[On August 25th, 1976, the rock band Boston released their self-titled debut album. It would go on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time, so for its 50th anniversary this week I wanted to pay rocking tribute by AmericanStudying what a handful of iconic 70s bands can tell us about the nation. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post through which I hope we can keep on rockin’ in the free(ish) world!]
How the Southern rock band’s most famous song reflects three distinct ways to AmericanStudy them.
As a kid growing up in the South in the late 1970s and early 1980s—and I know folks from the Deep South like Lynyrd Skynyrd might not call Charlottesville, Virginia, the South, but I assure you it was—I was both aware of the region’s horrific histories and yet still frustrated that all of us got lumped into those worst versions (especially since one could do very much the same with all Americans, of course). So I certainly get why Neil Young’s scolding song “Southern Man” (1970) was likewise frustrating to someone like Ronnie Van Zant, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s frontman and chief songwriter; Van Zant and company crafted “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974), a song from their second album Second Helping that would become their only single to enter the Billboard top ten, in direct response to Young’s song, even name-checking him throughout the first verse including in lines like “Well, I hope Neil Young will remember/A Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.” (It’s worth noting that Young and Van Zant were friends, so this is a performative stance and a compelling one to be sure.)
So I get and endorse the message of the song’s opening verse, and more exactly the idea that there’s more than one way to be a Southern man (an idea to which the third and final verse returns, as will I below). But the second verse does this starting point no favors, as it presents a vision of what this new Southern man stands for that is frustratingly similar to the histories Young was calling out. I’m thinking in particular about the opening two lines, “In Birmingham, they loved the governor/Now we all did what we could do.” That governor is George Wallace, he of the infamous “Segregation now, segregation forever” speech, and a man who during the 1970 gubernatorial primaries had run ads with slogans like “Do you want the Black bloc electing your governor?” Wallace narrowly won that Democratic primary against incumbent Albert Brewer (who had indeed sought African American support) and won the governor’s race, thanks no doubt to plenty of racist white Alabamians doing what they could do. I don’t believe Van Zant and his fellow bandmates were racist—more on that in a moment—but at the very least these lines put them squarely adjacent to Wallace’s successfully racist campaign for governor, and that’s a shame.
And it becomes even more of a shame when we get to the song’s third and final verse, which focuses on a very specific place and community in Alabama: Muscle Shoals and “the Swampers,” the four session musicians who in 1969 founded the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and would go on to back countless artists, including Lynyrd Skynyrd. All four musicians were white, but they were deeply interconnected with the region’s foundational role in the history of Black music in America; often played behind Black artists like Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Jimmy Cliff, and many more; and, according to guitarist Jimmy Johnson, found it “the greatest compliment anyone could give them” when they were mistaken for Black musicians. Moreover, in this final verse Van Zant writes of the Swampers that “they’ve been known to pick a song or two,” which directly echoes another song on Second Helping: “The Ballad of Curtis Loew,” the story of a legendary Black musician of whom the chorus concludes, “People said he was useless, them people were all fools/‘Cause Curtis Loew was the finest picker to ever play the blues.” As is the case with so much iconic American music, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s was clearly and essentially cross-cultural, and this final verse tribute to the equally cross-cultural Muscle Shoals makes that a final layer to this frustratingly but tellingly multi-layered 70s rock song.
Next iconic and telling rock band tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Thoughts on this band or other iconic ones (from the 70s or not) you’d add into the conversation?
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