‘Southern Accents’: The story behind a song Tom Petty called his best
When it comes to the question of what song Tom Petty was most proud of, there are several answers fans would likely predict. They’d probably expect it to be something like the anthemic ‘Free Fallin’’, or something classic and energetic like ‘American Girl’, maybe even a collaboration like ‘Stop Dragging My Heart Around’ that he sang with Stevie Nicks. But in reality, Petty actually counted ‘Southern Accents’ as his unlikely best.
It’s certainly not the song that immediately comes to mind when thinking about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. In fact, the track caused major issues in the lineup. It seems that each and every member had a very different idea of how the song should sound and what direction the album it gave its name to should be going in. It was written during a period of real tension in the group in the mid-1980s. Petty himself wanted the record to be a concept album based on this track. But as Dave Stewart demanded that some of his tracks be included too, any semblance of a cohesive theme went out the window.
But still, that didn’t deter Petty’s love for the song. For him, it was less about the finished product and more about the moment of making it, appearing to him as one of those perfect moments when an idea strikes and he simply caught it.
“I wrote it at the piano. Very late at night, about four or five in the morning,” he recalled. “That was one where it just took me over,” he explained, reminiscing on one of those golden instances where inspiration seems to just fall into the artist’s lap. Falling into a flow state as he tried to capture the fleeting spark of an idea, he emerged with the song as if he’d been in a trance, remembering, “I don’t know what happened there. I do have a vague memory of being extremely glad when I hit the bridge. I actually woke up my wife and made her listen to this song.”
The idea had been brewing for a while, though, as Petty admitted he’d always wanted to write a song like that one. “I started with the title. I thought at the time I was going to do an album based on southern themes and southern music,” he said, having been dreaming up the concept for a while. Having that idea finally come to fruition, he said, “I still think it’s probably one of my best two or three things that I ever wrote.”
Singing, “There’s a southern accent, where I come from / The young ‘uns call it country,” Petty plays into a classic country character. Taking influence from the long legacy of musicians with thick southern accents, singing about the dreams of small-town living and classic country ways of living, Petty seemed to be positioning the song amongst the powerful lineage of artists from that background.
So, in 1996, when Johnny Cash decided to cover the track, it surely must have been a dream that had been realised. Seemingly picking the track up and giving it exactly the accent and spirit Petty was tapping into, Cash’s take feels like a full circle moment as if Petty had the initial spark of the idea way back in the 1980s, but the country’s star’s thick southern drawl brought it to beautiful completion a decade later.
