![]() ![]() "I feel like that personifies a lot of America. "It's honestly an American anthem - it really is," he told NPR. At a concert featuring the reconstituted Lynyrd Skynyrd in Kansas City, fan Nick Paul was tailgating outside before the show. Some still insist that Southern pride, absent the racism, is what "Sweet Home Alabama" is all about. I asked Clayton if appearing on the record was a way of laying claim to it - of saying, "My experience is part of the Alabama experience as well." Her response? "Absolutely. Ronnie Van Zant was among the dead, and he remains the ghost in the room when the intent of the song is discussed.Īnd yet, there she is on the finished track. In 1977 - just three years after the song hit the airwaves - three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd and their road manager, as well as a pilot and copilot, died when their chartered plane went down. That's another thing: The definitive take on the meaning of "Sweet Home Alabama" may have left the world decades ago. I'm sure if you asked the other guys who are not with us anymore and are up in rock and roll heaven, they have their story of how it came about." But he also added that there were "a lot of different interpretations. We put the 'boo, boo, boo' there saying, 'We don't like Wallace,' " Rossington said. "A lot of people believed in segregation and all that. Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington co-wrote "Sweet Home Alabama," and in the Showtime film he addressed that line. ![]() In 1963, when he was elected to his first term, Wallace famously said, "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever." "In Birmingham, they love the governor (boo! boo! boo!) It's an integral part of our nation's history." "At the root of it is a very human dilemma of bigotry and stereotyping," Kemp says. Mark Kemp, originally from Ashboro, N.C., offers one perspective he's the author of a book called Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South, a memoir about his relationship with rock and roll from the region. And in the documentary, Van Zant offered this: "Everybody thinks we're a bunch of drunken rednecks. ![]() Back then, Lynyrd Skynyrd performed in front of a large Confederate flag - at the suggestion of its record label. " From what I'm told you were born in Canada."Įven as the song was positioned to dispel some stereotypes of the South, the band was embracing others. "What are you talking about, you know?" Van Zant said. Is it a worthwhile rebuttal of Neil Young’s attack, or merely an anxious defense mechanism? “Sweet Home Alabama” is a song that negotiates what it’s like to feel bad about feeling proud.Īre you a songwriter? Enter the American Songwriter Lyric Contest.A Southern man don't need him around, anyhow “Now Watergate does not bother me,” he sings with a snarl, “does your conscience bother you?” Like the famous last verse of Randy Newman’s “Rednecks,” Van Zant deals with his own grave ambivalence by taking the assumptions of violent racism in the South and throwing them back in the faces of the rest of the country. Ronnie Van Zant takes the racial turmoil of Governor Wallace’s Jim Crow Alabama of the 1960s, and turns it into a twisted mythical promised land, “where the skies are blue.” Again, for Van Zant, the only pure retreat is music itself: The only straightforward, unambiguous piece of lyric writing in the entire song can be found in the final verse, which champions the Swampers, a famous group of studio musicians from Muscle Shoals, Alabama who recorded hundreds of hit soul and r&b records throughout the ’60s and ’70s.īut Van Zant can’t escape his region’s history – the shame, the violence, the guilt – and he treats the South’s dirty baggage as something worth celebrating in its own right. ![]()
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