When Neil Young covered ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ weeks after the fatal plane crash
The world needs its heroes to take a stand. Nobody embodies that better than Neil Young. The long-haired legend has always put the world to rights either in song, or in scathing remarks that those songs have afforded him.
He also knows all too well that speaking out can have unwanted consequences. When Young released his songs ‘Southern Man’ and ‘Alabama’, he had his crosshairs trained firmly on the South. The singer took shots at the area of America deemed most politically conservative during a period of unrest in the region, and it was something Lynyrd Skynyrd took exception to.
In fact, Lynyrd Skynyrd turned their own arsenal towards the falsetto folkie and hit him with two barrels worth of rock radio buckshot in the form of their song ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. If you take a look at the lyrics for the band’s 1974 steering wheel thumper, it becomes very clear that they weren’t taking too kindly to Young’s words.
Ronnie Van Zant’s lyrics read like a countrified rap battle, with the singer wailing: “Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her/Well, I heard ol’ Neil put her down/Well, I hope Neil Young will remember/A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.” But, in truth, it wasn’t quite the barbed attack you may have thought.
“We wrote ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ as a joke,” Van Zant admitted a few years after its release. “We didn’t even think about it. The words just came out that way. We just laughed like hell and said, ‘Ain’t that funny.’ We love Neil Young. We love his music.” The idea that the ‘Heart of Gold’ star may think otherwise worried the singer, and he began wearing a Young shirt while on stage.
Clearly, the pair made up as Young sent across a demo of his legendary song ‘Powderfinger’ for Lynyrd Skynyrd to see if they wanted to cover it. They did, indeed, love the flegling track. Sadly, Ronnie Van Zant and other members of the band died in a plane crash before they could ever record it. There remains a hotly disputed legend that Van Zant is even buried in his Tonight’s The Night shirt.
Nevertheless, there is a far more concrete posthumous connection between the artists. A few weeks after the fatal crash, while Young was performing at a charity concert for a children’s hospital in Miami, the singer played a medley of ‘Alabama’ and ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ It’s a beautiful tribute to the band that sadly, there’s no footage of. There is, however, as with most Young gigs, a bootleg to enjoy.
Young would never play ‘Alabama’ again after that night, saying in his 2012 memoir Waging Heavy Peace “‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. 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.”
They do, however, embody his defiant spirit of being willing to put his neck on the line. Is it better to be misconstrued or silent? Well, you can ponder that quandary as you listen to Young’s emotional tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1977 with his searing performance of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ – a performance that the band would’ve absolutely loved.
