Sweet Home Alabama

Creation and recording

At a band practice shortly after bassist Ed King had switched to guitar, he heard fellow guitarist Gary Rossington playing a guitar riff that inspired him (in fact, this riff is still heard in the final version of the song and is played during the verses as a counterpoint to the main D – C⁹ – G chord progression). In interviews, King has said that during the night following the practice session, the chords and two main guitar solos came to him in a dream, note for note. King then introduced the song to the band the next day. Also written at this session was the track that followed "Sweet Home Alabama" on the Second Helping album, "I Need You".

A live version of the track on the compilation album Collectybles places the writing of the song during the late summer of 1973, as the live set available on the album is dated October 30, 1973.

The track was recorded at Studio One in Doraville, Georgia, using just King, bassist Wilkeson, and drummer Burns to lay down the basic backing track. King used a Marshall amp belonging to Allen Collins. The guitar used on the track was a 1972 Fender Stratocaster. However, King has said that the guitar was a pretty poor model and had bad pickups, forcing him to turn the amp up all the way to get decent volume out of it. This guitar is now displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.

The famous "Turn it up" line uttered by Ronnie Van Zant at the beginning was actually not intended to be in the song. Van Zant was simply asking producer Al Kooper and engineer Rodney Mills to increase the volume in his headphones so that he could hear the track better.

There is a semi-hidden vocal line in the second verse after the line "Well, I heard Mr. Young sing about her". In the left channel, you can hear the phrase "Southern Man" being sung lightly (approximately at 0:55). This was producer Al Kooper doing a Neil Young impression and was just another incident of the band members amusing themselves in the studio while being recorded. According to Leon Wilkeson, it was Kooper's idea to continue and echo the lines from "Southern Man" after each of Van Zant's lines. "Better...keep your head"..."Don't forget what your / good book says", etc. But Van Zant insisted that Kooper remove it, not wanting to plagiarize or upset Young. Kooper left the one line barely audible in the left channel.

Following the two "woos" (Wilkeson's, the first; King's, the second) at the start of the piano solo (at approximately 4:08), Van Zant can be heard ad-libbing "My, Montgomery's got the answer." The duplicate "my" was produced by Kooper turning off one of the two vocal takes. For Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1976 film Free Bird, this final line was changed to "Mr. (Jimmy) Carter got the answer." in a reference to the 1976 Presidential Election. While this line has many variations, and was commonly sung as "My Montgomery's got the answer," in the original recording, the line was "Ma and Pop Stoneman got the answer," referring to Hattie and Ernest Stoneman, better known as Ma and Pop Stoneman of the bluegrass/country music group and a TV show of the same name, The Stoneman Family.

The count-in heard in the beginning of the track is spoken by King. The count-in to the first song on an album was a signature touch that producer Kooper usually put on albums that he made.

"Sweet Home Alabama" was a major chart hit for a band whose previous singles had "lazily sauntered out into release with no particular intent". The hit led to two TV rock show offers, which the band turned down. In addition to the original appearance on Second Helping, the song has appeared on numerous Lynyrd Skynyrd collections and live albums.

None of the three writers of the song were from Alabama. Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington were both born in Jacksonville, Florida. Ed King was from Glendale, California.

During live performances, there is another guitar solo performed at the end after the piano solo. This live solo also includes the "Ahh ahh ahh, Alabama" used in the first solo.

Controversy

"Sweet Home Alabama" was written as an answer to two songs, "Southern Man" and "Alabama" by Neil Young, which dealt with themes of racism and slavery in the American South. "We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two," said Ronnie Van Zant at the time. The following excerpt shows the Neil Young mention in the song:

In his 2012 autobiography Waging Heavy Peace, Young commented on his role in the song's creation, writing "My own song 'Alabama' richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. 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".

Van Zant's other response was also controversial, with references to the Governor of Alabama, George Wallace (a noted supporter of segregation) and the Watergate scandal:

Music historians point out that the choice of Birmingham in connection with the governor (rather than the capital Montgomery) is significant for the controversy as "In 1963, the city was the site of massive civil rights activism, as thousands of demonstrators led by Martin Luther King, Jr. sought to desegregate downtown businesses...[and] was the scene of some of the most violent moments of the Civil Rights Movement. Segregationist police chief Bull Connor unleashed attack dogs and high-pressure water cannons against peaceful marchers, including women and children; just weeks later, Ku Klux Klansmen bombed a black church, killing four little girls."

In 1975, Van Zant said: "The lyrics about the governor of Alabama were misunderstood. The general public didn't notice the words 'Boo! Boo! Boo!' after that particular line, and the media picked up only on the reference to the people loving the governor." "The line 'We all did what we could do' is sort of ambiguous," Al Kooper notes. "'We tried to get Wallace out of there' is how I always thought of it." Towards the end of the song, Van Zant adds "where the governor's true" to the chorus's "where the skies are so blue," a line rendered ironic by the previous booing of the governor. Journalist Al Swenson argues that the song is more complex than it is sometimes given credit for, suggesting that it only looks like an endorsement of Wallace. "Wallace and I have very little in common," Van Zant himself said, "I don't like what he says about colored people."

Music historians examining the juxtaposition of invoking Nixon and Watergate after Wallace and Birmingham note that one reading of the lyrics is an "attack against the liberals who were so outraged at Nixon's conduct" while others interpret it regionally: "the band was speaking for the entire South, saying to northerners, we're not judging you as ordinary citizens for the failures of your leaders in Watergate; don't judge all of us as individuals for the racial problems of southern society".

Muscle Shoals

One verse of the song includes the line "Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers/And they've been known to pick a song or two." This refers to the town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a popular location for recording popular music because of the "sound" crafted by local recording studios and back-up musicians. "The Swampers" referred to in the lyrics are 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 Musician's Hall Of Fame in 2008 (the performers inducted into the latter were the four founding Swampers—Barry Beckett, Roger Hawkins, David Hood, Jimmy Johnson—plus Pete Carr, Clayton Ivey, Randy McCormack, Will McFarlane, and Spooner Oldham). The nickname "The Swampers" was given to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section by producer Denny Cordell during a recording session by singer/songwriter Leon Russell, in reference to their 'swampy' sound.

Part of the reference comes from the 1971–1972 demo reels that Lynyrd Skynyrd had recorded in Muscle Shoals with Johnson as a producer/recording engineer. Johnson helped refine many of the songs first heard publicly on the Pronounced album, and it was Van Zant's "tip of the hat" to Johnson for helping out the band in the early years and essentially giving the band its first break.

Lynyrd Skynyrd remains connected to Muscle Shoals, having since recorded a number of works in the city and making it a regular stop on their concert tours.

The PBS show Independent Lens aired a documentary on Muscle Shoals and its place in music history in mid-April 2014.

Personnel

Covers

An altered version by the country group Alabama (who changed the lyrics involving the Watergate scandal with a verse talking about Alabama football) was included on the 1994 tribute album Skynyrd Frynds. It peaked at number 75 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart.

In 1994 Serbian hip-hop rock band Sunshine used the guitar solo in their song Zaklina trazi sponzora (Zaklina the gold digger).

In 1999, the Germany rock band Bonfire covered the song for their album, Fuel to the Flames and have performed the song live at concerts as well as for an acoustic performance (which was released as the double disc album One Acoustic Night).

Kid Rock's 2008 song "All Summer Long" samples "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". Since Kid Rock's release, the original song has charted in the UK charts at number 44. Zevon himself apparently hated "Sweet Home Alabama" and referred to it as "that dead band's song". He surmised that those who listen to it only do so because their own lives are miserable, and his views on the song are articulated in "Play It All Night Long," which appears on his 1980 album Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School.

Spanish punk rock group Siniestro Total released a parody under the title Miña Terra Galega, that is "My Galician Homeland", in Galician, "where the sky is always gray".

Although not a cover, former Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine has admitted that the bridge to the song "The Four Horsemen" on the band's album Kill 'Em All is a direct copy of the main riff in "Sweet Home Alabama".

In 1994, the Finnish rock band group the Leningrad Cowboys featuring the Alexandrov Ensemble did a cover of many songs on their album called Happy Together and performed it both on their 1993 Helsinki concert and the 1994 MTV Music Awards show.

Israeli guitarist Menachem Herman covered the song with rewritten text Sweet Home Jerusalem.

Japanese female singer Chihiro Onitsuka covered the song in her 2012 cover album Famous Microphone.

Garth Brooks recorded the song for the 2013 box set Blame It All on My Roots: Five Decades of Influences.

Other uses

In the 1980-1990s, the song is played during warmups of the University of Alabama in Huntsville Charger Hockey team during home games. This song can also be heard before, during, and after many University of Alabama sporting events. Majority of the Alabama fan base have mixed the words "Roll Tide Roll" in the middle of the chorus to relate Alabama sports to the Great State of Alabama.

Recognition and awards