Table of Content
This band was always about just playing the music, but those songs have become a soundtrack to a lot of people’s lives. “Sweet Home Alabama” is still played on the radio a lot, and when people hear the first little beat of it, their reaction is to sing. If you can write a song that makes people have emotions and show their feelings, that’s a powerful thing and a beautiful thing. Now there are people saying roll tide with it and there is a new generation who hears it and relates.
In September 2007, Alabama governor Bob Riley announced that the phrase "Sweet Home Alabama" would be used to promote Alabama state tourism in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. In 2009, the state of Alabama began using the phrase as an official slogan on motor-vehicle license plates, and Riley noted that the song is the third most-played that refers to a specific destination. The song remains a staple in southern and classic rock, and is arguably the band's signature song. By all accounts, there was no real "feud" between the artists.
The Real Story Behind the Song "Sweet Home Alabama"
The band remains connected to Muscle Shoals, where it has recorded on numerous occasions and where it regularly performs during concert tours.
Kid Rock's 2008 song "All Summer Long" interpolates "Sweet Home Alabama" on the chorus and uses the guitar solo and piano outro, as well as the "turn it up" shout before the guitar solo; Billy Powell is featured on the track. "All Summer Long" also samples Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London", which has similar chord progression to "Sweet Home Alabama". Consuming that many calories required activity, so that morning we did what we always do — we took a long walk, this time up on the "mountain" as we call the steep, rising slope of Monte Sano, which you can see from Mother's backyard.
"All Summer Long"
"We wrote 'Sweet Home Alabama' as a joke," Van Zant clarified a few years following the release. "We didn't even think about it. The words just came out that way. We just laughed like hell and said, 'Ain't that funny.' We love Neil Young. We love his music." Lynyrd Skynyrd had recorded demos in Muscle Shoals with Johnson as a producer/recording engineer in 1971 and 1972, and Johnson helped refine many of the songs on the Pronounced album.
We travel all over the world and it seems like the South is the place where the people are nicest and they think of the fellow man more. In the late 1960s, in Jacksonville, Florida, a clean-cut gym teacher named Leonard Skinner sent student Gary Rossington to the principal’s office because his hair touched his collar. The teenager’s shaggy mop was a brazen violation of Robert E. Lee High School’s dress code. When Rossington and some of his friends and schoolmates—singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Allen Collins, drummer Bob Burns, and bassist Larry Junstrom—were searching for a new name for their fledgling rock group—they drew on memories of the incident. Lynyrd Skynyrd (vowels changed “to protect the guilty”) was born. It seemed like you could see North Alabama with a wide-angle lens from that spot.
Muscle Shoals
The 2002 hit movie Sweet Home Alabama stars Reese Witherspoon as Melanie Carmichael, Josh Lucas as Jake Perry, Patrick Dempsey as Andrew Hennings, and Candice Bergen as Mayor Kate Hennings—Andrew's intimidating and oftentimes controlling mom. While you might think this all-star cast is enough to secure blockbuster success, it is really the script that the film is best known for. Sometimes cheesy ("What'd you want to marry me for anyhow?") and sometimes razor-sharp ("You can't ride two horses with one ass, sugarbean"), it always captures that unmistakable charm of something said with a Southern accent. For that reason, it has climbed the ranks as one of the most quotable movies out there.
Ronnie and I were sitting there, and he kept saying, play that again. The next morning she made her country breakfast, with sausage, country ham and bacon accompanied by eggs scrambled so lightly they had to be anchored to our plates with biscuits and two kinds of gravy. We sang complexly written and arranged music by Broadway songwriters with four- or five-part harmonies. In those days, music stores were everywhere, and they sold a lot of arrangements for small vocal groups, pieces from composers like Sigmund Romberg and Rodgers and Hart.
We had toured there, going all around playing clubs and National Guard armories. When we were out in the country driving all the time, we would listen to the radio. Neil Young had “Southern Man,” and it was kind of cutting the South down.
"The Swampers" is a reference to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. These musicians, who crafted the "Muscle Shoals Sound", were inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1995 for a Lifework Award for Non-Performing Achievement and into the Musicians' Hall of Fame in 2008. The nickname "The Swampers" was coined by producer Denny Cordell during a recording session by singer/songwriter Leon Russell, in reference to the band's "swampy" sound. I love being Southern because of the people and the fans we have.
"Southern man better keep your head," went the chorus of the former. "Don't forget what your good book said/ Southern change gonna come at last/ Now your crosses are burning fast." Young had expressed his disappointment with racism in the South in two songs, "Southern Man" and "Alabama". The song is credited to Matthew Shafer, Waddy Wachtel, R.J. Ritchie, Leroy Marinell, Warren Zevon, Edward King, Gary Rossington and Ronnie Van Zant. Since "All Summer Long"'s release, the original song has also charted at number 44 on the UK Singles Chart.
And so Ronnie just said, We need to show people how the real Alabama is. In 1977, a tragic airplane crash in Mississippi killed three members of the band, including Van Zant. A decade later, the band reformed with Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny as the lead singer. He’s still the frontman today, and the band recently released a live album, is working on a new studio album, and is on tour . Called "Sweet Home Alabama," the single reached number eight on U.S. charts—its popularity due, at least in part, to a controversy hidden in the verses.
When we were children, the public schools still offered an excellent music program, and my cousin Sandra and I studied under a Russian violin teacher named Ara Zerounian. We had piano lessons, of course, and since everyone in my family sang, the girls and I started singing together. Van Zant grew up listening to Young and regularly rocked a "Tonight's the Night" t-shirt—most notably, on the cover of the band's album Street Survivors.
No comments:
Post a Comment