The legend of Sweet Home Alabama is bound up in the notion – false, as it turns out – that the lyric was penned as an attack on Neil Young, the Canadian hippy rock superstar known to his friends as ‘Shakey’, for his songs Southern Man (from 1970’s After The Gold Rush) and Alabama (from 1972’s Harvest), and their condemnation of the institutionalised racism as perpetrated south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The ‘offending’ section comes in the second verse, with a reference to Young and his South-bashing songs. “Well, I hope Neil Young will remember,” rasps Ronnie Van Zant, “A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”
