Is Lynyrd Skynyrd song ‘The Ballad of Curtis Loew’ about a real person?
When one comes across a pop song with a narrative, it’s easy to believe that it’s a one-to-one retelling of something that actually happened to the band. Sometimes it is. Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’, for example, is a word-for-word retelling of how the theatre the band were set to record at burned down the night before they were set to begin working there. More often than not, though, Paul McCartney never knew an Eleanor Rigby and Johnny Cash wasn’t really called Sue. Then you get the case of this Lynyrd Skynyrd classic, where the waters are altogether a little muddier.
While everyone knows ‘Free Bird’ and ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, ‘The Ballad of Curtis Loew’ is one of the unsung classics in Skynyrd’s back catalogue. Taken from their second album, Second Helping, the song is the story of the title character, a Black dobro player who sits outside a country store the narrator frequents. His playing is so great that the narrator collects all the soda bottles he can find to find enough change to pay him to play.
It’s an agreeable slice of warm southern rock, with the band’s trademark slide playing the worthy star of the show. However, is it a true story? Here’s where things get complicated: if you talk to two different members of the band, you’ll get two very different answers to that question.
Ed King, a guitarist who joined the band in 1972, says that not only is the story fictional but “Curtis Loew” is a composite of a bunch of different slide players who inspired the band, chief among them Shorty Medlocke, who played in an early Skynyrd incarnation.
On the other hand, founding member Gary Rossington swore blindly that almost the entire story was true. He, along with his childhood friends singer Ronnie Van Zandt and Allen Collins, watched Curtis play outside their local drugstore, and the only difference was that his last name wasn’t ‘Loew’. They needed something to rhyme with Dobro, poets that they were.
Who was Curtis from ‘The Ballad of Curtis Loew’?
In a radio interview, Rossington said, “His name was Curtis, and he had an old dobro guitar. He kept it in his house right behind the store, but if you gave him some money – 50 cents or even a quarter – he’d… play the blues. He was stomping his foot and he’d take an old Coca-Cola crate, turn it upside down, and that was his beat. He’s start playing and he’d drink a little more wine he’d start singing and playing and kicking. That was fun.”
Of course, since Van Zandt and Collins actually wrote the song and both died long before either King or Rossington gave those interviews, we’ll never truly know for sure. That said, it’s always better to print the legend, and the Skynyrd mystique only grows with time, so maybe some mystery about where their songs came from is a good thing.
After all, if there’s one thing we can be sure of in 2025, it’s that you can absolutely know too much about rock legends from the 1970s.
