So I’m kinda chuffed with myself because it’s not even 9:30am yet and I have gotten the kiddo to school (on-time and without drama)(from either of us), picked up groceries, put the groceries away, prepped dinner (e.g. diced some chicken cutlets and thrown them into a carefully-prepared marinade of Kikkoman teriyaki sauce and McCormick ground ginger), taken my meds and am now eating breakfast and writing. (also, not to brag, but I even took out the recycling and the trash this week, so I’m basically on fire).
And I was in the super-duper-market getting the groceries and there’s music on the PA and I can basically never not pay attention to the music. Fortunately the good-ol’-USA playlist seems to be done for now. I think that was a Memorial day thing this year, probably a directive from the Regime. Today it was the regular mix of familiar hits-from-the-ages. One of which was “Sweet Home Alabama.”
And it can’t get that song, nor the song it was written as an answer to, out of my head. So I’ll share some thoughts about it while I try to move them through my brain’s musical alimentary canal.
I love that this song is the result of a beef. I love this is an example of how a catchy tune with a singable chorus will get people saying just about anything during the verses. (Bruce Springsteen knows this well, or at least he knew it once the music press pointed it out to him- and yes it just happens that I generally wind up agreeing with Mr. Springsteen in most of his verses- but by no means all).
And yes I’m bopping along just like anyone else in the store- it’s a catchy groove- and laughing at the verse about Neil Young because, by the metrics of record sales, cultural memory, and just plain riffage, Lynyrd Skynyrd absolutely won this beef. But the song’s still racist as… I was going to say racist as hell, but let’s be real (which hell isn’t)- the song’s still racist as the nation it was written in. Because after the verse about Neil Young, Lynyrd declares their love for “The Governor.”
Meaning the governor of Alabama.
What was his name? This is where my mind takes detours… was it Wallace… not Lew Wallace, the guy who wrote Ben-Hur and always shows up in movies about Billy the Kid… obviously not Lou Reed… (pulls up wikipedia…) Oh yes, George “”segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” Wallace. The man who tried to physically block Black students from enrolling in a ‘white’ university. And a quick web read tells me he ‘stood against desegregation’ but can we be honest and say that he is for ‘continued segregation.’ That’s like saying Charles Manson was against not-murdering people.
Come the fuck on. Yeah yeah yeah I know a political career is more nuanced that a single quote from a single inauguration but really? People all over the country sing along to the line without the faintest idea of who they are celebrating- while others know exactly who they are celebrating.
But…. that’s not what I’m really wondering about this morning.
What I’m really wondering is this: “Sweet Home Alabama” is an explicit response to two Neil Young songs. It is a direct answer to “Alabama,” which appears on Young’s 1972 album Harvest, and it references “Southern Man,” from Young’s 1970 album After the Gold Rush.
Both of these songs are typical of Young’s gut-forward, non-nuanced approach to social justice issues, and while “Southern Man” is an incendiary device, “Alabama” is a coal-seam fire. And it seems that Mr. Young’s direct naming of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s home state was the catalyst for their answer.
Not that the songwriters of “Sweet Home Alabama” appear to try to refute anything that Ol’ Neil claims in his songs. They just attack him for putting Alabama ‘down’ and then tell him, in so many words, to fuck off.
But what I’m really wondering about is this: there’s a musical similarity to the openings of “Alabama” and “Sweet Home Alabama”. It’s not the same progression or the same bass line but it’s the pattern of one chord-a nearby chord- and now we’re gonna hang out on this other chord for a bit. Which makes me wonder if Skynyrd started jamming and mocking “Alabama” and then were like, you know what, fuck you, we’re going to take your plodding-ass song and turn it around into something that people will be SINGING IN SUPERMARKETS DECADES FROM NOW!!!
I don’t know if that’s how it happened. I like to think so. And I’ll wonder about it. And in a while I’ll look it up and see if I can find more about the actual story, but for now I’m just going to wonder about it, because wondering is good for me.
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