Sweet Home Alabama

“Sweet Home Alabama” is a song by the American Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, released on their second album, Second Helping (1974). It was written in response to Neil Young’s 1970 song “Southern Man”, which they felt blamed the entire South for American slavery. Young is name-checked in the lyrics. It reached number 8 on the US chart in 1974, becoming the band’s highest-charting single. None of the three writers of the song were from Alabama; Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington were both born in Jacksonville, Florida, while Ed King was from Glendale, California. In an interview with Garden & Gun, Rossington explained the writing process. “I had this little riff,” he said. “It’s the little picking part and I kept playing it over and over when we were waiting on everyone to arrive for rehearsal. Ronnie and I were sitting there, and he kept saying, ‘play that again’. Then Ronnie wrote the lyrics and Ed and I wrote the music.” “Sweet Home Alabama” was a major chart hit for a band whose previous singles had “lazily sauntered out into release with no particular intent”. The hit led to two TV rock show offers, which the band turned down. In addition to the original appearance on Second Helping, the song has appeared on numerous Lynyrd Skynyrd compilations and live albums. “Sweet Home Alabama” was written in answer to two songs by Neil Young, “Southern Man” and “Alabama”, because the songs “took the entire South to task for the bloody history of slavery and its aftermath”. “We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two,” said Ronnie Van Zant at the time. The following excerpt is the Neil Young name-check in the song “Sweet Home Alabama”. In Young’s 2012 autobiography Waging Heavy Peace, he commented on his song, “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 misconstrue.”Another part of “Sweet Home Alabama” was also controversial in its reference to George Wallace, the then Governor of Alabama and noted supporter of racial segregation:. The choice of Birmingham in connection with the governor (rather than the capital Montgomery) is significant. “In 1963, the city was the site of massive civil rights activism, as thousands of demonstrators led by Martin Luther King, Jr. sought to desegregate downtown businesses… [and] was the scene of some of the most violent reactions to the Civil Rights Movement. “‘We tried to get Wallace out of there’ is how I always thought of it.” Towards the end of the song, Van Zant adds “where the governor’s true” to the chorus’s “where the skies are so blue,” a line rendered ironic by the previous booing of the governor. Journalist Al Swenson argues that the song is more complex than it is sometimes given credit for, suggesting that it only looks like an endorsement of Wallace. “Wallace and I have very little in common,” Van Zant himself said, “I don’t like what he says about colored people.” Music historians examining the juxtaposition of invoking Richard Nixon and Watergate after Wallace and Birmingham note that one reading of the lyrics is an “attack against the liberals who were so outraged at Nixon’s conduct” while others interpret it regionally: “the band was speaking for the entire South, saying to northerners, we’re not judging you as ordinary citizens for the failures of your leaders in Watergate; don’t judge all of us as individuals for the racial problems of southern society”. Ed King, the song’s co-writer, contradicted his former bandmates in a 2009 post on his website. He claimed the tune was originally intended as the unabashed defense of Alabama, even Gov. Wallace, that almost all of the song seems to be: