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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