After getting kicked out of the band in 2007, Jason Isbell launched a solo career that has yielded many more successful hits than the Truckers have ever had. The first inkling of his knack for bone-baring ballads came on The Dirty South’s closing track, “Goddamn Lonely Love,” but his greatest contribution to the driving concept of the record is “The Day John Henry Died.” Isbell grew up learning to play music from his grandfather, a Pentecostal minister. He wrote “The Day John Henry Died,” not to log his name in the lineage of folksingers who have written “John Henry” songs, but in anger at his grandfather’s death. In an early live performance, he said the song was inspired by seeing a very old and wealthy man in Kmart after losing his grandfather. He grew angry: he realized in that moment that his grandfather, much like John Henry, could have lived a few more decades if he hadn’t had to work so hard for a living. “John Henry was a steel-driving bastard,” he sings, “but John Henry was a bastard just the same / And an engine never thinks about his daddy / And an engine never needs to write its name.” He casts John Henry as the first human life lost in deindustrialization and globalization, a theme Hood picks up in the next song telling the story of a man who gets laid off from Ford auto to work at Walmart and push pills while “over there in Huntsville / they’re puttin’ people on the moon.” Through all the album’s references to the most famous jawlines in Americana, these flawed men are the Truckers’ real American heroes, searching for a clean place in the filth of their home. 

When it comes time for the band to tell the Buford Pusser story, in a three-song sequence known by fans as the “Buford suite,” they choose to tell “the other side of that story.” Hood and Cooley place themselves in the minds of members of the State Line Mob, men worried that Pusser’s tough-on-crime persona will take away their livelihood of “stills and whores.” Cooley’s character on “Cottonseed” is particularly wicked, but also a Biblical scholar. “They say every sin is deadly, but I believe they may be wrong / I’m guilty of all seven, and I don’t feel too bad at all.” When he’s contemplating a demise at the end of a hangman’s rope, his girlfriend cites scriptural opposition to capital punishment. “Say what you gotta say to shut their Bibles and their mouths / if they was to tie a noose they’d have to lay their Bibles down.” This killer may have been the very devil who chained up the moonshiners in hell in the opening track, but he sees sin as evidence of life, as proof of humanity. It’s a maladaptive but logical response to the world these characters live in, where if the job doesn’t kill you, you still might get sucked out the window like on the track “Tornadoes.” To the State Line Mob, Sheriff Pusser’s reputation of virtue supported by lawful violence makes him all the more suspect. These men are not direct descendants of John Henry, but they’re more his kin than Reagan’s or Pusser’s. 

Throughout the album, the Truckers point out the hypocrisy of public heroes, like a TV preacher driving a Cadillac and the 4F John Wayne starring in Sands of Iwo Jima. Hood, Cooley, and Isbell show the wounds of injustice in their characters, in quiet lives of struggle, in righteous anger and in maladaptive but human sin. They search for lives of glory in the backwoods, and their search sometimes leads them off the straight and narrow. As Southerners, they’re wary of simplistic heroes. Turns out, in Pusser’s case, they were right.