Swan Song of the South
I grew up in a home where country was always the pop music of preference, and one of the most memorable hits of those years was Alabama’s 1988 number-one charter “Song of the South”. Living in a large Midwestern metropolitan area, the rustic subject matter was hardly intimately familiar to me, but my father’s roots in the Missouri Ozarks, as well as our proximity to irksome and criminal urban blacks, lent themselves to a vague and inarticulate sympathy with the South. I never paid close attention to the words, but “Song of the South”, particularly in the rousing, hand-clapping rendition by Alabama, came across as an anthemic statement of Southern pride. I was unaware until recently that the song had first been recorded in 1980 by Bobby Bare, in a significantly more somber, subdued interpretation. Wikipedia summarizes the content of “Song of the South” as follows: The song tells the story of a poor Southern cotton farm-family during the Great Depression. “Cotton on the roadside, co