A Once Unnecessary Reminder: Criticism Produces Good Works

“My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending…”

Editor’s note: Although initially published on November 29, 2020, this essay has been re-released to include a brief discussion of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1817-18 poem “Ozymandias.”

In March of 2018, in an interview hosted by SiriusXM’s “Southern Rock” channel, the current members of the rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd reflected on their careers and the band’s influence, with a particular emphasis on their 1974 classic song “Sweet Home Alabama.” The tune, of course, has—in the time since—become a mainstay of sporting events and campaign rallies and has come to be considered nearly synonymous with the state to which it pays tribute. As has been frequently discussed at this point, “Sweet Home Alabama” was written originally in response to a pair of songs by Canadian songwriter Neil Young: “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” both of which were deeply critical of the American South, its cultural mores, and its record on race. As Johnny Van Zant, the current lead singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd put it in the SiriusXM interview, “Neil Young came out, of course, with a couple songs that put down Alabama, and Ronnie [Van Zant]’s saying, ‘With hell, Neil, you’re from Canada, what the hell you know about Alabama?’”

Years later, even Young himself appeared to recognize that he may have overstepped in his song-writing (“Alabama, you got the weight on your shoulders/That’s breaking your back/Your Cadillac has got a wheel in the ditch”), writing in 2012, “My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending…” Also appearing to walk back some of the lyrics of “Southern Man,” Young would suggest to Dan Rather in 2016 that at least a portion of the song’s degree of vituperation could be explained by an argument Young was having with his then-wife on an evening the song was being written: “Well, the one thing I remember is my lovely wife threw something at the door while I was writing, and that’s where some of the anger might have come from.”

However, as Johnny Van Zant made clear, there are no lingering hard feelings: “A lot of people think Skynyrd hates Neil Young, but that’s not the case at all.” And this point was also echoed by Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington, who seemed even to imply that there never were: “We loved Neil Young—always did, still do.” On Young’s part, he notably played a live cover version of “Sweet Home Alabama” in tribute to its writers, has expressed feeling honored to be mentioned in a song that has come to be imbued with such cultural import, and has not performed his own song “Alabama” since 1977. It is perhaps now even the case that Lynyrd Skynyrd’s response to Young’s own songs has eclipsed the original in Young’s own mind, just as it most certainly has in popular imagination.