Anyway, by 1973, taking pot-shots at the South was shooting fish in a barrel. One defense of the tune is that Young, a Canadian, had no business poking his nose into the internal affairs of the sovereign state of Alabama, making the song less a defense of the South than a rebuke of meddling outsiders from the North, or, in Young's case, the Great North Woods. Skynyrd, several of whose original members perished in a 1977 plane crash, have long denied allegations that the song is a white supremacy anthem, insisting that the lyrics are more ambivalent. By the final year of Richard Nixon's term in office, explicit racism was going out of style in American popular culture. It was also the site of three epochal 1965 civil rights march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, a turning point in American history when blase folks living in more enlightened regions of the US got to turn on their TVs and see the Alabama state police in action.ġ974 was an odd year to release a song that appeared, on the surface, to support George Wallace and the white South in general.
It also boasted the Birmingham police chief Bull Connor who unleashed German Shepherds on women and children, then blasted them with water cannons, during a 1963 civil-rights march. Alabama was famous for its flamboyantly racist governor George Wallace, who once stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama in a staged, tawdry, farcical attempt to prevent two African-American students from entering the event ended when federal marshals armed with guns told him to move. Young got up the Skynyrdian nose because of his abrasive, heavy-handed Southern Man and the somewhat more delicate Alabama, both of which were vehemently critical of the American South for its Neanderthal treatment of African-Americans. The state also turned up in the 1934 jazz standard Stars Fell on Alabama, and Stephen Foster's 1847 classic Oh! Susanna! This is a lot of songs to be written about one of America's most obscure states. The song made the band famous, particularly in Alabama, which had already appeared in several songs called Alabama Bound or I'm Alabama Bound, as well as in Kurt Weill's Alabama Song, later recorded by the Doors. Sweet Home Alabama was written in 1973 in response to Neil Young's repeatedly thumbing his nose at the South, and at Alabama in particular. But at the time Lynyrd Skynyrd released Sweet Home Alabama in 1974, the practice was relatively new. The use of a song as revenge for insults, real or imagined, is quite common in the hip-hop world, where rappers routinely use their material to abuse other artists. These are songs written in retaliation for something flippant or defamatory enunciated in somebody else's song. Sweet Home Alabama falls into that wonderful category of songs known on the continent as chansons de revanche or dissenlieder.
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