Tupper Saussy

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Frederick Tupper Saussy III (July 3, 1936 – March 16, 2007) was an American composer, musician, author, artist, and conspiracy theorist. He was a self-styled theologian, restaurant owner, ghostwriter of James Earl Ray's biography, King assassination conspiracy theorist, anti-government pamphleteer, and radical opponent of the federal government’s taxation and monetary authority.^[1]

He was born in Statesboro, Georgia; grew up in Tampa, Florida; and graduated from the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1958.^[2] His jazz combo there put out a university-subsidized album, Jazz at Sewanee, which included several original compositions.^[3] Thereafter Saussy taught English at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, co-founded an advertising agency, McDonald and Saussy, and kept his musical career alive with recording dates and club sessions.

With the Nashville Symphony, he composed a work called The Beast with Five Heads (1965/66), based on "The Bremen Town Musicians", designed to replace Peter and the Wolf as a work to teach schoolchildren about the instruments of the orchestra, which continued to be used for the next fifteen years.^[4] For its 1968/69 season, the Nashville Symphony commissioned him to write a piano concerto for Bill Pursell; it was performed by the Symphony on January 14, 1969, with Thor Johnson conducting.^[5]

Saussy's activities as tax protester led him to be sentenced to prison and to be a fugitive from the law between 1987 and 1997. After his arrest, he served 14 months and was released in 1999.