![]() ![]() The Truckers tell stories of the South that dwell with the moonshiners and aspiring stock car drivers and the deacon down at the Salem Church of Christ. Like the rest of Southern Rock Opera, the double album that put the band on the map twenty-one years ago, the “Southern Thing/The Three Great Alabama Icons/Wallace” cycle is about less obvious but plenty insidious evil, and why the long life of his home state’s most infamous politician can’t be neatly summed up in a soundbite about segregation.Īt a time when the telling of history has become politicized, early Truckers’ albums like The Dirty South and Decoration Day feel freshly relevant-at least to me, someone who spent about the middle-third of the pandemic obsessed with the band. As Hood puts it in the opening of the suite, all of this “ain’t about excuses or alibis,” but speaks to the wider point that racism is a nationwide problem that’s ignored too many places because it’s “always a little more convenient to play it with a Southern accent.” ![]() The lyrics could be read as somewhat sympathetic, though it would be unfair to suggest the song’s author, bandleader Patterson Hood, is any kind of Wallace apologist. I only know that because of a Drive-By Truckers’ song, part of a suite that culminates with Wallace in hell, where he’s serenaded by a demon choir singing “Roll Alabama.” Proceeds benefit local charities.When George Wallace ran for governor of Alabama for the last time in 1982, he got more than ninety percent of the Black vote. On the main boulevards, metered spots are available. PARKING: Three parking garages and other large surface lots are free. The original Zona Rosa operated for more than 100 years.
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