‘Does your conscience bother you?’: Lynyrd Skynyrd and the real meaning of Sweet Home Alabama
On an early summer’s day in 1973, while waiting for the last of his bandmates to arrive for rehearsal, Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington unfurled a speculative riff on a sunburst Les Paul. “Play that again,” ordered frontman and group-leader Ronnie Van Zant, a man only the unwise would ignore, before writing a lyric that has resonated for more than half a century. Even its title continues to evoke. In 2009, the words “Sweet Home Alabama” appeared on license plates issued by the state eulogised in song.
From the off, it was an anomalous classic. For one thing, Skynyrd came from Florida – the hardscrabble neighbourhood of Shantytown, in Jacksonville, to be exact – a neighbouring state of Alabama. Worse still, guitarist and co-writer Ed King was born in California, of all places. In this sense, the band’s claim to an allegiance with the Heart of Dixie was a bit like The Proclaimers barrelling onstage and singing Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner.
Somehow, though, it worked. “[Sweet Home Alabama] was one of the quickest songs they ever wrote,” recalled the band’s friend and live sound engineer Kevin Elson in the book Lynyrd Skynyrd: An Oral History. “The idea of it started being played in the morning, and when I came back to the [group’s fetid rehearsal space] the Hellhouse… at the end of the day, it was done.” Pen in hand, it took Ronnie Van Zant a mere 15 minutes to lyricize the chorus and one of the verses. Appropriately for a track that has remained cloaked in mystery since its release 50 years ago this summer, which verse is unclear.
Given that its authors never quite entered rock and roll’s VIP lounge, the numbers are astounding. In 2013, Sweet Home Alabama beat standards by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and everyone else to become the first song released prior to 1975 to break the three-million barrier for paid downloads. With varying degrees of success, not to mention sincerity, this most evergreen of bangers has been rendered by artists as diverse as Mumford & Sons, Green Day, Jimmy Buffett, Counting Crows, Jewel, Garth Brooks, Tori Amos, Dave Matthews Band, Killdozer, Nirvana, and more. Naturally, the country rock band Alabama have had a crack at it too.
More surprising, perhaps, is the song’s geographical pliability. International versions include Sweet Home Australia, Sweet Home Buenos Ares, Sweet Home South Korea and Sweet Home Jerusalem. Coveting spiritual real estate, the Christian rock group Harvest Worship issued a celestially inclined facsimile titled Sweet Home Up In Heaven. By placing their own hands around its neck, meanwhile, the English Nazi skinhead band Skrewdriver allowed unquiet ghosts to run amok. “The carpet baggers tried to swamp us, but to the [Ku Klux] Klan we all stand true,” they sang.
In its original form, though, the track is a tale of two peoples sheltering uneasily under the flag of one nation. As the author Jonathan Bernstein notes in his fascinating audiobook Sweet Home Everywhere, “To its advantage, Sweet Home Alabama has remained persistently contentious as a symbol, a pawn in the ongoing cultural, social and political conflicts [that have] pitted the South against the rest of America.”
As counterintuitive as it may seem, unlike metropolises at the foot of the state, the port city of Jacksonville, in northern Florida, is as much a part of the Deep South as Macon, Georgia, or Clarksdale in Mississippi. When Ronnie Van Zant wrote the lyrics to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s most famous song, the band’s hometown was a mere decade removed from abandoning segregationist policies that separated its black and white citizens in public life. In keeping with the region as a whole, this messy transition met with bare-knuckled resistance from rowdies dressed in bed sheets. Along with other acts of violence, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the homes of black students newly enrolled in previously white-only state schools.
In their earlier days, Lynyrd – pronounced Leonard – Skynyrd made their bones by gigging constantly in Florida and north-western Alabama. The group even recorded their first demo tape – featuring their second most famous song, Free Bird – at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama. Never mind that the cassette was duly rejected by no fewer than nine major record labels, the band themselves believed they’d found their people. “We used to do clubs and teen dances all around Alabama,” guitarist Gary Rossington would later recall. “When you drove through the state it was beautiful. And they were great people. If you had trouble, they’d come out to help you.”
Certainly, this affinity was real enough that Ronnie Van Zant took personal offence when Neil Young, a Canadian no less, had a pop at his crowd. Of particular grievance were the songs Alabama and Southern Man, the latter of which saw Young singing how “I saw cotton and I saw black, tall white mansions and little shacks, Southern man, when will you pay them back?” By way of response, famously, Lynyrd Skynyrd addressed the slight in the opening verse of Sweet Home Alabama. “Well I hope Neil Young will remember, a Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow,” Van Zant sang.
“We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks to kill one or two,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. In an audio recording featured in the 2018 documentary film If I Leave Here Tomorrow, meanwhile, the singer (who never seemed at all comfortable on this topic) admitted that “we knew that by doing that song, just writing those lyrics, we knew from the beginning that we’d get a lot of heat for it. And I did attack Neil Young in that song. ‘What are you talking about’, you know? From what I’m told, you were born in Canada.”
(Despite the Floridian’s boundless appetite for a scrap, it’s worth noting that the dispute wasn’t much of a rock and roll ding dong. In 1977, Ronnie Van Zant could be seen sporting a Neil Young t-shirt on the cover of the Lynyrd Skynyrd album Street Survivors. Thirty-five years later, in his 2012 autobiography Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream, Young even went so far as to admit he deserved the jab from his apparent adversary. “I didn’t like my words [to Alabama and Southern Man] when I wrote them,” he revealed. “They are accusatory and condescending.”)
Really, though, Skynyrd were just getting started. By the time the song’s second verse rolled into view, Van Zant had somehow managed, in just 17 words, to sow the kind of confusion that has reaped a harvest for a full half century. “In Birmingham they love the governor – boo boo boo – now we all did what we could do,” he sang. Okay, fine, but what is he claiming to have done, people wondered. And who is it’s that being booed here, exactly?
Here’s what we do know. The governor in question is one George Corley Wallace Jr., an ardent racist who in 1963 gave a speech – on the site at which Jefferson Davis was bequeathed the provisional presidency of the Confederate States of America, no less – written by the KKK leader Asa Carter in which he declared that “in the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny… I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Inevitably, talk such as this attracted no end of attention. In 1972, Wallace’s bid to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee came to an end when one of four bullets fired by a would-be assassin left him paralysed from the waist down.
While a more cautious lyricist might well have left the governor of Alabama out of it, Ronnie Van Zant had big catfish to fry. It doesn’t much matter that in Sweet Home Alabama the spectre of the American Civil War is only ever implied – nonetheless, the divisive and chaotic legacy of so much historical monkey-business hangs heavy from first beat to last. As well as much else, the song bears scrutiny as being one half of a dialogue in which the descendants of the Confederacy are afforded a rare opportunity (as they see it) to respond to their Northern detractors.
“But 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 his own right,” the website American Songwriter noted in 2019. “‘Now Watergate does not bother me,’ he sings with a snarl, ‘does your conscience bother you?’ 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… Sweet Home Alabama is a song that negotiates what it’s like to feel bad about feeling proud.”
Academics and artists are unlikely to ever untangle themselves from weeds such as these. Certainly, the dominance of the song’s second verse manages to effortlessly obscure a subsequent section in which Lynyrd Skynyrd unequivocally eulogise the Swampers, a group of white Muscle Shoals musicians whose names were made playing on hundreds of gospel, blues and soul classics by black artists such as Percy Sledge and Eta James. The presence of backing vocalists Clydie King and Merry Clayton, both women of colour, on Sweet Home Alabama itself is very rarely noted.
But as the Maryland academic Drew Daniel notes in his essay How To Sing Along With Sweet Home Alabama, “Determining racism [in the song] is a bit like determining anti-Semitism in The Merchant Of Venice. Both are clearly susceptible to such uses, and generate such readings for a reason, but they are also both shot through with enough counter-evidence that they remain permanently evasive. There’s an adaptive vagueness to Sweet Home Alabama which, along with it just being a good song, is perhaps what makes it so anthemic.
“You can,” he added, “detect within it whatever political relation to the legacy of Southern racial politics you want, from full dress irony and dry wit in the face of tragedy, all the way along the spectrum to straight up white boy chest-beating Southern pride.”
About this, even the band themselves appeared divided. In an interview in 1975, Ronnie Van Zant denied accusations of political endorsement by stating that “[Governor] Wallace and I have very little common. I don’t like what he says about coloured people.” Ed King, on the other hand, had no such qualms. “‘In Birmingham we love the Governor,’” he explained, somehow misquoting a line from a song he actually helped write. “Get it? “‘We all did what we could do’ to get Wallace elected. It’s not a popular opinion but Wallace stood for the average white guy in the South.”
Of course, at least some of this confusion might well have been cleared up were it not for the tragedy of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crashing into the forests of southern Mississippi en route to a concert in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in October 1977. The death on impact of Ronnie Van Zant (along with six other passengers) put paid to everything bar speculation about the true meanings of Sweet Home Alabama.
One thing, though, is known: with its line-up of surrogates and sidemen, the 21st century iteration of Skynyrd has little time for nuances of the past. As well as being one of the few mainstream rock acts willing to play Republican Party happenings, conservative conferences and gun shows, the group has gone so far as to perform Sweet Home Alabama with conspiracy theorists and talk show blowhards such as Mike Huckabee and Sean Hannity. With this, a band that were once supple enough to write songs about the futile destructiveness of firearms (Saturday Night Special) and the cause of environmentalism (All I Can Do Is Write About It) had at last painted themselves into a corner from which there was no escape.
In 2012, following an outcry from what I suppose we should call their base, Lynyrd Skynyrd reversed a decision to no longer perform in front of a Confederate flag. “We know what [it] represents and its heritage,” the band said in a statement issued less than a fortnight after decrying the symbol’s proximity to “racist hate groups”. They went on: “The Civil War was fought over states’ rights. We [will] still utilise the… rebel flag onstage every night in our shows. We are, and we always will be, a Southern American rock band.”
