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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.

Not long after three of the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd tragically died in a plane crash in 1977, Young performed a medley of "Alabama" and "Sweet Home Alabama" as a tribute. According to Rolling Stone, he's never played "Alabama" again since. But others interpreted the lyrics as a reminder to Young that not all Southerners are the same. "We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two," Van Zant later said. The portion of the song referring to Governor George Wallace in particular made some believe that Lynyrd Skynyrd disagreed with desegregation, seeing as how the governor stood for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever".
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."
The band remains connected to Muscle Shoals, where it has recorded on numerous occasions and where it regularly performs during concert tours.
Muscle Shoals
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.
Monte Sano is part of the foothills of the Sand Mountains, and according to a local legend an Indian maiden jumped to her death from its peak, but I can't remember why. Looking back, we were as amazed that we'd mastered these intricate pieces as we were surprised to have survived as a family through geographical separations, marriages and the deaths of our elders. Everyone else drifted in a few minutes later, and all of us — sisters and cousins, nephews, nieces and grandchildren, hugging and kissing — moved on up the hill to my sister's house for dinner.
"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.
"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 television rock show offers that the band declined. In addition to the original appearance on Second Helping, the song has appeared on numerous Lynyrd Skynyrd compilations and live albums. Live video"Sweet Home Alabama" on YouTube"Sweet Home Alabama" is a song by American southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, released on the band's second album Second Helping . It was written in response to Neil Young's 1970 song "Southern Man", which the band felt blamed the entire South for American slavery; Young is name-checked and dismissed in the lyrics. It reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1974, becoming the band's highest-charting single.