Claude “Curly” Putman Jr. was born in Princeton, Alabama on 20 November 1930 and wrote his breakthrough song while working as a song plugger for Tree in Nashville; he already had a top-10 country hit behind him, “I Think I Know” for Marion Worth in 1960. Songfacts traces the song’s setting — a condemned man’s homecoming that turns out to be a dream — to the film The Asphalt Jungle. He went on to write “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” and to co-write “He Stopped Loving Her Today” with Bobby Braddock, which took the CMA Song of the Year award in both 1980 and 1981. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1976 and the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1993, and died on 30 October 2016.