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The 2002 hit movie Sweet Home Alabama stars Reese Witherspoon as Melanie Carmichael, Josh Lucas as Jake Perry, Patrick Dempsey as Andrew Hennings, and Candice Bergen as Mayor Kate Hennings—Andrew's intimidating and oftentimes controlling mom. While you might think this all-star cast is enough to secure blockbuster success, it is really the script that the film is best known for. Sometimes cheesy ("What'd you want to marry me for anyhow?") and sometimes razor-sharp ("You can't ride two horses with one ass, sugarbean"), it always captures that unmistakable charm of something said with a Southern accent. For that reason, it has climbed the ranks as one of the most quotable movies out there.
"Indian Love Call" was one of our favorites, but we liked other, more "modern" songs, too. They were complex, and we spent a lot of time practicing to get the parts exactly right. My cousin Linda and her husband drove through Cincinnati from Detroit and picked me up on Friday morning, and we set off with high energy. We were glad to see each other and instantly at ease, like slipping into warm bath water. This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. In May 2006, National Review ranked the song #4 on its list of the 50 greatest conservative rock songs.
Sweet Home Alabama: Southern Rock Songs
We watched and rewatched (it's research!) Sweet Home Alabama to gather the absolute best quotes from the funny, romantic, and sometimes even poignant film.Here are our favorite quotes from the movie Sweet Home Alabama. And for what it's worth, Young came to regret the song that started it all. "'Alabama' richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record," he wrote in his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, in 2012. "I don't like my words when I listen to it today. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, too easy to misconstrue." It’s the little picking part and I kept playing it over and over when we were waiting on everyone to arrive for rehearsal.
In September 2007, Alabama governor Bob Riley announced that the phrase "Sweet Home Alabama" would be used to promote Alabama state tourism in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. In 2009, the state of Alabama began using the phrase as an official slogan on motor-vehicle license plates, and Riley noted that the song is the third most-played that refers to a specific destination. The song remains a staple in southern and classic rock, and is arguably the band's signature song. By all accounts, there was no real "feud" between the artists.
The Story Behind “Sweet Home Alabama”
It’s a great thing to have to play a song that people like so much. We just had a dream that we could make it in a band and it came true. Everyone thought it was about Neil Young, but it was more about Alabama.
This band was always about just playing the music, but those songs have become a soundtrack to a lot of people’s lives. “Sweet Home Alabama” is still played on the radio a lot, and when people hear the first little beat of it, their reaction is to sing. If you can write a song that makes people have emotions and show their feelings, that’s a powerful thing and a beautiful thing. Now there are people saying roll tide with it and there is a new generation who hears it and relates.
Five Unique State Park Stays in the South
Everybody pitched in with the work; when we were done, we moved through the house like nomads, lighting in different places for a time, talking to first one, then another. When we got to Alabama, Mother was in her kitchen just like I'd imagined her, smelling like Ivory soap and Jergens lotion. Her great-grandson was in the backyard looking for the rabbit who lives there. "Some people might call 'em spoiled, but I think that these almost ruined ones sometimes make the sweetest jam."
Kid Rock's 2008 song "All Summer Long" interpolates "Sweet Home Alabama" on the chorus and uses the guitar solo and piano outro, as well as the "turn it up" shout before the guitar solo; Billy Powell is featured on the track. "All Summer Long" also samples Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London", which has similar chord progression to "Sweet Home Alabama". Consuming that many calories required activity, so that morning we did what we always do — we took a long walk, this time up on the "mountain" as we call the steep, rising slope of Monte Sano, which you can see from Mother's backyard.
We travel all over the world and it seems like the South is the place where the people are nicest and they think of the fellow man more. In the late 1960s, in Jacksonville, Florida, a clean-cut gym teacher named Leonard Skinner sent student Gary Rossington to the principal’s office because his hair touched his collar. The teenager’s shaggy mop was a brazen violation of Robert E. Lee High School’s dress code. When Rossington and some of his friends and schoolmates—singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Allen Collins, drummer Bob Burns, and bassist Larry Junstrom—were searching for a new name for their fledgling rock group—they drew on memories of the incident. Lynyrd Skynyrd (vowels changed “to protect the guilty”) was born. It seemed like you could see North Alabama with a wide-angle lens from that spot.
"We wrote 'Sweet Home Alabama' as a joke," Van Zant clarified a few years following the release. "We didn't even think about it. The words just came out that way. We just laughed like hell and said, 'Ain't that funny.' We love Neil Young. We love his music." Lynyrd Skynyrd had recorded demos in Muscle Shoals with Johnson as a producer/recording engineer in 1971 and 1972, and Johnson helped refine many of the songs on the Pronounced album.
"The Swampers" is a reference to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. These musicians, who crafted the "Muscle Shoals Sound", were inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1995 for a Lifework Award for Non-Performing Achievement and into the Musicians' Hall of Fame in 2008. The nickname "The Swampers" was coined by producer Denny Cordell during a recording session by singer/songwriter Leon Russell, in reference to the band's "swampy" sound. I love being Southern because of the people and the fans we have.
And so Ronnie just said, We need to show people how the real Alabama is. In 1977, a tragic airplane crash in Mississippi killed three members of the band, including Van Zant. A decade later, the band reformed with Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny as the lead singer. He’s still the frontman today, and the band recently released a live album, is working on a new studio album, and is on tour . Called "Sweet Home Alabama," the single reached number eight on U.S. charts—its popularity due, at least in part, to a controversy hidden in the verses.
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