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Walt recounts how a friend who grew up in the American South during the 1960s was still taught an anti-union ditty (“Three hundred thousand Yankees lie stiff in Southern dust/ We got three hundred thousand, before they conquered us”) as a way of underscoring how deeply anti-occupation sentiment can persist. But then he draws a straight-line connection to Lynrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” using the verse that responds to Neil Young’s diss track “Southern Man.” Walt writes:
This is what defeat in war and prolonged occupation does to a society: it generates hatred and resentment that can last a century or more.
Yes! Yes that’s true. But “Sweet Home Alabama” is an example of something more subtle.
The crucial verse in “Sweet Home Alabama” is the third one, where Skynyrd sing, “In Birmingham they love the governor,” a reference to George Wallace, and then chant out, “Boo! Boo! Boo!” before asking if the conscience of Alabama is untroubled by Wallace’s racism. That’s as direct a confrontation of southern white racism as you could expect for a song glorifying the south, and it’s a credit to Skynyrd for taking the subject on. But the reason why they went after Neil Young is simple: “Southern Man” treats all southerners as Wallace. As a result, it risked marginalizing anti-racist white southerners who needed all the authenticity-cred they could get it into Wallace supporters’ heads that they shouldn’t back the demagogue. Lyrnrd Skynyrd, in other words, represented an Alabama Awakening. But Neil, in his zeal, treated reconcilable elements as irreconcilable. Skynyrd took him on as a step of taking back the south for their mutual and admirable goal.
I’m not saying Walt is wrong and “Sweet Home Alabama” isn’t a reflection of “what defeat in war and prolonged occupation does to a society.” It reflects a distinctly southern perspective, forged in what Walt describes. But it’s much more subversive than Walt gives it credit. Anti-occupation sentiments can be claimed and reclaimed for all kinds of worthy goals. As much as occupation warps the perspectives of those who bear its force, we’re not locked in a hopeless dialectic between occupation and demagoguery.
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I think your reading is completely off. The “Does your conscience bother you?” seems to refer to Watergate and how the North has its own issues.
Also they include the couplet:
“Where the skies are so blue
And the governor’s true ”
In the last verse. Seems to me they are reveling in it not confronting it.
Maaaaaaaybe. But then why boo Wallace on first reference?
You should listen to “The Three Great Alabama Icons” by the Drive-by Truckers. It’s a great example of a southern band dealing with that second point. It might be a bit folky/speaky for you, but it’s great.
FWIW, when the song first came out and folks were calling it a slap at Southern Man, Skynyrd folks contacted Neil Young to let him know it wasn’t. Ed King, one of the then guitarists, had played with Young in the past.
Granted there’s a lot of haze over my memories, but IIRC, they did say at the time that it was a bit sarcastic as an anthem of the south.
Ronnie Van Zant was a bit of a leftie at the time (think of his later song, Saturday Night Special for an example)
The military occupations of Japan and Germany ended differently. Different cultures or different occupation policies? I’ll bet some sociologists have studied it to death.
The military occupation of Germany was no doubt a reaction to the harshness of the result of the reparations after the first World War, hence the Marshall Plan.
With Germany at least, there’s the comparative example of East Germany to make the West German occupation look highly appealing.
I think with Japan one key factor is that the Emperor surrendered and was kept around.
That said, I think the example of the American South is also exceptional in some ways. The battle over civil rights lasted at least a century after the war itself. In some ways, we may have disrupted the Southern social order more profoundly than pacifism disrupted Germany or Japan. Hitler’s vehement antisemitism obviously had origins in German culture, but while the German war machine profited greatly by stealing from murdered Jews, such exploitation wasn’t the basis of the pre-war economy in the same way that slavery was the basis of the Southern economy.
I don’t know to what extent liberating women draws a similar backlash. From what I’ve heard, the Taliban’s treatment of them was an aberration in Kabul but not necessarily elsewhere. That said, so long as we’re in the country I’m not willing to write off the rights of 50+% of the population.
All people looking to discuss “Sweet Home Alabama” and its political connotations should be required to listen to “The Three Great Alabama Icons” by the Drive-by Truckers before saying anything.
Hell, anybody looking to discuss the South in general should have to.
Different occupation policies. Specifically, the longevity of the occupation, and the transition of the occupation into alliance. Reconstruction was ended early and abruptly, and the Southerners were subsequently left at the mercy of those portions of their society that remained unreconciled and were eager to exploit grievance for power. This is similar to Interwar Germany. Post-WWII Axis powers were occupied on an essentially permanent basis and required to reinvent themselves culturally–Italy embraced the mythology that they had been misled into German slavery and freed by the Allies; Germany blackballed Nationalist sentiments; Japan abandoned millennia of tradition regarding militarism. And the hotbed of European neo-Nazism today is the little sliver of France that Hitler annexed as part of the German Homeland which was just returned to France and never really subject to postwar occupation.
It’s very hard to stay in one place without making friends, even among former enemies.
FWIW, as a native Kentuckian (and yes, Kentucky is a southern state), whose great grandfather was in the Confederate Army and who has lived and worked in AL, FL, and TX as well as in NH, MA, NY, CT, IL, MI, CO, and HI, I do think I already have a pretty good idea about the south without having to listen to the Drive By Truckers
But thanks for asking
Spencer’s reading is the right one. The whole verse goes:
In Birmingham they love the governor
Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
The “we” of the second line is clearly contrasted with the “they” of the first. The part about Nixon seems to say, well the Yankee/Union government leader is a bastard, too, so get off your high horse.
Also the last verse about the Muscle Shoals session band (one of them the father of one of the DBTs guys, btw) is important: those white dudes were the backing band on some of the best records Aretha Franklin (“I Never Loved A Man” was made there) and Wilson Pickett (“Mustang Sally” also produced there) ever made. And yet another subtle diss: no Yankee college-boy folkies could ever lay down tracks that funky.
tmi!… http://www.thrasherswheat.org/jammin/lynyrd.htm