The bizarre reason the ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ solo is out of key
The more you think about it, was ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd one of the earliest examples of a diss track?
To all intents and purposes, it certainly seemed that way, with Neil Young’s songs ‘Southern Man’ and ‘Alabama’ providing the backdrop to a landscape that, if you were to take his word for it, was entrenched completely in bigotry and racism. But Lynyrd Skynyrd were proud of their roots, and knew that not all its people lived up to the picture Young painted. Like any battle of wills, it started with defending their patch.
Of course, any kind of war of this nature is bound to stoke up tensions, yet in doing so, it also made the band more than a little superstitious in terms of their crafting of the song and the process that went into it. While a basis for their defensive sentiment, as well as lyrical jibes thrown at Young, were easy enough to create, composing a riff that would stand the test of time was a much harder job.
That thankless duty fell to guitarist Ed King, who toiled over how he was going to write the coveted solo until he heard a rhythm being played by fellow guitarist Garry Rossington in the studio, which the former later described as “the catalyst that started the ball rolling”.
But the real energy of that blistering solo came to him somewhere perhaps quite unexpected – his dreams. Yes, it might all seem a bit whimsical and a bit too good to be true, but according to King, everything he needed for the song came to him as he lay in bed the night after the lyrics were written.
“I used to sleep with my guitar next to the bed,” King recalled. “The night after we wrote ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, I had a dream in which I played both the short and long solos. I immediately woke up, got the guitar and started playing what I’d seen in the dream. At rehearsal the next day, I just plugged the solos into the spots where we had rehearsed them, and they fit perfectly.”
Everything’s peachy, right? Well, apart from the fact that he played them in the wrong key, which producer Al Kooper had to point out. Naturally, he didn’t want to use the solos on the record. “But the guys in the band, being from the south and believing in superstition and dreams, told Kooper the solos needed to stay as I’d played them,” King explained. “Though they were overdubs, I’d recorded them both on the first take anyway with no mistakes. Kooper says he’s grown to like the solos since.”
So, if you’ve ever played the song and either thought your record player needs retuning or that your speakers are on the blink, fear not – because that was actually how the song was intended. And for all Lynyrd Skynyrd’s superstitions and aversions to vowels, there was a method in all their madness.
There are plenty of iconic songs with mishaps committed to tape, but the perfectly imperfect approach was something that Lynyrd Skynyrd clearly very much embraced. After all, it was the perfect sentiment that summed up their home – they were no martyrs, but were not completely evil, either. The irony is, after all that, they weren’t even from Alabama.
