The Beef

Southern Man, Sweet Home

Hello all. As I have become more sociable on Substack, I find more cool jazz clubs in back alleys. This week I was guided by a new subscriber to Stories From The Jukebox, a weekly writing exercise hosted by MJ Polk.

Neil Young and Ronnie Van Zant had a little kerfuffle back in the day, a minor clash of worldviews, that was more hype than actual substance. Check out MJ Polk’s post here for a breakdown of the incident.

The exercise is to share a post about that moment. This is my entry.

The Beef

The Beef

Southern Man, Sweet Home

I cut my teeth on the keyboard playing “Southern Man.” It’s loud. It’s bold. It’s easy. The kind of statement any teenage would-be rocker wants to make. And then, among the first guitar licks I ever learned was the iconic opener to “Sweet Home Alabama.” Four notes and you are in a place. Two songs, two worlds, and somehow they both landed in my teenage hands.

I was aware of the tension between them, even then. Neil Young firing arrows at the South, Ronnie Van Zant flinging them back with swagger and a toothy grin. But I didn’t feel them as contradictions. I understood them both to be right, and proper, and true. I too had seen the cotton, and the black, the tall white mansions and shotgun shacks. I grew up in the South. The history was all around me. The ghosts were, too. But it was also true that people loved the guvnah, that we all did what we could do. Where’s the lie in any of it?

The “feud” between Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd became rock and roll folklore. On one side, the Canadian firebrand with a gift for blunt protest, hammering down judgment in “Southern Man” and later “Alabama.” On the other, the stars and bars rebels from Jacksonville, turning their response into an anthem of southern pride. It was never a real feud, of course, more of a cultural dialogue set to guitar. But it played out like a morality tale: the outsider throwing stones, the insider answering with a grin and an axe.

I didn’t hear Young’s “Alabama” until a bit later, and to be honest, it never resonated the way “Southern Man” did. It was heavy-handed, a sermon painted in one color. Young himself admitted as much in later years. He seemed to realize that the South wasn’t reducible to villains and victims, that its story was tangled, contradictory, alive.

He even offered “Powderfinger” to Lynyrd Skynyrd, maybe as a peace offering, maybe just as a mark of respect. Fate intervened, as it so often does, and the world never got to hear what certainly would have been another iconic guitar lick. Van Zant was one we never figured would fade away so young, with so much left undone.

For me, it wasn’t just about the songs. It was about identity. Personally, I’m an unapologetic Southern man. Sweet home. I’m a fan of Neil Young’s earlier music and career, the weirdness, the daring, the moments that hit exactly right. But his politics strike me as the polemics of a spoiled child. Loud, moralizing, acting like the world bends to his moral compass, choosing emotion over reason, every time.

Bad things happened here, in the American South—no one can deny that. Slavery, segregation, violence, poverty. Bad things happen everywhere. But we have to do more than point and preach. In this neck of the woods, we reckon. We work. We build. We survive. All of us. More or less together. That’s the difference.

You can make great art, Neil, and still get the world wrong. You can write songs that land like lightning and still speak as if the world is flat. That’s what makes the betrayal sharper. I love the music. I respect the craft. But the politics? Pure yo-yo, swinging from impulse to impulse. Sorry, that doesn’t fly in my South. That smell gets around you.

That complexity, that mix of pride and pain, creation and survival — that is the South. We don’t need someone else to tell our story for us. This place has always resisted easy labels. It doesn’t need defending.

Young saw the violence, the hypocrisy, and he called it out. Van Zant saw the pride, the culture, the love of home, and he called that out. Both voices still echo. The easy arrogance of Southern Man and the rhythmic defiance of Sweet Home Alabama don’t cancel each other; they lean against each other, like two sides of the same truth.

They remind me that to be from the South is to live inside contradictions: to carry history like both a weight and a gift, to reckon with pain while holding fast to beauty, to be proud and humbled all at once.

So, Neil, if you want to come visit, we’ll be happy to show you around, bless your heart. You’ll find more here than you put in your songs. You’ll find it’s not one thing or the other, but both at once. And if you listen carefully, you might just hear a new chorus. Better keep your head.