The Southern Thing
Earlier this month, I saw Drive By Truckers play their double album Southern Rock Opera in full (no anniversary, they just wanted to, I guess). Great show. When they played the song “The Three Great Alabama Icons”, a spoken word tribute and critique of the deceased Ronnie Van Zandt of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the tragedy of which a good portion of the album is dedicated to, Bear Bryant, and George Wallace, Patterson Hood decided not to really talk about any of that and instead talked about being from the south today, in 2024, including an anecdote about seeing a Proud Boys rally in his now home state of Oregon while going his whole upbringing in Alabama without seeing a Klan rally once. It’s an album written from that defensive back foot, making the case that what outsiders see and what actually is about living in the south are often two different things, but also sometimes aren’t (“the duality of the Southern Thing”). It’s an insular mindset that you are probably familiar with if you have talked to anybody from the south, a kind of “I get to make fun of my family but you don’t” type of deal.
Southern Rock Opera is not a blind defense of the dirty south’s sordid history of depraved racist violence, individually and institutionally, nor is it really a celebration of the region either, being more about drinking, drugs, and death than anything else. It’s ultimately an album trying to figure out what happens when neither praise or disdain feel quite right, what goes on in your brain when the place you grew up in seems to be two different images occupying the same space. Everything is an angel or a devil and then both and then neither.
“The Southern Thing”, as the de facto thesis statement of the album’s narrative, is the kind of lashing out that can come this level of generational cognitive dissonance. The song is about the southern U.S. existing in a constant state of contradiction, a volatile entity prone to mood swings and your best bet is to just stay out the way, meaning “mind your fuckin’ business Yankee.” It’s a bit petulant but in a lot of ways it’s what it really feels like to be from this part of the country and have a not insubstantial portion of the rest of the land earnestly believe stereotypes about dumb hicks and gun toting religious fanatics, but what makes this feeling and this song sting is that those notions are also often true, and the Truckers had to stop playing “The Southern Thing” for a long time because people kept bringing Confederate flags to their shows. It’s an aching, longing emotion that makes you wish that the love and complexity and kindness you’ve seen in your day to day life as a southerner was reflected by the governing forces, the culture, the history, and it is sometimes, but also who elected those officials? Where’d Jim Crow come from? Who dragged James Byrd Jr. behind their pickup truck for three miles and dumped what was left of him in front of a church in 1998, three years before Southern Rock Opera was released?
It’s a hard thing to get past. It’s hard to square the circle of knowing about the awful, bloody, true things that happened and also acknowledge the breathing human beings that live here that deserve love and show it to others. It’s election season, so a lot of folks will be coming out of the woodwork and all but stating that they wish the south would be razed, that the next climate catastrophe will be just desserts, that we deserve whatever injustices our governments decide to impose upon a public full of those who will also feel it the worst. It’s a wish for collective punishment, all the while being more than glad to reap the benefits of southern culture, to acknowledge the importance of southern music on a global scale, to wear cowboy boots and hats and post “yeehaw” memes and speak with an affected southern accent. My boyfriend hates the song “Clay Pigeons” by Blaze Foley because he heard too many well-to-do northern art school kids play it at Bennington, and sometimes I think about how many of those people would feel about actually meeting someone like Foley and if they would be able to find anything to talk about. People want to enjoy these cultural trappings without understanding how intrinsically tied these things are to the culture they come from; A culture they mostly despise. Southern Rock Opera is also partly about this, and about how Lynyrd Skynyrd are their art and are also Jacksonville, Florida and Alabama and everything you may hate about those places. The duality of the Southern Thing.
I really connected with this album and this band because I’ve had all of these sentiments gestating inside of me for almost as long as I’ve been alive but had never heard them put to words. A lot of southerners experience this conflict when they reach a certain age and start looking at their environment through a different lense. You realize that southern hospitality is indeed a real thing, but that it may have its limits; You see people you’ve known your entire life and have only ever seen treat people with the utmost kindness and generosity turn into monsters at the drop of a hat; You begin to realize that it’s not really normal to have so many Confederate flags around. It’s an idea that has long been explored by authors of the southern gothic like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, the notion that beneath the genteel and pleasant southern veneer lies a rot so dark and consumptive that it has to be compensated for by manners and glasses of sweet tea. The Truckers are less poetic about it, and they go so far as to propose that the evil is not supressed in favor of the good, but that they lay side by side. In this perspective, to be southern is to stew in a land of contradiction, where love and hate, God and the Devil, prejudice and acceptance, kindness and meanness, can paradoxically live within one mind.
As I write this, though, a question comes to mind that I’ve asked myself countless times over the years: am I southern? Not geographically speaking, but like southern southern. When I feel an existential connection to Patterson Hood’s own inner turmoil about what it means to be from the south in the modern age, what part of myself am I actually connecting to?
I know that I’m Texan, for sure. I was raised in a small Texas town called Schertz, and my parents are from small Texas towns, and my accent, my inheritance, comes out often and moreso when I’m drunk or tired. I was raised on a lot of country music and southern rock and I smoke Marlboros. I drink Shiner Bock. But my “small” town also at this point probably has more fast food restaurants and strip malls per square mile than residential areas, and one more piece of land that would’ve lent any credence to a rural identity disappears under concrete every time I come home. I have a lot of country cousins, but I was raised in the suburbs. There’s also a lot to be said about Texas kind of being its own thing, being close to what we would consider the “south” but also being so large and diverse itself that it doesn’t really have all that much in common with any of those places. Texan is its own separate national identity, so much so that we grow up saying a unique pledge to the state in the classroom alongside the pledge of allegiance. There’s not a lot about me that communicates where I’m from besides the slightest of drawls, and that feels more like party trick than an actual signifier of region or history. What makes me any more southern than a college kid from anywhere who’s just really into Orville Peck or starts all their emails with “Hey y’all”?
I live in Austin, now, which is a city that postures a lot about this Texan identity and its country bonafides, if any still exist. The flood of tech entrepreneurs and income tax refugees in the past few years into the city fashion themselves as cowboys and outlaws, meaning everything about them is the same but they have a couple of pairs of Wranglers in the closet and Elon Musk gets to wear a cowboy hat. The city itself kind of wears the corpse of this Texan/southern/country/whatever identity as a rotting shawl; Willie Nelson murals in gentrified neighborhoods, people wearing cowboy boots into designer clothing stores, taking pictures in front of the “I Love You So Much” wall wearing cheap, grotesque cow-print hats. I don’t know if its the same in other major metropolitan southern cities, but here it feels like the Southern Thing is to act like there still is a Southern Thing and that all of these things we’ve come to associate with the idea of “Texas” or “the South” are now divorced entirely of context or history and are made into cheap signals of an identity that everyone has a different definition for. Of course, when you remember what confronting said history really entails, who can blame people for just passing the buck?
I go back to thinking about Hood’s story about Portland, Oregon, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and I think about how the underlying point of that story is that it’s not really about what’s southern and what’s not anymore. Everwhere’s the south; Everywhere’s the north. The cultural differences between the various geographical regions of the US beyond voting lines, accents, weather, and food grow thinner and more transluscent every day, to the point that all that’s left is to hold on to the local pride that you feel a little less strongly for than your parents, and them less than their parents, and so on. The cities are “blue”, the rural areas are “red”, and that’s really all there is. The contradictions that I spent most of this discussing are still there, but what’s the point in making it about regional culture when the American identity is defined by contradiction? Southern Rock Opera now is an interrogation of a complex cultural way of living and thinking about the world that doesn’t really exist as such anymore, at least not exclusively in one place. All there is now is different ways to make pizza and barbeque.