CARLTON FLETCHER: Sometimes songs’ words tell deeper story

It’s only words, but words are all I have to take your heart away.

— The Bee Gees

Anybody who knows me even a little knows that I love music. I’m not a music fan, I’m a fanatic. And, as such, plus the fact that I’m someone who is fascinated by and works with words, I’m one of those people who really gets deep into song lyrics.

In a majority of songs, especially pop songs, lyrics are basically just a collection of words … phrases that go, often nicely, together. Sometimes, though, if you listen a little more closely, you make interesting — and sometimes revelatory — discoveries.

Case in point is the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic “Sweet Home Alabama.” Released in 1974 on the Jacksonville, Fla. band’s “Second Helping” LP, “Sweet Home” is as noted for its chunky “Southern rock” guitar licks as it is a rebuke/homage to one of the Deep South’s last standing bastions of a way of life that most of the rest of the Union had left behind.

It’s lyricist Ronnie Van Zant’s dig at a man who was a rising rock star at that time, though, that makes Alabama’s state song so memorable. And while such musical references are often cryptic, hidden if you will, Van Zant pulls no punches.

“I heard Mr. Young sing about her. I heard ole Neil put her down. I hope Neil Young will remember a Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”

The inspiration for those words, Canadian singer Neil Young, who had made a name for himself as a solo artist, with Buffalo Springfield, with the band Crazy Horse, and most famously, as a late addition to Crosby, Stills & Nash, had rankled the Southern sensibilities of many with the words in two of his better-known songs: “Southern Man” and “Alabama.”

Van Zant, who shares writing credit for “Sweet Home” with guitarists Ed King and Gary Rossington, responded to the digs in those songs that Young took at the South’s — and the state of Alabama’s in particular — treatment of blacks during the era of slavery.

In “Southern Man,” included on Young’s 1970 classic “After the Gold Rush” album, the Canadian sings, “I saw cotton and I saw black, Tall white mansions and little shacks. Southern man when will you pay them back?” … and … “I heard screamin’ and bullwhips crackin’” … and finally … “Southern man better keep your head. Don’t forget what your Good Book said.”

On “Alabama,” which was on perhaps Young’s greatest work, 1972’s “Harvest” album, he sings, “Alabama, you got the weight on your shoulders That’s breaking your back. Your Cadillac’s got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.” Also, “I came to see you and all this ruin. What are you doing, Alabama?”

Unlike the sometimes violent East Coast/West Coast rap battles of the ’90s that resulted in rising stars Tupac Shakur’s and Biggie Smalls’ deaths, the Skynyrd/Neil Young throwdown was of a much friendlier nature, although many at the time of “Sweet Home Alabama’s” release assumed that bullets would fly if the two ran into each other.

Not the case.

Young actually backed off of his lyrics in “Alabama” after Skynyrd released “Sweet Home,” saying Van Zant had every right to take a crack at him because his words were “condescending” toward the state. For his part, Van Zant laughed off any talk of a feud, disappointing many fans when he admitted he was a huge fan of Young’s. In fact, he took to wearing one of the CSNY singer’s “Tonight’s the Night” tour T-shirts when he performed. (A side note: Some unsubstantiated reports have Van Zant buried in the familiar T-shirt.)

After Van Zant and two other members of Skynyrd died in a plane crash near Gillsburg, Miss., while on a chartered flight from Greenville, S.C., to Baton Rouge, La., on Oct. 20, 1977, Young paid homage to the band by including bits of “Sweet Home Alabama” in a medley with “Alabama” during a performance in Miami later that year.

A touch of rock history, right there in the words of these classic songs.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.