lame, but what can you do.

quote:
At a concert in Norway in 2012 Jason had this to say about the song:

"So when I was a little kid I was about 5 or 6 years old, my Mama's Uncle Hollan killed a man that lived down the street from him... and uh, this was in the 80's, about like 85-86 when the state of Alabama when the "he needed killin' defense" still stood. So you could basically just say, "well he needed killin'" and that was the end of the trial and he didn't get into any trouble for it. That's kinda how it happened and I mean there's a few more details to that but the man needed killin', so... He didn't try to hide, run off, or burn the body, he just said "I killed him, he needed killin', but um sometime around my 17th or 18th year somebody in the family actually told me what happened and before that they never really talked about it that much and it wasn't the kind of thing that we really wanted everybody to know about. So, my Mother made the worst mistake in the world when she was telling me about it right as I was learning how to write songs. So I wrote this one on the front porch in Houston Texas, about 2001."

So, the Hill side of the incident sheds a little bit of a different light on the whole thing. It was their belief that Dude Lawson had done something which warranted him being killed. In all my research, I could never find out exactly what it was that set this whole incident into motion. No one at the trial testified as to the motive. Neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorneys tried to establish a motive. We really have no clue what Dude Lawson did, but we do know a lot of people in that town weren't too worried about him being dead. That has to say something about his character. Did the Hills do the town a favor by getting rid of someone who needed to go? Is that why it only took a jury one hour to come back with a not guilty verdict? Did the incident with "The Lumber Man's son" actually happen or was that a bit of poetic license? Since just about everything else in this song turns out to be true (more or less) it isn't too far fetched to think that may be at least partly based in truth too. Either way, I find the whole story captivating.

LINK