{"id":12295,"date":"2025-12-10T19:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T19:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=12295"},"modified":"2025-12-11T22:29:59","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T22:29:59","slug":"the-dirty-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/12\/10\/the-dirty-south\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dirty South"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"the_dirty_south.ff_cover\"\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Walking Tall<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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On this gritty Southern rock and roll album, Drive-by Truckers reject the idea of spotless heroes and take a long look at the sinful lives of real people.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Joseph Collum<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In August of this year, cold case investigators concluded that Sheriff Buford Pusser of McNairy County, TN, murdered his wife in 1967. Pusser, a small-town cop and hero of the Walking Tall<\/em> movie franchise, spent the years after his wife\u2019s death accusing his enemies in the State Line Mob of killing his wife in revenge for Pusser\u2019s fearless efforts to disrupt their operations. Pusser died a hero in 1974. He was driving his Corvette home after signing a contract to portray himself in the Walking Tall <\/em>sequel and crashed into an embankment. He was drunk. In the words of Drive-by Truckers frontman Patterson Hood, \u201cThe Lord works in mysterious ways.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

The Dirty South<\/em> is an investigation of heroes. Buford Pusser, John Wayne, Elvis Presley, and Ronald Reagan all make appearances in the fourteen tracks of punkified, unwieldy Southern Rock and Roll. It\u2019s not \u201cSouthern Rock\u201d: none of the band members are good enough instrumentalists and, while all five are from Alabama, they would never use such an uncomplicated word as \u201csweet\u201d to describe their home. But the music is Southern. On their breakout album Southern Rock Opera<\/em>, Hood coined the phrase \u201cthe duality of the Southern Thing\u201d to describe the collision of love and shame that every Southerner should feel for the home of American music, food, and literature that is also the home of America\u2019s original sin. On The Dirty South, <\/em>the people that Hood and fellow lyricists Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell investigate each embody this complexity of Southern identity. None of the heroes on this album are true heroes. Hood and his bandmates are too aware of human nature to accept simple saviors. They know too much. And in 2004, when the album was released, they didn\u2019t even know that Buford Pusser killed his wife.<\/p>

The album opens with Mike Cooley\u2019s \u201cWhere the Devil Don\u2019t Stay.\u201d \u201cMy Daddy played poker on a stump in the woods,\u201d Cooley sings over Isbell\u2019s manic slide guitar, \u201cback when the world was gray.\u201d A moonshiner narrates the song, calling for the Lord\u2019s salvation from a home of violence, sin, and confusion. \u201cI call to the Lord with all my soul \/ I can hear him rattling the chains on the door \/ He couldn\u2019t get in, I could see he tried \/ through the shadows of the cage \u2018round the 40-watt light.\u201d Cooley opens the album in Hell\u2014a hell set in the backwoods of north Alabama. There the band will stay for the remainder of the album. But this is a human hell, built from sin and the desire for a better daily circumstance. Writing from the place that housed Jim Crow and plantation slavery, the postmodern notion of denying the existence of sin does not tempt the Truckers. As Cooley stated in the 2009 documentary The Secret to a Happy Ending<\/em>, \u201cBy the time I was old enough to remember anything, it was scars left to heal\u2026what with fire hoses and dogs. It\u2019s given us a lot to overcome.\u201d The band searches for a way to overcome, and they find it in the small lives of their true heroes: men and women acting out their sinful, violent existences on humbler scales. At worst, these heroes are low-level drug dealers and moonshiners, and at best, a WWII veteran providing weekend childcare for his great-nephew.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The band searches for a way to overcome, and they find it in the small lives of their true heroes: men and women acting out their sinful, violent existences on humbler scales.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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<\/em>\u2019s closing track, \u201cGoddamn Lonely Love,\u201d but his greatest contribution to the driving concept of the record is \u201cThe Day John Henry Died.\u201d Isbell grew up learning to play music from his grandfather, a Pentecostal minister. He wrote \u201cThe Day John Henry Died,\u201d not to log his name in the lineage of folksingers who have written \u201cJohn Henry\u201d songs, but in anger at his grandfather\u2019s death. In an early live performance<\/a>, 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\u2019t had to work so hard for a living. \u201cJohn Henry was a steel-driving bastard,\u201d he sings, \u201cbut 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.\u201d 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 \u201cover there in Huntsville \/ they\u2019re puttin\u2019 people on the moon.\u201d Through all the album\u2019s references to the most famous jawlines in Americana, these flawed men are the Truckers\u2019 real American heroes, searching for a clean place in the filth of their home.\u00a0<\/p>

When it comes time for the band to tell the Buford Pusser story, in a three-song sequence known by fans as the \u201cBuford suite,\u201d they choose to tell \u201cthe other side of that story.\u201d Hood and Cooley place themselves in the minds of members of the State Line Mob, men worried that Pusser\u2019s tough-on-crime persona will take away their livelihood of \u201cstills and whores.\u201d Cooley\u2019s character on \u201cCottonseed\u201d is particularly wicked, but also a Biblical scholar. \u201cThey say every sin is deadly, but I believe they may be wrong \/ I\u2019m guilty of all seven, and I don\u2019t feel too bad at all.\u201d When he\u2019s contemplating a demise at the end of a hangman\u2019s rope, his girlfriend cites scriptural opposition to capital punishment. \u201cSay what you gotta say to shut their Bibles and their mouths \/ if they was to tie a noose they\u2019d have to lay their Bibles down.\u201d 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\u2019s a maladaptive but logical response to the world these characters live in, where if the job doesn\u2019t kill you, you still might get sucked out the window like on the track \u201cTornadoes.\u201d To the State Line Mob, Sheriff Pusser\u2019s reputation of virtue supported by lawful violence makes him all the more suspect. These men are not direct descendants of John Henry, but they\u2019re more his kin than Reagan\u2019s or Pusser\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>

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<\/em>. 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\u2019re wary of simplistic heroes. Turns out, in Pusser\u2019s case, they were right.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Joseph Collum<\/strong> grew up in rural Mississippi and Kentucky. Now living in Philadelphia, he holds a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and a M.S. in Secondary Education from St. Joseph’s University. He works teaching English at Cristo Rey Philadelphia High School and writing fiction.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Dirty South<\/strong><\/em> was released on August 24, 2004, by New West Records, and re-released in June 2023. The album was produced by David Barbe. You can purchase a physical copy from the band here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On this gritty Southern rock and roll album, Drive-by Truckers reject the idea of spotless heroes and take a long look at the sinful lives of real people. Review by Joseph 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