We just laughed like hell and said, 'Ain't that funny.' We love Neil Young. Yet meaning is precisely what Young is looking for in Down by the River. "We wrote 'Sweet Home Alabama' as a joke," Van Zant clarified a few years following the release. Theyre what please the ear and give a work melody, form, and meaning.
"We're Southern rebels but, more than that, we know the difference between right and wrong." In fact, those "boos" are thought to imply that the band disagreed with Wallace's politics-and that bit about Watergate seems to be a pointed remark about the hypocrisy of the North, which had its own problems, too.īy all accounts, there was no real "feud" between the artists. "We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two," Van Zant later said. One of the more moving stories in Waging Heavy Peace describes his moment of transcendence singing it to an empty stadium in Missouri in 2011, with just a guitar and harmonica, a teenage folk.
The portion of the song referring to Governor George Wallace in particular made some believe that Lynyrd Skynyrd disagreed with desegregation, seeing as how the governor stood for " segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever".īut others interpreted the lyrics as a reminder to Young that not all Southerners are the same. "In Birmingham they love the Gov'nor, boo boo, boo/ Now we all did what we could do/ Now Watergate does not bother me/ Does your conscience bother you?/ Tell the truth"
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