I have always had some questions about the song “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. The lines “In Birmingham they love the governor” and “Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you?” have caused me the slightest bit of discomfort, but I didn’t want to be “that” guy, and I’d already had someone important to me tell me that “nigger” doesn’t necessarily apply to just black people. I love this person dearly, but I bet they’d still tell me that “you only see racism because you want to.” Anyway, that guitar lick is catchy and the music is fun, so I accepted the gaslighting in advance and continued to ignore the twinges I felt whenever I heard the song. Until today.

Today, I heard the song again and I followed up on some of the questions I have. The first question I had was, “What’s all this about Neil Young?” I’m not a big fan of the man, so most of his library has gone unheard by me. I started looking in the easiest place, Wikipedia, of course. Here I found that the song was meant to be a response to Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” and “Alabama.” Again, I’ve got no knowledge to connect this to, so off I went to find the lyrics of these songs. What I found was that the songs were basically statements of disappointment in the South’s, specifically Alabama’s, adherence to old racial views and practices, their failure to get out of the 19th Century, as it were. This started making me think that there was something to the discomfort I felt when I heard the song. When you take offense that people are taking offense to bad actions, doesn’t that put you on the side of the bad actions. The Wikipedia article (and statements I’ve heard or read from people I know) have included the “don’t blame us all for the racial situation” defense. What is implied by this is that most Southerners were against racism in the 20th Century and slavery in the 19th; it’s just that this is how the system was, and we shouldn’t all be held responsible for the beliefs of a vocal few. Whenever I hear this argument, I think about an interview conducted by a journalist sometime in the 60s in what I think was Alabama. I watched this clip a long time ago, and it stuck with me ever since. On camera was a man who looked to be in his early 30s by today’s measure (so he might have been in his early 20s), attempting to show his support for the local black community. What he said was almost exactly (though it’s been a number of years since I’ve seen this clip last), “I feel pretty bad for the niggers around here. The niggers in these parts got it awful bad. Awful bad.” Now, I’m sure he didn’t think of himself as a racist. If the phrase was popular back then, he might have thought of himself as anti-racist. He was wrong, though, I’m pretty sure. Look, I’m not here for “it wasn’t all of us.” That shit didn’t work for Nazi Germany, and it’s not working for the South prior to 1970. The State of Alabama elected him Governor four times, when at least three of the four times, the cornerstone of his campaign was continued segregation. I’m not sure how much I think it works for today’s South, either, to be honest.

There have been attempts by some of the band members to have people believe that they’re just not hearing the song right when it sounds like support for George Wallace, but it’s hard for me to get past “and the governor’s true” at the back end of the song. But then there’s this: one of the song’s authors posted to a forum on his web page back in 2009 (before he died) that the song was definitely meant to be a defense of the South, Alabama, and yes, even George Wallace. In his comments, he says that George Wallace spoke for the “average white guy” in the South.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen to the song. I’m not even saying you shouldn’t enjoy it. I am saying that the song is exactly what it sounds like it is, and I thought you’d like to be aware of that if you weren’t already.