“Song of the South”
Alabama
Written by Bob McDill
Radio & Records
#1 (2 weeks)
January 13 – January 20, 1989
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
February 11, 1989
New producers, a new sound, and an old song showcase a revitalized Alabama.
With Josh Leo and Larry Michael Lee now co-producing with the band, Alabama took a relatively lengthy break between studio albums before re-engaging audiences with a record that converted their Southern pop rock into a muscular country sound that emphasized the fiddle and banjo. They even twanged up their harmonies a bit, sounding more like they’re from Alabama because of it.
It seems like Bob McDill was cranking out No. 1 hits as much as Alabama was in the eighties, so it may be surprising that this song was recorded as a ballad multiple times earlier in the decade. The Bobby Bare original remained an album cut, but low charting covers from Johnny Russell and Tom T. Hall & Earl Scruggs soon followed. Alabama reinvented the song as an uptempo celebration of southern nostalgia, though that required them to edit out this bummer of a verse:
Well, I was eighteen ‘fore I ate my fill
We lived on the garden and the cow’s good will
Winters were wet and the summers were dry
Mama, she was old by 35
The song is a whitewashed depiction of the American south already, and a case could be made that the song was undermined by excluding a verse that captured the life-threatening challenges of living off the land during the great depression. But who has time to make that case when we’re all singing, “Sweet potato pie and I shut my mouth!”
As far as I’m concerned, taking a few liberties with history in exchange for Alabama’s most endearing and enduring hit of all time.
“Song of the South” gets an A.
Every No. 1 Single of the Eighties
Previous: K.T. Oslin, “Hold Me” |
Next: Rodney Crowell, “She’s Crazy For Leavin'”
Kevin, Could you please fix the 1988 feature for the Every #1 Country Single of the Eighties feature at ( https://www.countryuniverse.net/history/every-1-country-single-of-the-eighties/ ) Thank You.
Alabama regained its footing in a big way with a great version of a great song. I had heard before that the song was written as a ballad, but it was a stroke of genius to reimagine it as an uptempo banger. I’d be curious to know what McDill thought of the Alabama version since it so clearly colored outside of the lines compared to his original vision. I didn’t realize until this feature just how badly Alabama needed a reinvention by this point in their career. Their previous several singles were bleaker and emptier than I’d ever realized Alabama had become. I’d say they were lucky they had enough momentum to weather the storm and not get snuffed out the way so many other popular acts that arose in the early 80s did. They pulled off the comeback with a song that was different than anything else on the radio yet still very much in their wheelhouse. I’d kind of like to hear an Alabama outtake that included the missing verse though, just to see how close they were to pulling it off without messing up the song’s good-time vibe.
Another thing that’s always fascinated me about this song is that it’s the only major radio hit I’m aware of that chose a side on the partisan battle line. I can’t imagine any record company letting that slide today, but it’s surprising that they got away with it then. After all, the 1988 election was the backdrop to this song’s chart ascent. Every Southern state voted differently in that election than the narrator’s stated party preference. It speaks to the oddity of partisan fault lines at the time that listeners connected with “Song of the South’s” reverence for FDR and the narrator’s “Southern Democrat” father while still voting overwhelmingly the other direction.
Grade: A
I agree that this wouldn’t fly today, but to focus on the presidential race in 1988 is to miss that Southern Democrats still dominated in the House and Senate because local races hadn’t been fully nationalized yet. Then Bill Clinton won wide swaths of the south in 1992 and 1996, while those House and Senate races started to turn red down south. Same thing happened in the northeast in reverse, where my home state of NY didn’t even have two Democratic Senators until 1998, and where the Governor and mayor were Republican well into the 21st century.
Country music became expressly partisan after 9/11, so I think that’s the dividing line after which this song would’ve been flagged as a problem. The genre was always fairly conservative but it wasn’t partisan until then, IMO.
That was my point regarding the political climate of 1988. Southerners were voting for George H.W. Bush while still identifying with the narrator’s nostalgia for his “southern Democrat” father. The song worked then because the realignment was in its middle stages. I disagree that country music became expressly partisan after 9/11, at least in the sense of overtly picking a side by name. We had a pretty good sense of which performers were on one side of the aisle but the lyrics never explicitly embraced one party.
I saw the banning of a superstar act on one side of the political aisle and the full embrace of a superstar act on the other side of the aisle as explicitly partisan, and it’s why Country Universe exists. The backlash against the Chicks is our origin story! It’s only gotten worse since then on the radio, but thankfully radio doesn’t matter much anymore. I think the streaming era is getting us back to where we were in the nineties, when a wide variety of artists and perspectives co-existed in harmony. Listeners are showing that’s what they want.
We’re going to explore some of this from our perspectives as part of our twentieth anniversary and I’m excited to hear different perspectives about where the genre has been and where it is going!
Tom T Hall & EARL Scruggs
Thank you for the correction!
This is Alabama’s most endearing hit. It has a warm stickiness that isn’t too sweet or saccharine for my taste. They genuinely squared this one up.
The history of politics in country music is a fascinating one. Peter La Chapelle’s “I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time Hillbilly and Country Music” is a great exploration of that relationship.