STOP PLAYING THESE SONGS!: - "Sweet Home Alabama" by Lynyrd Skynyrd
Trigger warning: I'm actually going to be saying a lot of nice things in this article. Those of you that have known me for years, prepare to be shocked shitless.
S.T.T.S. CASE #002:
SONG: “Sweet Home Alabama”
ARTIST: Lynyrd Skynyrd
SONGWRITERS: Ronnie Van Zandt, Gary Rossington, Ed King
ORIGINAL RECORDING: Second Helping, MCA, 1974
KEY SIGNATURE: D Mixolydian (not G major, for chrissakes!)
SONG STRUCTURE: Slightly repetitive
Confession time: I used to hate this band with a passion. And to be perfectly honest, that’s a very extreme exaggeration. Probably once every ten years or so for the past thirty, I’d get brave enough to try to see if I could endure at least a decent greatest hits CD of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Nothing clicked until I took a chance a couple of years ago on a $10 sealed copy of The Essential Lynyrd Skynyrd double CD on MCA1, which consists solely of their classic original band period from 1973 to 1977. (A previous attempt at enduring a compilation that mistakenly included some of their inferior reunion material was an understandable failure; the less said about any release of theirs from 1987 onward that isn’t a remastered edition of their MCA classics, the better.) But otherwise, any casual interest in the band that I had beforehand was ruined simply because of the trope of idiots at shows yelling at any band - regardless of genre, and including ones I’ve been in - either “Free Bird!” or “Play some fuckin’ Skynyrd!” Sometimes it would be shouted as a joke, and sometimes it wasn’t. Either way, that ruined things for me for decades as far as Skynyrd was concerned.
Being a lover of punk and alternative music as well as K-pop, jazz, and electronic music, and much more besides, I have not become a repentant convert to Southern Rock at the expense of everything else. But that’s besides the point. Lynyrd Skynyrd were on the edge of breaking beyond their large cult following when they dropped their final album, Street Survivors, in October of 1977, a few days before three of the band’s members, including their iconic frontman Ronnie Van Zandt, went out like Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Yes, the song that we’re going to (respectfully) semi-roast in this installment of STOP PLAYING THESE SONGS! was their only major hit single, and they did have a hit live album during a time when the likes of Kiss and Peter Frampton were having hit live double albums that were selling better than their studio releases at the time.
Who is to say how well Street Survivors would have sold, and how much more popular the band would have become, if someone in Skynyrd’s camp had gotten word from someone in Aerosmith’s camp about the private plane they were going to hire? (“Uhh, Ronnie? Gary? Listen, that plane you guys are thinking of hiring? Someone from Aerosmith’s management told me they almost hired that plane until their road manager saw the pilots sharing a joint and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the cockpit. Let’s just fly commercial, OK?”) At least the band would have gotten to see any success they would have earned had Street Survivors raised the band’s profile on the strength of their new material. And maybe we would have gotten to hear Ronnie and company perform the two songs Neil Young wrote for them, “Powderfinger” and “Sedan Delivery”.
But that’s armchair quarterbacking. Let’s go backwards in time to when the song in question, “Sweet Home Alabama”, reared its head.
The band, being lovers of R&B and blues music, had gotten an opportunity to record at Muscle Shoals Recording Studio in Alabama. An opportunity to record in the same studio, into the same microphones going through the same mixing board into the same mutli-track tape decks that Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, and Etta James recorded at? Not to mention a place where Duane Allman worked frequently as a session guitarist before the Allman Brothers Band (another set of Skynyrd heroes/role models) broke big? Wouldn’t you take it if you were in their shoes? The band drives over, sets up shop, cuts some tracks, and hangs out with some of the locals.
Amongst the many artists Skynyrd were fans of was Neil Young, and undoubtedly tapes of Neil’s most recent solo albums, After The Gold Rush and Harvest were amongst the selections in whatever transportation the Skynyrd boys took. Being Florida boys with no prejudiced bones in their bodies, the subject of two of Neil’s key album tracks from those albums, “Southern Man” and “Alabama”, came up. Apparently, some of their new friends from the area weren’t “racist pieces of shit” (to borrow a line from Drive-By Truckers’ “Ronnie and Neil”), nor were they fans of Governor George Wallace;s segregationist policies. Ronnie and company were sympathetic about the issue: “We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two,” Van Zant said at the time. Uncle Neil would later confirm in his autobiography Waging Heavy Peace, “My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to miscontrue.” Still, in general the band was reporting on what their new acquaintances felt, and the band themselves didn’t hold a grudge against Neil. Ronnie Van Zant would often been seen wearing a T-shirt with the front cover of Neil’s Tonight’s The Night album on it - especially on the cover of their last album, and of course after the band and Neil had bonded, he offered them the aforementioned two songs that Neil would later record himself on Rust Never Sleeps.
The reference to Wallace and the violent reactions to the civil rights activism in Birmingham was also misconstrued - to the open disgust of Ronnie Van Zant himself: “The lyrics about the governor of Alabama were misunderstood - the general public didn’t notice the words ‘Boo! Boo! Boo!’ after that particular line, and the media picked up only on the reference to the people loving the governor. Wallace and I have very little in common. I don’t like what he says about colored people.”
However, some people aren’t too comfortable with the facts behind the song. Former guitarist Ed King, who only co-wrote the song’s music with Gary Rossington and didn’t have a single thing to do with any syllable of Ronnie Van Zant’s sympathetic, Neil Young-ribbing, anti-racist lyrics, actually claimed that the song was pro-Wallace in a blog post, years after Ronnie was long gone. I think its safe to say that if Ronnie were still around and he caught wind of those comments, he would have told Ed King to go fuck himself.
Ronnie Van Zant, who counted Muhammad Ali amongst his heroes, would probably even be more sickened if he found out that years later, racist rock bands like Skrewdriver would record and release cover versions of “Sweet Home Alabama” (and probably without the permission of Duchess Music [the publishers Skynyrd were contracted to] or paying royalties), turning Ronnie’s innocent, unbiased account of his encounters with anti-racist Alabamians into a pro-racist anthem?
And that, there, is one of the main problems with anyone covering “Sweet Home Alabama”. Bar bands will naïvely throw the song into the set list because of its alleged simplicity and the mistaken belief that the song is pretty much mandatory in any cover band’s set - and not really show the song much respect in the process. Two of the trademarks of Skynyrd’s sound were a three-guitar frontline (not counting bass) and a deft pianist more than comfortable with tickling the lvories in a honky-took style. Most cover bands are lucky to have two guitarists, and as far as trying to find a keyboard player? You’d have an easier time trying to find the elusive dodo bird. And even if the band is able to nail the song in a way that wouldn’t cause Ronnie Van Zant and the other deceased original members of the band to experience rotational friction in their final resting places, playing the song is liable to invite trouble from the types of folks who didn’t notice, amongst other things, the boos at the end of the line referencing Gov. Wallace.
What type of folks, you might ask? How about the kind of folks that tried to overthrow the American government on 1.6.2021? How about the kind of shitheads that were marching with tiki torches through Charlottesville, Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us?” The exact kind of people that Ronnie Van Zant would have nothing to do with?
Before someone chimes in and says “If you lived in the South, you’d have to play that song anyway,” unfortunately for reality that isn’t much of a case either. A couple of friends in the south have told me that many bars and clubs in their area don’t allow cover bands to play any Skynyrd material, or allow their recordings into their jukeboxes (pre-TouchTunes), for fear that someone is going to start shit - even if that shitstarter is just some ordinary dude that might have gone through a little trauma in his personal life, head for the club to blow some steam, end up hearing a few bars of “Free Bird” or “Tuesday’s Gone”, get liquored up and start a bar brawl. But in the case of the song we’re semi-roasting here, all it takes is the wrong person in the wrong place hearing those opening notes to light the proverbial powder keg.
Look, I get that, as a cover band, you might feel that you still want to do the song anyway, thinking it’s mandatory. Let me make your job easier: Pretty much any other song on the Essential Lynyrd Skynyrd double CD would be a much better choice than just doing an obligatory run-through of “Sweet Home Alabama”. You’ll probably have more fun playing it, too. General rule of thumb: Unless you’re a southern rock or country rock-based act or even a Skynyrd tribute band, “Sweet Home Alabama” isn’t as mandatory as you think it is. If you can’t play the song with the reverence and respect that it deserves, don’t play it.
Extra bonus points if you’re a band that gets a catcalled request for the song, you start the opening riff, and then turn around and go right into Uncle Neil’s “Southern Man”.
That CD has also been repackaged as Lynyrd Skynyrd Gold as part of Universal’s Gold series of double CD’s; my copy of Essential Lynyrd Skynyrd happened to have CDs labeled Lynyrd Skynyrd Gold, which is probably why the copy I bought - same track listing, just different labels on the discs - was so cheap.