The legend of Sweet Home Alabama is bound up in the notion – false, as it turns out – that the lyric was penned as an attack on Neil Young, the Canadian hippy rock superstar known to his friends as ‘Shakey’, for his songs Southern Man (from 1970’s After The Gold Rush) and Alabama (from 1972’s Harvest), and their condemnation of the institutionalised racism as perpetrated south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The ‘offending’ section comes in the second verse, with a reference to Young and his South-bashing songs. “Well, I hope Neil Young will remember,” rasps Ronnie Van Zant, “A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”
"Ronnie wrote those lines about Neil Young – that we don’t need him around, talking about the South," the late Gary Rossington told Classic Rock, "because we’d just been in Alabama touring all the back roads, meeting all the people and seeing all the pretty countryside and blue skies, and we thought it was great. There were a lot of hardcore racists in the South, but we thought they were just silly. We all loved Neil Young’s songs. And it’s funny, because people still say to me, 'What have you got against Neil Young?' Nothing! It’s crazy.”
Article continues below"We loved Neil Young," added Gary. "That was a joke lyric about him."
Young later declared his love of Skynyrd, and said he was honoured to be mentioned in Sweet Home Alabama.
"They play like they mean it," Young said in 1976. "I’m proud to have my name in a song like theirs."
Young also admitted that one of his songs was misguided. "Alabama richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record,” Young wrote in his 2012 book, Waging Heavy Peace. "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."
Indeed, Young went as far as offering them one of the gems of his songbook – his moving requiem for lost innocence in the Civil War, Powderfinger, which he later released on 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps – before he’d even recorded it himself.
“Lynyrd Skynyrd almost ended up recording Powderfinger before my version came out,” he said in 1995. “We sent them an early demo of it because they wanted to do one of my songs.”
Rolling Stone journalist Cameron Crowe was the conduit for these Young tunes, later recalling that “Neil loved that band, and said they reminded him of [Young’s first band] Buffalo Springfield, and they made him yearn for the days of the Buffalo Springfield. Being a huge Neil Young fan, I sort of appointed myself as cheerleader for that ‘love affair’ [between Young and Skynyrd] to happen and blossom.
"Neil Young gave a tape to [photographer and Young confidant] Joel Bernstein to give to me, which I gave to Ronnie, that had three songs on it – Captain Kennedy, Sedan Delivery, and Powderfinger – before they’d come out. Neil wanted to give them to Lynyrd Skynyrd, if they wanted to do one of his songs.”
Rossington further revealed that the band once planned to have Young join them on stage. "He wanted to come out and play Sweet Home Alabama with us. Ronnie was gonna say, ‘We don’t need him around anymore…’. We were really looking forward to it. But it never happened."
The "bad blood" myth was explored by Drive-By Truckers on their brilliant 2001 album Southern Rock Opera, which explored Skynyrd's rise, fall, and cultural legacy. On Ronnie And Neil, frontman Patterson Hood told the story of Young and Van Zant's misunderstood friendship.
"And out in California, a rock star from Canada writes a couple of great songs about the bad shit that went down," wrote Hood. "Southern Man and Alabama certainly told some truth, but there were a lot of good folks down here and Neil Young wasn't around."
Later in the song, Hood finished the story.
"Now Ronnie and Neil became good friends / Their feud was just in song / Skynyrd was a bunch of Neil Young fans, and Neil he loved that song / So he wrote Powderfinger for Skynyrd to record / But Ronnie ended up singing Sweet Home Alabama to the lord."
Ronnie Van Zant, who wore a Neil Young Tonight's The Night t-shirt at Lynyrd Skynyrd's Knebworth Park show with The Rolling Stones, died in October 1977. According to Hood, Neil Young was an honorary pallbearer at the funeral (it's likely this is another apocryphal tale), while rumours persist that Van Zant was buried in that shirt.
Three weeks after the funeral, Neil Young gave a rare performance of Alabama at the Miami Music Festival Of The Arts. And towards the end, he broke from his own song to mournfully repeat the lines, "Sweet Home Alabama" over Skynyrd's iconic riff.
It's still the only time he's played it.
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