Michael Buma
University of Western Ontario
Abstract
The relatively new genre of alternative country music often offers a similar
theological perspective to that of its predecessor, traditional country.
Both generally respond to the redneck condition–the plight of the
rural working classes in the American South–by focussing on the immanent
and material rather than the transcendent and spiritual. This paper will
address alternative country’s concern for the here-and-now as it
occurs in the lyrics of one prominent band, the Drive-By Truckers. I will
suggest that the Truckers subscribe to what David Fillingim has called “redneck
liberation theology,” a belief that the end to human suffering is
due in the present world rather than in the promise of a distant heaven.
The Drive-By Truckers ultimately find God and the organized church lacking
in their ability to bring about human redemption, and, consequently, look
to music as a surrogate “religion” that provides necessary,
if provisional, spiritual answers.
Alt.Country Music and the Drive-By Truckers
[1] Most accounts of the notoriously difficult to define genre of “alternative
country” begin with Uncle Tupelo’s album No Depression in
1990. Named for the Carter family’s song “No Depression in
Heaven” (a version of which appears on the album), Uncle Tupelo’s No
Depression is derivative of traditional country music before the rise
of the heavily produced and effect-augmented “Nashville Sound.”Simply
put, Uncle Tupelo hearkens back to an era of “simpler arrangements
and more traditional instrumentation” (Fillingim 2003,12). At the
same time, Uncle Tupelo was like no one else before them, a country band
that owed as much to punk outfits like Black Flag and the Stooges as it
did to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. In the words of Chuck Taggart, this
new style of music could “blast and blaze and blow the roof off of
a club, then turn around and be quietly acoustic, having you weep into
your beer” (Taggart). Bands like Blue Mountain, Whiskeytown, the
Old 97s, the Bottle Rockets, Slobberbone, and the Jayhawks followed in
the wake of Uncle Tupelo’s success, forging a genre that “defied
clear definition, ranging from rock-flavoured to neo-honky tonk to various
other forms of fusion” (Malone and Stricklin 2003, 172). When Uncle
Tupelo split up in 1994, the break spawned two new alternative country
titans:Wilco (led by Jeff Tweedy) and Son Volt (led by Jay Farrar).
[2] The common element between all these country-influenced bands was their “opposition
to Nashville’s industrial approach to music making and the homogenized
predictability of Top Forty radio programming” (Malone and Stricklin
2003, 172). From the early days of Uncle Tupelo onward, nobody really knew
what to call this new incarnation of country music. Bloodshot Records,
an independent record-label in Chicago, devised the name “insurgent
country,” and defined it as music that “applies a steel-toed
boot to the rhinestone-encrusted ass of commercialized country crap” (quoted
in Taggart). Jay Bennet, a former guitarist for Wilco, referred to the
genre as “rural contemporary” (quoted in Taggart), and some
called it “No Depression music” after the album that had started
it all (Malone and Stricklin 2003, 172). Among the other appellations that
arose were “country-rock,” “roots country,” “country-punk,” “cow-punk,” and
perhaps most famously, “alternative country” (alt.country).
By 1995 the scene was thriving enough to warrant a bimonthly magazine,
also called No Depression, which devoted itself to covering “alternative
country (whatever that is)” (www.nodepression.net).
[3] One of the most critically-acclaimed inheritors of the alt.country
mantle has been the Drive-By Truckers, “an alternative country band
steeped in twang, rock, punk, and Southern Gothic” (Dechert 2003,
97). In the late 1990s the Drive-By Truckers emerged as one of the dominant
second-generation bands of the so-called “Redneck Underground” in
Athens, Georgia. Patterson Hood, the six-cylinder engine behind the Truckers’ drive
to success, had spent more than a decade playing in various bands around
Muscle Shoals and Auburn, Alabama, before moving to Athens, Georgia in
the mid ’90s. Hood soon got a job as a sound technician for a small
club called The High Hat, and dedicated his free time to writing many of
the songs that the Truckers would later record for their first two albums.
The band was officially founded in 1997, fronted by Hood and his long-time
friend and musical collaborator Mike Cooley, who shared almost equally
in the singing, song-writing, and guitar duties. In addition to the traditional
country and underground punk influences The Drive-By Truckers share with
their alt.country comrades, the Truckers add a third major source of inspiration:the
arena-rock bands of the 1970s (Molly Hatchet, Blue Oyster Cult, AC/DC,
ZZ Top, Thin Lizzy, Steely Dan, and especially Lynyrd Skynyrd).
[4] It was clear from the start that Hood, Cooley, and their bandmates
had the work ethic necessary for success. They produced two albums very
quickly, Ganstabilly in 1998 and Pizza Deliverance in 1999,
while at the same time touring incessantly to establish a fan base and
support record sales. By the release of their live album (Alabama Ass
Whuppin’) in 2000, the Drive-By Truckers were logging almost
200 shows a year. The Truckers’ critical reception began to heat
up with their third studio album, Southern Rock Opera (2001). Southern
Rock Opera is loosely the story of an unnamed protagonist (known simply
as “our hero”) who turns his back on his Southern roots before
eventually rediscovering his heritage and founding “Betamax Guillotine,” a
fictional Lynyrd Skynyrd clone.1 The album explores Hood and
Cooley’s experience of growing up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as well
as delving into the cultural preoccupations of the time—football,
rock and roll, segregation, and the inexplicable “duality of the
Southern thing” (as Hood puts it in one of the songs, “Three
Great Alabama Icons”). In 2003 the Truckers followed Southern
Rock Opera with Decoration Day, an album that prompted No
Depression magazine to name them Band of the Year. By this time the
Truckers had added a third guitarist and songwriter, Jason Isbell, who
wrote the title track for Decoration Day only three days after joining
the band. While the Drive-By Truckers have been something of a revolving
door for supporting members, the New West Records press release for their
latest album, The Dirty South (2004), claims that the band has found
its “best incarnation” (Thomas) with Hood, Cooley, and Isbell
sharing the singing, song-writing, and guitar duties, Brad Morgan on drums,
and Shonna Tucker on bass. Hood, Cooley, and Isbell’s lyrics tend
to focus on “the weak, the powerless, the goners and those left behind,” as
Michael Baker puts it in his Trouser Press review, but perhaps the
Truckers are best summed in their own words from the liner notes of Southern
Rock Opera:
They’re telling stories of a forgotten south. Stories, no one
else was bothering to tell. Stories that own up to the terrible while
telling of the beautiful. Rock, that doesn’t bend down and kiss
anybody’s ass.
“Redneck Liberation Theology”
[5] In Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology David Fillingim
argues that country music can be read as theological discourse because
it “interprets raw experience by (de)constructing systems of order
and meaning … [and] relates mundane experience to the perception
of ultimate significance or ultimate power” (6). While country music
often does this within a theistic framework, Fillingim argues that it “deconstruct[s]
narrowly Christian structures of meaning and assert[s] other experiences
as ultimate” (6). Fillingim’s generalization applies well to
the Drive-By Truckers, who operate within a theistic framework but look
to music itself (rather than traditional Christianity) as the matter of “ultimate” importance.
[6] The Truckers’ brand of theism could more functionally be described
as deism. Deism affirms the existence of an omnipotent creator God, but
constructs this God as being separate or removed from both the created
world and human affairs. When God is present in the Truckers’ lyrics,
he is ultimately detached, aloof, and waiting to judge human beings when
they leave the material world via death. Whether or not the Truckers believe
in their references to God, it is clear that they see humanity as being
transcendentally alone during its sojourn on earth. This frequently results
in an undisguised antagonism toward Christianity. It could be argued that
the Drive-By Truckers construct themselves as radical antinomians:they
are consistent in their distrust of the organized church, aggressive in
their attempts to desecrate sacerdotalist pieties, and steadfast in their
adherence to a doctrine of “higher law.”In place of the “narrowly
Christian structures of meaning” suggested by the church, the Truckers
substitute what Fillingim has called “redneck liberation theology,” a
worldview whose concerns are material and immanent rather than spiritual
and transcendent. As shall be seen, this often gives way to the excesses
of materialism and hedonism, but these are not the values the Drive-By
Truckers assert as ultimately important.
[7] Having posited the indifference (and even antipathy) of God toward
the human condition and the general inability of the organized church to
address human suffering, the Drive-By Truckers suggest an alternative teleology:music
as religion. For the Truckers, music functions as a means to world-denying
spirituality. It is mystical, transporting, and life-sustaining. It presents
an escape from–though not an antidote to–the poverty, menial
work, and myriad social problems that often accompany the “redneck” condition.
Simply put, music makes these indignities bearable and life worth living.
But while the substitution of music for Christianity as an existential raison
d’être achieves some measure of redneck liberation in immanent
(if not material) terms, I will ultimately suggest that the Truckers’ belief
in music as religion is thrown into crisis when confronted with the question
of human mortality.
[8] Several of the terms I’ve introduced in the preceding paragraphs
require additional definition or clarification, the first among them being
the potentially problematic “redneck.”Fillingim quotes Will
D. Campbell in defining rednecks as “the underprivileged white[s]
of mill town and rural South” (8). According to Fillingim rednecks
are a “less obvious minority in the American South” (8), a
relatively transient class of marginalized low-income wage-slaves whose
servitude, first to share-cropping and then to industrialization, has remained
largely unrecognized as such. Rednecks have been “stereotyped as
ignorant, vilified as racist, and assumed to be privileged simply because
they are white” (Fillingim 2004, 8). They have constantly been marginalized
in Southern society, and have often been blamed for “the regions’ perceived
shortcomings” (Fillingim 2003, 8). With the rise of an industrial
economy and the urbanization of the South came the farthest-reaching redneck
diaspora in American history; many moved to search out a better life that
never materialized. Hood describes the symptoms of all this in the liner
notes to The Dirty South:
The South is a geographically beautiful region. Big rivers cut through
red clay hills, green grass and shady trees. At least it was that way
before they strip-mined and strip-malled us into bland suburbia and
conformist complacency. Our factories are all shutting down and our
farms are being replaced with poultry plants. Hell, even our small towns
have sprawl. In some cases, the sprawl predates the town. Many of the
hard times being sung about in these songs have been replaced by even
harder times. Sam’s Club has got baloney in them big ol’ sticks
and we got free samples out the ass but our small downtowns and court
house squares are being boarded up and torn down.
[9] The term “redneck” is potentially problematic in its frequent
use as a derogatory stereotype. A recent example of this is the comedy
of Jeff Foxworthy, who has published three popular books of one-liners
that work on the premise “you might be a redneck if …”It
is probably because Foxworthy speaks with a Southern accent that he has
gotten away with perpetuating every negative stereotype in the book:to
Foxworthy, rednecks are backward, stupid, and unpleasantly licentious.
The naming of the “Redneck Underground,” the musical scene
from which the Drive-By Truckers emerged, represents an act of subversion
similar to that of homosexuals re-claiming the insult “queer” as
a positive feature of their own identity (a more incendiary example is
the word “nigger” in black hip-hop and rap music). My analysis
will use the term “redneck” in this spirit of subversive reclamation,
referring to the general demographic outlined above:the economically underprivileged
and largely rural whites of the small-town south.
[10] The movement known as “liberation theology” began in the
Roman Catholic Church in South America during the 1950s and ’60s.
The main emphasis of liberation theology was to shift the focus of theistic
faith from hope in other-worldly transcendence (i.e., heaven) to a belief
that earthly liberation from social, political, and economic oppression
is a necessary part of the Christian eschatological schema. “Redneck
liberation,” then, refers to the desire of rednecks for emancipation
from poverty and the various social problems that tend to accompany it.
Fillingim identifies two distinct musical responses to the redneck condition:gospel
songs and cheatin’ songs. Gospel songs are those which have “evolved
from the ethos and pathos of the frontier camp-meeting, the nineteenth-century
revivalist theology of Dwight Moody and his hymn-writing song-leader Ira
Sankey, and the revival showmanship of their successors Billy Sunday and
his song-leader Homer Rodeheaver” (27). This genre is known as Southern
Gospel, and has, according to Fillingim, “remained farther from the
American cultural mainstream than country music” (27). Following
the gospel hymn tradition, Southern Gospel tends to posit heaven as an
end to earthly suffering—“a better land that’s free from
care” as “No Depression in Heaven” casts it. Songs in
this tradition suggest encouragement for rednecks in the throes of their
earthly troubles, promising an eternity in heaven as the reward for perseverance
and faith. These songs tend to see faith and spirituality as an inward-looking
phenomenon, an individual mix of emotion and intellect that shifts the
focus of religious experience away from external conditions like hunger,
poverty, etc. The response of “gospel songs” to the redneck
condition, then, has been to be hopeful, longsuffering, and loosely faithful
to Christian ideas of redemption and transcendence.
[11] Although many of the early country musicians were influenced by the
gospel hymn tradition, Fillingim suggests that country’s response
to redneck suffering has been less other-worldly than that of Southern
Gospel. According to Fillingim, country musicians have tended toward “cheatin’ songs,” songs
that “refuse to look forward or inward in an effort to deny cruel
realities or to postpone the hope of redemption” (36).2In
other words, cheatin’ songs “reject otherworldly dualism in
favour of bodily acts of protest against the contradictions of life at
the social margins” (Fillingim 2003, 36). As will be seen, the Drive-By
Truckers fit perfectly into this schema—to again borrow from Fillingim’s
description of cheatin’ songs, the Truckers often depict “bodily
resolution of existential tension [as] a vehicle of redemption” (Fillingim
2003, 36). Fillingim’s characterization of country can be loosely
expanded to the genre of alternative country as well. Though alt.country
effectively began with Uncle Tupelo’s cover of “No Depression
in Heaven,” it has remained predominantly immanent and material in
its ultimate focus. With Jay Farrar snarling “some people have it
all / and some have all to gain” over his distorted electric guitar,
the first song on No Depression, “Graveyard Shift,” signalled
immediately that alt.country wouldn’t be content to sit around and
wait for a distant and coming heaven.
The Failure of God and the Church in Redneck Liberation
[12] The “dirty south” presented by the Drive-By Truckers is
a land of spiritual and material brokenness. Most of the Truckers’ songs
have a story to tell, and most of their characters wrestle with the same
persistent troubles:frustration in a dead-end job, not being able to provide
for a family, and the psychological pressures that stem from outlawry,
social transgression, or marital infidelity. Presiding over the whole mess
is the demon of alcohol, which turns up both to perpetuate these problems
and to medicate them. A major component of the Truckers’ work is
simply diagnosis. Most of their songs are flatly unironic, and the result
is a series of sordid snapshots. “Why Henry Drinks” (Gangstabilly)
suggests that alcohol is the only thing that keeps “[Daddy’s]
hands off Mama’s throat.”The speaker of “Bulldozers and
Dirt” (Pizza Deliverance) attempts to seduce the 13 year old
daughter of his girlfriend by offering her a beer, justifying his actions
with the various frustrations of his existence:“a pickup that’s
up on blocks,” being “up to [his] ass in debt and hock,” etc. “Nine
Bullets” (Pizza Deliverance) catalogues the people who have
contributed to its speaker’s various miseries, pledging ominously
that “my roommate’s gun got nine bullets in it / gonna find
a use for every last one.”The speaker in “The Company I Keep” (Pizza
Deliverance) confesses that “I get by on liquor, guns, and luck
/ But I’m scared to death which one might run out first.”Southern
Rock Opera continues these themes:the album opens with the fatal car
wreck of a high school friend (which Hood describes as “unfortunately
a near universal rite of passage” in the South on www.drivebytruckers.com),
and continues with songs about sniffing glue (“Dead Drunk and Naked”),
marital infidelity (“Guitar Man Upstairs”), alcoholism (“Women
Without Whiskey”), and hating a soulless job (“Life in the
Factory”). Decoration Day expands the scope of these Southern
dystopias with songs about consensual brother/sister incest (“The
Deeper In”), killing a banker who repossessed the family farm (“Sink
Hole”), and a feud between two families that closely resemble the
Grangerfords and Shepherdsons in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (“Decoration Day”). The Dirty South incorporates
all of what seem to have become the essential Truckers elements:whisky
and moonshine (“Where the Devil Don’t Stay”), snippets
of Southern lore (“Carl Perkins’ Cadillac” and “The
Buford Stick”), and narrative protests against the human costs of
capitalism (“Puttin’ People on the Moon” and “The
Day John Henry Died”).
[13] All these pictures of “the dirty South” amount to an abundantly
familiar stereotype, but it is clear that the Truckers aren’t interested
in exploiting this; rather, “they’re calling attention to it
and to the socioeconomic issues it often obscures” (Dechert 2003,
98). The Truckers’ attitude towards the South is best described as
ambivalent: on one hand they shine a spotlight on the social problems described
above, but on the other hand they exhibit a sense of enduring pride in
Southern authenticity and belligerent self-sufficiency. To the Drive-By
Truckers, this seeming contradiction doesn’t really need to be resolved—”such
is the duality of the Southern thing.”It is this pride in Southern “identity” that
gets expressed in songs like Southern Rock Opera’s “The
Southern Thing,” and The Dirty South’s “The Boys
from Alabama,” “The Buford Stick,” and “Never Gonna
Change,” which ends with the lines
You can throw me in the Colbert County jailhouse.
You can throw me off the Wilson Dam
but there ain’t much difference in the man I wanna be and the man
I really am
We ain’t never gonna change.
The “duality of the Southern thing” recognizes the shortcomings
of the redneck condition while simultaneously asserting pride in redneck
identity. It helps to account for a South that has been repeatedly failed
by government, big business, and church, but has never lost its sense of
independence, entitlement, and self-reliance, at least as the Drive-By
Truckers see it.
[14] Despite having converted their sense of marginality into a badge of
identity, the Truckers remain deeply cynical about the institutions they
believe to have failed the South. Songs like “One of These Days” (Pizza
Deliverance), “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” and “The
Sands of Iwo Jima” (The Dirty South) direct this anger
and distrust toward the government and police, while the more light-hearted
but equally pointed jab of “The President’s Penis is Missing” (Pizza
Deliverance) takes aim at misplaced media priorities in the Monica
Lewinsky affair:“the whole world suffers from hunger and meanness
/ but we’re more concerned with the President’s penis.”These
institutions are all recurrent targets, but the most frequent object of
the Truckers’ cynicism is the church.
[15] The Drive-By Truckers often see the organized church as something
akin to a cash-grab scheme. In “Puttin’ People on the Moon” Hood
writes that “the preacher on the TV says it ain’t too late
for me / but I bet he drives a Cadillac and I’m broke with hungry
mouths to feed.”In addition to highlighting the hypocrisy of the
Cadillac-driving clergyman (an allegation that is never actually substantiated
in the song), this speaker sees salvation in strictly material terms—what
he needs is help in the immediate physical world. “Too Much Sex (Too
Little Jesus)” (Pizza Deliverance) sees the church in a similar
light. It tells the story of a “troubled teen” who is told
by a radio evangelist that “for a small donation she could / have
the Lord Almighty.”The lyrics continue:
Stop that dope smoking, stop that masturbation! Take the Lord into your
heart and stop that fornication.
We’re building us an army, gonna knock out Satan.
Visa or Mastercard, our operators are waiting!
Again, the critique is double-edged:“Too Much Sex (Too Little Jesus)” attacks
the outward trappings of sacerdotal piety (stop smoking, masturbation,
etc.) while at the same time casting the church as a cash-grab scheme that
purports to offer salvation in exchange “for a small donation.”Another
instance of Christian hypocrisy occurs in “Late For Church” (Gangstabilly),
where the speaker is judged by the congregation for his late arrival:“I
can tell they think I’m a sinner / Hear them whisper while I’m
watching my shoes.”While Christian teaching professes the church
as a community of forgiven sinners, all the speaker of “Late for
Church” encounters there is judgment. During the sermon this speaker
amuses himself by “wondering what’s for dinner,” again
asserting the Truckers’ trust in physical materiality over a spirituality
they see as empty and unpromising.
[16] The Drive-By Truckers frequently criticize the church for being spiritually
insufficient to meet human existential needs (an attitude which I suggested
earlier stems from their perception of God as being at best indifferent
to human affairs). “Dead, Drunk and Naked” is one such example;
it deals with the failure of Christianity to assuage a character’s
psychological and physical afflictions. The song begins with a childhood
retrospective:
When I was a young boy I sniffed a lot of glue
Mom sent me to rehab, they told me what to do
We didn’t have much money; the Lord picked up the tab
They made me write him love songs, sitting in my room
That “the Lord picked up the tab” for the narrator’s
struggling family seems to indicate some aspect of church support or Christian
charity, but the following line characterizes this as ultimately self-serving—it
requires the forced gratitude of the recipient. Similarly, if the child’s
rehab for sniffing glue was to force him to “write love songs” to
God, it becomes apparent as the song continues that this has done little
to help:
Me and old Jack Daniel’s, become the best of friends
We got all them Baptists to die for our sins
I know the Lord is coming
The South will rise again!
The narrator’s dismissive attitude towards the church stems from
its failure to help him with his problems, and possibly even suggests that
the church has contributed to his decline. The line “we got all them
Baptists to die for our sins” dismisses the efficacy of Baptist piety:the
only “redeemer” that has worked for this speaker is alcohol.
In the same way, the second-coming promised by Christian eschatology is
substituted for a presumably materialist reinvigoration of Southern glory
and prominence. Of course this is never realized in the song, and the speaker
ends up feeling alone and broken, “dead, drunk and naked.”As
in “Late for Church,” it is a “holier-than-thou” version
of Christianity that gets disdained in “Dead, Drunk and Naked.”Again,
the Truckers see church as a place where “sinners” are made
to feel unwelcome. The narrator of “Dead, Drunk, and Naked” is
defeated by the impossibility of the standard set by Baptist piety, and
draws a clear line between himself and the self-righteous church.
[17] Another instance where God fails to help a character overcome an earthly
predicament is “The Deeper In,” a song inspired by the only
two people currently serving time in America for consensual brother/sister
incest. Despite being one of the few third-person offerings in the Truckers’ catalogue, “The
Deeper In” achieves a powerful pathos for the difficulty of the sister’s
situation and the reasons she made the choices she did. Eventually she
and her brother find themselves facing a District Attorney who admits “you
had lots of reasons to turn out this way,” but eventually decides
to throw them in jail for “them four little babies / you made and
delivered along the way.”The song ends with the girl in prison:
Last night you had a dream about a Lord so forgiving
He might show compassion for a heathen he damned.
You awoke in a jail cell, alone and so lonely
Seven years in Michigan
The possibility of God’s forgiveness is immediately juxtaposed against
the cruel materiality of the lonely jail cell; as usual in the Truckers’ lyrics, “salvation” is
cast in strictly material terms. Musically speaking, the abrupt line ending “Seven
years in Michigan” is carried to resolution by sessional musician
John Neff’s melancholy pedal-steel guitar, sounding almost like an
audible sigh. The ending is unrelentingly lonely, foreclosing on any hope
of forgiveness and redemption; all that remains is the cold materiality
of the physical world.3
[18] In “The Deeper In,” salvation and transcendence are no
more than figments of some incorporeal “dream.”The “Lord
so forgiving” exists at best as an imaginary fantasy of earthly escape
and at worst as an angry and judgemental God who remains indifferent to
the girl’s suffering in prison. The latter is the sort of God that
presides over human suffering in “When the Pin Hits the Shell” (Decoration
Day):
And the same God that you’re so afraid of
is gonna send you to hell
is the same one you’re gonna answer
to when the pin hits the shell.
“When the Pin Hits the Shell” is Cooley’s response to
a friend’s suicide. The God of “Late For Church” is similarly
vengeful (“Reverend Bob is preachin’ out thunder / fire and
brimstone pouring down”), but relatively detached from the existential
certainty and materially comfortable indifference of the presumably adolescent
speaker. The afflicted characters of “The Deeper In” and “When
the Pin Hits the Shell” find themselves in desperate need of some
kind of salvation, but ultimately find no solace in the cold loneliness
of a world without divine immanence and in the inevitability of terrifying
judgment at the hands of an angry God who doesn’t concern himself
with earthly human suffering.
[19] The most extreme versions of the Truckers’ contempt for the
church occur in characters who have recognized the failure of organized
religion for themselves, and have taken matters of morality into their
own hands. One such song is “Sink Hole,” in which the narrator
kills a banker who has repossessed the family farm. The song begins with
the refrain
I’ve always been a religious man
I’ve always been a religious man
But I met the banker and it felt like sin,
He turned my bailout down.
“Sin” is cast in terms of violating the sacred institution
of the family farm, which was “my Daddy’s and his Daddy’s
before / and his Daddy’s before and his Daddy’s before, / five
generations and an unlocked door / and a loaded burglar alarm.”When
the banker comes to take the farm, he won’t even look the speaker
in the eye. In the framework of the song, the real “sin” is
not the impending murder but the banker’s denying the family their
dignity, wellbeing, and heritage. The song ends with the narrator killing
the Banker, burying his body “in the old sinkhole,” then declaring
Damned if I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday
Damned if I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday
Damned if I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday
Look the Preacher in the eye.
In the framework of the song the speaker and his act of murder are vindicated
by the “justice” of their cause; the ability to “look
the preacher in the eye” with a clean conscience makes this clear.
[20] “Sinkhole” illustrates the Drive-By Truckers’ appeal
to a doctrine of “higher law” that trumps the teaching of any
church, one that seemingly allows whatever means are necessary to provide
for self and family. This thematic manifests itself in a recurring pattern
of justice as “might makes right.”“Don’t piss off
the boys from Alabama,” writes Hood, “you know they won’t
let it slide” (“The Boys From Alabama”). Jesus’ directive
to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39) has no place in the “dirty
south”–people who do this get left behind, while those who
fight back are able to make a life for themselves (usually outside the
law). This is certainly the situation of the speaker in “Puttin’ People
on the Moon”:
I took to runnin’ numbers for this man I used to know
And I sell a few narcotics and I sell a little blow
I ain’t getting rich now but I’m gettin’ more than by
It’s really tough to make a living but a man just got to try
A similar motif occurs in “Cottonseed” (The Dirty South)
where the speaker makes his living by “corruption, crime, and killing” and
by the complicity of crooked lawmen, judges, and politicians. His philosophy
is basically that these people get what they deserve:
I ain’t here to save no souls and even if I could
I could never save enough to put back half the ones I took
So if they rest in torment you can’t say it’s cause of me
They’d long been bought and paid for ...
It can be inferred from his behaviour that the narrator of “Cottonseed” doesn’t
take these assertions of eternal “torment” very seriously.
The material “now” of human existence trumps any belief in
the afterlife, and, as in so many of the Truckers’ songs, the way
to pursue this material success is by transgressing what might be seen
as “Christian” expectations. “They say every sin is deadly
but I believe they may be wrong,” proclaims this speaker:“I’m
guilty of all seven and I don’t feel too bad at all.”When the
speaker of “Puttin’ People on the Moon” finally leaves
his life of crime to get a job at Wal-Mart he reflects that
I wish I’z still an outlaw, was a better way of life
I could clothe and feed my family, still have time to love my pretty wife
And if you say I’m being punished. Ain’t he got better things
to do?
Turnin’ mountains into oceans Puttin’ people on the moon.
Again the outlaw life is cast as preferable to life within “morally
acceptable” parameters, and is vindicated by recourse to a doctrine
of “higher law” that allows any means necessary to care for
one’s self and family.
[21] Another interesting feature of the above passage is the speaker’s
re-working of a Biblical psalm to show his contempt for God’s sense
of priority. Psalm 46 encourages faith in God’s promise of eternal
life no matter what happens on earth–precisely the mentality of the
gospel hymn tradition discussed earlier. Verses 1-3 assert that “God
is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore
we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into
the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains
quake with their surging” (NIV). Hood’s reworking of this motif
in the line “turnin’ mountains into oceans” implies a
causal relationship between God and human affliction, or at least a misplaced
sense of priority in the Divine failure to alleviate earthly suffering.
The Drive-By Truckers remain unwilling to accept the Christian call to
faith “though the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.”Instead,
they challenge God’s failure to alleviate human suffering on earth.
The Truckers’ response to divine indifference and the ineffectuality
of the institutional church is to take the matter of redneck liberation
into their own hands. The characters who can’t do this, such as those
in “The Deeper In” and “When the Pin Hits the Shell,” find
themselves trapped beneath their own emotional baggage and lonely insufficiencies
in a universe that is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to their
existence.
[22] The Drive-By Truckers clearly aren’t content to wait for eternity
in heaven to enjoy prosperity. The “purpose” of life in many
of the Truckers’ songs is to eke out an existence any way possible;
this, of course, gives way to the reckless hedonism and materialism that
so many of the songs portray. But this is only “getting by,” not living.
Albert Camus has suggested that the most basic question of philosophy is “judging
whether life is or is not worth living” (quoted in Appignanesi and
Zarate 1979, 3). The Drive-By Truckers consistently pose one answer to
this most fundamental question:life is worth living because of rock and
roll.
“Everybody’s got their own heaven”: Music as Religion
[23] The narrator of “Late for Church” muses at the end of
the song that “everybody’s got their own Heaven / they all
find it their own way.”For the Drive-By Truckers, music is this “heaven”;
it is what gives life purpose and makes living worthwhile. “Music
is my savior,” sings Jeff Tweedy in “Sunken Treasure” on
Wilco’s Being There (1996), “and I was named by rock
and roll.”The same could be said of the Drive-By Truckers. For the
Truckers, music is about freedom:freedom from working a soulless job, and
freedom from having to “bend down and kiss anybody’s ass” (as
Hood puts it in the liner notes to Southern Rock Opera). “Practiced
seven days a week,” writes Hood about Lynyrd Skynyrd in “Life
in the Factory”, “cuz Rock’s the / only thing to save
them from life in the factory.”Similarly, Isbell’s “Outfit” (Decoration
Day) features a father giving advice to his would-be rock star son.
The father tells his son about getting “Momma” pregnant in
the back seat of his Mustang, then selling the car to buy a ring. He goes
on about the pressures of having to support a family, explaining how he
worked
Six months in a St. Florian’s foundry,
they call it Industrial Park.
Then hospital maintenance and tech school just
To memorize Frigidaire parts.
But I got to missing your momma
and I got to missing you too,
so I went back to painting for my old man
and I guess that’s what I’ll always do.
The consequences of the father’s decisions are made clear in the
first verse, a series of semi-rhetorical questions that ultimately preface
his advice:
Do you want to grow up to paint houses like me,
A trailer in my yard ’till you’re 23?
You want to feel old after 42 years?
Keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears.
The father tells his son to pursue the life of a musician as a way out
of growing up “to paint houses like me,” and eventually admonishes
him “don’t let me catch you in Kendale / with a bucket of wealthy
man’s paint.”The father offers a series of practical suggestions
for staying rooted in the rootless world of rock and roll, which he ends
by saying “don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus /
don’t give it away.”This last line works as a reference to
John Lennon’s comment that The Beatles were “bigger than Jesus” (which
eventually prompted his murder by a religious fanatic), but also hints
at the sense of music being “bigger than Jesus” in its redemptive
power. Time and time again in the Truckers’ lyrics, music is cast
as the vehicle to spiritual freedom, giving purpose and direction to a
life that would be otherwise meaningless. And while this doesn’t
bring the kind of material prosperity that redneck liberation seeks (the
market for alt.country is hardly lucrative), it does allow the cathexis
of exhibiting the redneck condition (which the gospel hymn tradition had
failed to do in its trust of Christian eschatology) and the catharsis of “turn[ing]
it up to 10 and rip[ping] off the knob” (liner notes to The Dirty
South).
[24] In one of the dispatches from the band’s website, Hood tells
the story behind the song “The Living Bubba” (Pizza Deliverance). “The
Living Bubba” is based on Gregory Dean Smalley, a “rude and
loud and very belligerent” (www.drivebytruckers.com) musician
that Hood met during his time as a sound-tech at The High Hat Club in Athens,
Georgia. Smalley was a key figure in the first generation “Redneck
Underground,” playing in several different bands and organizing “Bubbapalooza” (the
movement’s annual three-night festival in Atlanta). When Hood first
met Smalley in 1995 he was in the early stages of a slow and painful death
at the hands of AIDS. Smalley’s response to his disease was to join
several more bands and to play every single chance he could get, often
two or three nights a week. Hood tells the story of watching Smalley play:
Some nights, he’d place a barstool on stage behind where he stood
to prop him up for the set. When he wasn’t singing, he would lean
back on that barstool and play his ass off. He would lean forward semi-upright
and sing in that raggedy voice and crack nasty jokes between songs, occasionally
looking like he was about to fall off the stool and drop dead on stage,
but he stayed on his feet and never went down. As the terrible disease
progressed, he got worse and worse. But the shows stayed consistently rock
solid. These were not packed houses, mind you. Some nights there wouldn’t
be but eight or nine people in the audience. That wasn’t the point.
The point was the playing. The Rock. By that time, it was what he was living
for. It was the point of his existence (www.drivebytruckers.com).
This isn’t the only place in the Truckers’ catalogue where “Rock” gets
a capital “R.” The implication is clear: Rock as religion,
purpose, meta-narrative. Hood continues that “I was … blown
away by [Smalley’s] conviction and what he was doing … it
made me question and eventually reaffirm my own convictions and beliefs” (www.drivebytruckers.com).
Hood wrote “The Living Bubba” both to honour Smalley and to
articulate the “beliefs and convictions” that his example had
reinforced:
Some people stop living long before they die
Work a dead end job just to scrape on by
but I keep living just to bend that note in two
and I can’t die now cuz I got another show …
[25] The idea of music as religion is one of the central themes in Southern
Rock Opera. “Let There Be Rock” is basically a catalogue
of concerts that Hood attended as a teenager, which he has been known
to introduce live as “a song about how rock and roll kept me from
killing a bunch of motherfuckers at my high school.”Again, rock
and roll carries the power to impart purpose and structure, the power,
effectively, to keep you sane. But most religious accounts of the purpose-driven
life measure themselves in some way against the inevitability of death.
In the liner notes to Act II, Hood tries to do this using the Lynyrd
Skynyrd plane-crash as a metaphor:
… hurtling through space at three hundred miles an hour when
everything just goes quiet. Only the sound of the wind; rustling over
the wings and your own heartbeat. We’re all just one heartbeat
away from being sucked into that swamp, and we’re all going to
be there sooner or later.
Maybe what’s important is what we do while we’re here.
What’s important is to stand tall, turn your three guitars up
real loud, and do what you do.
What our hero wants to do tonight is… ROCK!
While this comes off sounding somewhat sophomoric, it certainly does testify
to the band’s ethos. Again, even when confronted with the grim fact
of human mortality, the Drive-By Truckers posit music as their ultimate
purpose on earth.
[26] Jeff Tweedy’s assertion that “music is my saviour” towers
over the alt.country genre as an existential answer and a teleological
imperative. “Ain’t no good life at the Ford plant,” Hood
writes in “Life in the Factory,” “three guitars or a
life of crime.”Cooley takes this one further in “Shut Up and
Get on the Plane”:
Dead is dead and it ain’t no different than
Walking around if you ain’t living
Living in fear’s just another way of dying
before your time.
The soulless existence of a “working-death” job, or anything
else that keeps you from being “who you are” (to use the language
of “Outfit”), is just another way of being dead. Rock and roll,
then, is about life–it is about doing what you want to do
and being who you want to be. “The life I live is the life I choose,” writes
Hood in “Greenville to Baton Rouge.”This teleological manifesto
is ultimately forged in the awareness of immanent death, the grim reality
that “we’re all one heartbeat away from being sucked into that
swamp” like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ill-fated airplane. “Greenville
to Baton Rouge” is actually set on that plane, moments before its
descent into the literal and metaphoric swamp of death:“the right
engine gave a little flash, the pilot / panicked and dumped the gas / everything
is quiet, we’re dropping fast.”Even as the airplane goes down
the narrator of “Greenville to Baton Rouge,” like “The
Living Bubba,” clings to his sense of purpose:“can’t
die now got a show to do / the life I live is the life I choose.”
[27] As with the Truckers’ ambivalent critique/celebration of redneck
identity, the “duality of the Southern thing” arises in their
position on rock and roll as well. In the above examples, the Truckers
cast their music as a purpose, a telos. It can make you “high” without
pills, as Cooley writes about Johnny Cash in “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac.”But
it doesn’t necessarily tell the truth. “Rock and roll means
well, but / it can’t help telling young boys lies” (“Marry
Me,” Decoration Day). As Southern Rock Opera moves
from the descending plane in “Greenville to Baton Rouge” to
the swamp in which it crashes in the album’s final song, “Angels
and Fuselage,” the narrative voice shifts from a belligerent teleological
certainty about rock and roll to an abashed sense of doubt about the afterlife:
I’m scared shitless of what’s
coming next.
I’m scared shitless, these angels I see
In the trees are waiting for me.
This statement is ambiguous at best, and can’t reliably be construed
as a renunciation of rock and roll or as an indication of what might happen
after death for adherents of the “rock and roll religion.”The
second of these hypotheses seems to be beyond the Truckers’ scope–except
for this unique instance, their concerns are consistently immanent, earthly,
and material. But do being “scared shitless” of death and the
assertion in “Marry Me” that “rock and roll … can’t
help telling young boys lies” amount to moments of doubt?Is rock
and roll a religion that proves ultimately unworthy of belief?If so, the
Drive-By Truckers configure it in the same way as Wallace Stevens does
his “supreme fiction”:as something so incredibly expansive
and compelling that, though it remains a fiction, becomes worthy of belief.
Conclusion
[28] It has been argued that a life of quiet virtue is its own reward.
Many of the Drive-By Truckers’ songs seem to suggest an inverted
version of this adage:that a life of noisy excess can be its own punishment. “Hell
no, I ain’t happy,” complains the speaker of an eponymous song
on Decoration Day, seemingly summing up the litany of alcohol, abuse,
outlawry, and existential loneliness that occupy much of the Truckers’ catalogue.
But happiness isn’t necessarily the point:the rock and roll religion
doesn’t promise to make life easy, only to make it worth living.
While there is something attractive about the Truckers’ world-denying
dissolution of self into sound, the exercise remains little more than a
distraction, a short-term reprieve from the heartache and thousand natural
shocks that flesh is heir to. Simply put, the escape isn’t transcendental.
What happens to the “Living Bubba” when he is no longer living?The
Truckers don’t have an answer because their focus is immanent and
material; they give no consideration to soteriology or the possibility
that this life isn’t the last. Many, including myself, will find
this ultimately unsatisfying. Nevertheless, Hood and his bandmates seem
content with their own provisional answers. At the end of the day for the
Drive-By Truckers, or in that final heartbeat before life’s last “plane
crash,” only one thing really matters:to “stand tall, turn
your three guitars up real loud, and do what you do.”
Notes
1The members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were killed in a plane crash
in 1982. Ronnie Van Zant, the band’s founder and lead singer, is
rumored to have been decapitated by an onboard VCR mounted directly behind
his seat.
2Fillingim acknowledges the risk of over-generalizing when establishing
such categories, suggesting that his characterization of cheatin’ music
applies particularly well to the country sub-genre of honky-tonk.
3I include this instance of musicological commentary in an otherwise
strictly lyrical analysis because it is the music itself that carries the
spoken lyrics to an interpretive resolution in “The Deeper In.”
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