![]() You might read “logical fallacy” as if it’s a bad thing-but I don’t. And when it does come time to address the indictment of the South head-on, “Sweet Home Alabama” turns into a display of the power of logical fallacy. Young’s bullwhips are already far, far away, and receding into the distance-we’re in the realm of family, roadtrips, and blue skies. This isn’t reactive or defensive-it is entirely positive. Sweet home Alabama, where the skies are so blue. So Skynyrd’s response is something entirely different, and entirely unexpected (an unexpectedness that could only be dulled by four decades of radio rotation): “Hey-I’m from there! Now shut your Canadian mouth and listen to this awesome guitar lick.” But all of these profitable lines of response are discarded, becausee they themselves invite rebuttals and continued argument-whereas the point is to end the conversation. ![]() It might have argued that American elites of all regions have had a stake in the racial caste system, and that it was a massive dodge of responsibility and false salve of the conscience to make the South alone the national scapegoat. It might have attacked the hypocrisy of singling out the South for criticism, when-as civil rights leaders from MLK to Malcolm X pointed out-Northern cities remained hotbeds of de facto segregation themselves. Skynyrd might have pointed out that the South, by 1974, had at the very least openly confronted its history of racism and begun the work of desegregation. Now, there were a number of more-or-less reasonable responses to this line of attack. The Canadian-born Young has just delivered a scathing indictment of the South’s legacy of slavery and racial apartheid: Think of “Sweet Home Alabama” as a closing statement in a high-stakes debate with Neil Young (and the fact that Young and Skynyrd’s lead singer Ronnie Van Zant actually got along quite well changes none of the argument). ![]() They assert, they state, they restate-but they do not stoop to explain. Cynical as it may sound, most of us instinctively associate explanation-the reasonable, good-faith attempt at political persuasion-with weakness. As Karl Rove once said: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Karl Rove should be credited in Skynyrd’s liner notes, because the song is that philosophy embodied. Above all, “Sweet Home Alabama” is effective because it is ubiquitous-because, even if you are a racially enlightened liberal like myself, you know at least its chorus by heart. It is effective because it absolutely devastates the song it is in dialogue with-Neil Young’s “Southern Man”-to the point that the latter would be entirely forgotten if its memory weren’t resurrected only to be dispatched like the Washington Generals every time “Sweet Home Alabama” comes on the radio. “Sweet Home Alabama” is effective because it sidesteps that template entirely-but it is a protest song all the same, a protest against what the song regards as the smug political superiority of the South’s post-segregation political critics. Of course, most of us associate the category “protest song” with the Woody Guthrie/Pete Seeger/Bob Dylan hippie-with-an-acoustic-guitar genre. It is, quite simply, the most effective protest song ever recorded. In a field with more than its share of hamfisted, unsubtle preaching to the choir, “Sweet Home Alabama” stands alone. Whatever our opinion of its implicit politics, I think we have to agree that it is an absolute master class in the art of political music. ![]() But what I’ve lost in innocence, I’ve more than gained in respect for the song and its craftsmanship. I can’t say that I’ll ever be back to the point of enjoying “Sweet Home Alabama” with an entirely easy conscience. (N.B.: I should mention here that members of the band responsible, Lynryd Skynyrd, have insisted that the song is not an endorsement of Wallace at all. That night, before I passed out, it took me three minutes on Wikipedia to discover that the Governor was George Wallace-George “Segregation Forever” Wallace-and that what I’d always imagined to be a harmlessly infectious rock song was something much darker, and more interesting. I did not know that there anything ethically objectionable to dancing to “Sweet Home Alabama” at a party, but I trusted my friend’s opinion and stopped then and there. ‘In Birmingham they love the Governor’? Do you know who the Governor was when that song came out?” Gawky white boy that I am, I can’t dance to anything, though that’s never stopped me.
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