Song of the South

By Crispin Sartwell

When yankees like you asked me about the southern thing, I used to send y'all to Faulkner and Hank. Hank and Faulkner, though, are getting kind of...old: like half a century.
But now I've got something that explains the whole deal perfectly, truly, deeply. You got to get aholt of "Southern Rock Opera" by the Drive-By Truckers. At the risk of writing a blurb: this is profound, coherent, and important work of art.
It's about Lynryd Skynryd and southern rock. It's about alcohol and cocaine. It's about growing up in Alabama in the 70s. It's about two hours long.
Now it might occur to you that writing a two-hour rock opera about Lynryd Skynryd is not the very best idea that anyone ever had. And I might actually have agreed with you before I heard "Southern Rock Opera."
Southern rock was primordially the invention of the Allman Brothers, who came out of Atlanta playing an electrified country blues and jamming at great length. By the mid-seventies there was a bevy of bands in related veins, including Molly Hatchett, the Marshall Tucker Band, .38 Special, and above all Skynryd.
Duane Allman, the Brothers' great slide guitarist, who also played with Aretha Franklin among many others, died in a motorcycle accident. And just after the release of "Street Survivors" in , Skynryd's lead singer Ronnie Van Zandt and others died in a plane crash. So there was a certain semi romantic doom wound around the music.
"Street Survivors", though its songs have been trivialized by endless repetition on classic rock stations, was a masterpiece, one of the best dozen or so records in the history of rock. "Southern Rock Opera" makes constant references to it, not only in the lyrics, but in the playing.
In that sense, "Southern Rock Opera" is the very model of postmodern art. It's not only itself southern rock, but is about southern rock. After hearing "That Smell" or "Gimme Three Steps" hundreds of times, it's no longer possible to be a southern rocker in the same way Ronnie Van Zandt was. The Truckers are hyper-conscious of the style of music they're playing. Practically every riff has a reference in the classic texts of the form.
But there's also no gainsaying the fact that a lot of the music flat-out rocks as well.
What the thing is really about is growing up with music as one's central preoccupation, growing up with music as the engine of your identity. "Southern Rock Opera" tries to do for Bama what early Springsteen did for Jersey: make a typical youth there into the stuff of epic. But where Springsteen essentially invented his own vernacular, the Truckers are able to use the sounds of the era to evoke it with precision.
I'm not a big fan of the "rock opera" as a form. Rock is pop music and is best absorbed in fairly brief, discrete chunks. The Who's "Tommy," not to speak of the abominable early works of Andrew Lloyd Weber, were overblown and boring.
But the use of southern rock by the truckers keeps these discs from being pretentious. And by the end one realizes that they have told a truly epic story, the story of "the southern thing." There are meditations on race and George Wallace, on football, on the goodness of southern people and their pain.
The south is the object of both romance and revulsion to northern folks, and one thing that's not always realized is that there's a lot of good folks down there just trying to live their lives in a decent way. And the obsessive focus of northerners on southern race relations is in part a massive support for self-delusion. I've lived in Richmond, Nashville, and Tuscaloosa, and race relations there were far better than in my hometown of Washington D.C. Or in Baltimore or Philadelphia.

And the south is the source of the world's popular music: blues, jazz, rock, and country.
"Southern Rock Opera" constructs a romantic vision of the south in its own way, but one that is also realistic, that's focused on the problems and above all on the everyday life of real people.
That's precisely where the work's transcendent quality originates: in its everydayness. It achieves great truth and great self-consciousness precisely in its refusal of the grand profound gesture.