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The Three Great Alabama Icons

Drive-By Truckers

I grew up in North Alabama, back in the 1970’s,
when dinosaurs still roamed the earth…

Speaking of course of the Three Great Alabama
Icons… George Wallace, Bear Bryant and Ronnie
Van Zant… Now Ronnie Van Zant wasn’t from
Alabama, he was from Florida… He was a huge
Neil Young fan… But in the tradition of Merle
Haggard writin’ Okie from Muskogee to tell his
dad’s point of view about the hippies ‘n
Vietnam, Ronnie felt that the other side of the
story should be told. And Neil Young always
claimed that Sweet Home Alabama was one of his
favorite songs. And legend has it that he was an
honorary pall bearer at Ronnie’s funeral… such
is the Duality of the Southern Thing… And Bear
Bryant wore a cool lookin’ red checkered hat
and won football games… and there’s few
things more loved in Alabama than football and
the men who know how to win at it… So when the
Bear would come to town, there’d be a parade.
And me, I was one a’ them pussy boys… cause I
hated football, so I got a guitar… but a guitar
was a poor substitute for a football with the
girls in my high school… So my band hit the
road… and we didn’t play no Skynyrd either…
I came of age rebellin’ against the music in my
high school parkin’ lot… It wasn’t till
years later after leavin’ the South for a while
that I came to appreciate and understand the whole
Skynyrd thing and its misunderstood glory… I
left the South and learned how different
people’s perceptions of the Southern Thing was
from what I’d seen in my life… Which leads us
to George Wallace… Now Wallace was for all
practical purposes the Governor of Alabama from
1962 until 1986… Once, when a law prevented him
from succeeding himself he ran his wife Lerline
in his place and she won by a landslide… He’s
most famous as the belligerent racist voice of the
segregationist South… Standing in the doorways
of schools and waging a political war against a
Federal Government that he decried as
hypocritical… And Wallace had started out as a
lawyer and a judge with a very progressive and
humanitarian track record for a man of his time.
But he lost his first bid for governor in 1958 by
hedging on the race issue, against a man who
spoke out against integration… Wallace ran
again in ’62 as a staunch segregationist and
won big, and for the next decade spoke out
loudly… He accused Kennedy and King of being
communists. He was constantly on national news,
representing the “good” people of Alabama…
And you know race was only an issue on TV in the
house that I grew up in… Wallace was viewed as
a man from another time and place… And when I
first ventured out of the South, I was shocked
at how strongly Wallace was associated with
Alabama and its people… Ya know racism is a
worldwide problem and it’s been since the
beginning of recorded history… and it ain’t
just white and black… But thanks to George
Wallace, it’s always a little more convenient
to play it with a Southern accent. And bands
like Lynyrd Skynyrd attempted to show another
side of the South… One that certainly exists,
but few saw beyond the rebel flag… And this
applies not only to their critics and detractors,
but also from their fans and followers. So for a
while, when Neil Young would come to town, he’d
get death-threats down in Alabama… Ironically,
in 1971, after a particularly racially charged
campaign, Wallace began backpedaling, and he
opened up Alabama politics to minorities at a
rate faster than most Northern states or the
Federal Government. And Wallace spent the rest
of his life trying to explain away his racist
past, and in 1982 won his last term in office
with over 90% of the black vote… Such is the
Duality of the Southern Thing… And George
Wallace died back in ’98 and he’s in Hell
now, not because he’s a racist… His track
record as a judge and his late-life quest for
redemption make a good argument for his being, at
worst, no worse than most white men of his
generation, North or South… But because of his
blind ambition and his hunger for votes, he turned
a blind eye to the suffering of Black America.
And he became a pawn in the fight against the
Civil Rights cause… For

tunately for him, the Devil is also a
Southerner…