It sounded like a slap in the face. A stinging jibe from one great rock artist to another. But was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s hit song Sweet Home Alabama really an attack on Neil Young?
Guitarist Gary Rossington, one of the founding members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, set the record straight in a 2012 interview with Classic Rock.
Formed in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1964, Skynyrd rose to prominence in the mid-’70s as the definitive Southern rock band.
Sweet Home Alabama was the opening track on the band’s sophomore 1974 album Second Helping and became their biggest hit single, reaching No.8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The song was written by Rossington with singer Ronnie Van Zant and another of the band’s three guitarists, Ed King. And in his lyrics to Sweet Home Alabama, Van Zant made specific reference to Neil Young, whose songs Southern Man and Alabama had addressed the issue of racism and the history of slavery in the American South.
Southern Man featured on Young’s 1970 album After The Gold Rush, while Alabama was on his 1972 follow-up Harvest.
Ronnie Van Zant replied to Young in the words to Sweet Home Alabama: “Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her/Well, I heard ol’ Neil put her down/Well, I hope Neil Young will remember/A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”
Interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine in 1974, Van Zant gave his reasons for hitting out at Young. “We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two,” he said.
Many years later, Gary Rossington gave Classic Rock his side of the story.
“We loved Neil Young and we’d listened to Southern Man and all these songs,” Rossington said. “Ronnie sang about Neil Young and ‘we don’t need him around’, talking about the South, because we’d just been in Alabama touring all the back roads, the pretty countryside and blue skies, and meeting all these people, and we thought it was great. So that was kind of a joke lyric about Neil.”
Rossington also discussed the reference in Sweet Home Alabama to George Wallace, the governor of Alabama at the time Skynyrd recorded the song.
“George Wallace, the governor running for President, was a racist,” Rossington said. “So Ronnie made kind of a put down about Wallace. Again, it was a joke.”
For his part, Neil Young said he loved Sweet Home Alabama. He also admitted that his own lyrics in the song Alabama were misjudged.
In his autobiography Waging Heavy Peace, Young stated that his song Alabama “richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record.” He explained: “I don't like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue.”
In 1977, three years after Sweet Home Alabama was released, Ronnie Van Zant was pictured on the cover of Skynyrd’s album Street Survivors wearing a Neil Young t-shirt.
Street Survivors was the last album the band made before the plane crash that killed Van Zant and five others including guitarist Steve Gaines, who had replaced Ed King in 1975.
In 2012, Rossington proudly told Classic Rock about the mutual respect between Lynyrd Skynyrd and Neil Young.
Referring to the cover of Street Survivors, Rossington said: “Ronnie wore that Neil Young shirt because he loved him so much.”
He also revealed: “One time we were gonna play with Neil and we were so excited. He wanted to come out and play Sweet Home Alabama with us!
“Ronnie was gonna say, ‘We don’t need him around anymore!’ So we were really looking forward to it.
“Sadly it never happened. But would have been so great.”
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