White Masculinity in the Recent South

Where Has the Free Bird Flown?: Lynyrd Skynyrd and White Southern Manhood

Where Has the Free Bird Flown? Lynyrd Skynyrd and White Southern Manhood barbara ching When Neil Young sang “Southern Man” (1970) and “Alabama” (1971), the songs that provoked Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974), he provided the most obvious in what was (and would be) a host of insults and boasts from the Los Angeles–based country rockers who dominated California country rock music in the late 1960s and early 1970s.1 According to Young, After the Gold Rush, the album featuring “Southern Man,” expressed “the spirit of Topanga Canyon,” the L.A. exurb where he and many others in the country rock scene settled. While “Southern Man” evoked an antebellum world of white male privilege, Young’s first-person perspective and penchant for social commentary gave the song a contemporary twist. The singer testified to hearing bullwhips and screams.2 “Alabama” clearly expressed Young’s view of the South as a cradle of regression held back by the simpleminded corruption of the white man. In this folksy lament, Young takes the role of an enlightened guide, speaking of his desire to befriend the backward, Wallace-governed state. Indeed, he believes he speaks for the majority; the last verse criticizes the state’s resistance to change and asserts that “the rest of the union” is ready and willing to help. With similar assurance about their roles as benevolent leaders, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (Neil again) sang, “We are stardust, We are golden,” in Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” (1970), summing up not only this musical enclave’s vision of itself but also the self-suspended halo that supposedly enlightened the (white) men of the counterculture. Jackson Browne, a David Crosby discovery, released “Red Neck Friend” (1973), purportedly a song about his unruly penis. Famed for his sensitive southern California crooning, he cast the organ of his manhood as a white male southerner, the enemy of all the trendy mellowness he otherwise embodied. (Eagles cofounder Glenn Frey sang harmony.) Barney Hoskyns, the best chronicler of the L.A. scene, defined mellow as a “combination of bland tunefulness and harrowing introspection” (213); he also notes that “mellow” conveyed “post-hippie” masculinity—whether in Neil Young’s “wavering falsetto” (204) or Jackson Browne’s WASPy photo on the cover of The Pretender (280).3 No wonder Skynyrd’s “When You Got Good Friends” concluded that Los Angeles “never cared for me.”4 If California was cool, these southerners were steaming. The difference in emotional temperature reveals much about what the counterculture and its aftermath did to shape contemporary perceptions of the white southern man. By the time “Sweet Home Alabama” filled the airwaves, the ethos of California country rock had prepared the rock establishment and hipster wannabes to hear Skynyrd as the epitome of white southern manhood, an unreconstructedly macho and fascinating barrier to progress. Whereas Ted Ownby has convincingly defined and described the masculinity of southern rock by contrasting its themes to those of country music,5 I focus on its contrast with California’s mellow country-inflected rock of the 1970s, particularly the Eagles’ music. This contrast allows the defeat and anger of the marginalized southern male to be heard far more clearly than Ownby’s approach, which emphasizes southern rock’s rebellion against the southern ideology of evangelical domesticity. By comparing the careers, reception, and music of Lynyrd Skynyrd to those of the Eagles, I show how California-based “free birds” triumph in their projection of masculinity, while Lynyrd Skynyrd still represents the struggle over the role and meaning of white southern manhood.6 The Eagles, although they often thematically allied themselves to life in California’s fast lanes, also successfully named themselves after an American national symbol.7 Every song an anthem could have been their motto. Grace Lichtenstein praises the Eagles for just this reason: Hotel California, she says, “is about modern America . Desperado . . . is about America both past and present.”8 In effect, the Eagles became an enormously popular band without regional connotation to limit or qualify that popularity. Lynyrd Skynyrd, in contrast, remained marked: they were southerners first and foremost (although New Jersey–born Ed King, who played guitar in the band between 1973 and 1975, came from the L.A. psychedelic band Strawberry Alarm Clark). The Eagles were country rock, and their country was America; Skynyrd was southern rock in a country ruled by the Eagles.9 252 Barbara Ching [3.145.143.239] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 11...