Most bands have a go-to cover that they can pull out to win over an audience. An extension that was well past its relevancy some 10 and 15 years after half of Skynyrd was wiped out in a plane crash, but an extension nonetheless. As a teenager going to concerts, I thought it was just the natural extension of yelling for requests. Like most traditions, the origins of this one are cloudy. But what is the origin of this banal hollering? Why do the culprits keep it up? And is there anything we, the good people of rock and roll, can do about it? I went to the ranks to try and sort out the why’s and how’s and came back with some odd ideas. The yelling of the name of a Lynyrd Skynyrd song has become so ingrained in our culture that it is assumed someone will yell it at some point during a show-any show. It has become the most annoying aspect of live performance and one that never dies. Finally, when the band has that awkward space in their set between songs-maybe they’re switching instruments or tuning their guitars-it comes like a knife through the air. It’s the never-ending joke with no punchline. You know it’s going to happen and it’s just a matter of time. Music historians examining the juxtaposition of invoking Richard Nixon and Watergate after Wallace and Birmingham note that one reading of the lyrics is an “attack against the liberals who were so outraged at Nixon’s conduct” while others interpret it regionally: “the band was speaking for the entire South, saying to northerners, we’re not judging you as ordinary citizens for the failures of your leaders in Watergate don’t judge all of us as individuals for the racial problems of southern society”.You wait for it at every show. “Wallace and I have very little in common,” Van Zant himself said, “I don’t like what he says about colored people.” Journalist Al Swenson argues that the song is more complex than it is sometimes given credit for, suggesting that it only looks like an endorsement of Wallace. “‘We tried to get Wallace out of there’ is how I always thought of it.” Towards the end of the song, Van Zant adds “where the governor’s true” to the chorus’s “where the skies are so blue,” a line rendered ironic by the previous booing of the governor. The general public didn’t notice the words ‘Boo! Boo! Boo!’ after that particular line, and the media picked up only on the reference to the people loving the governor.” “The line ‘We all did what we could do’ is sort of ambiguous,” Al Kooper notes. Segregationist police chief Bull Connor unleashed attack dogs and high-pressure water cannons against peaceful marchers, including women and children just weeks later, Ku Klux Klansmen bombed a black church, killing four little girls.” In 1975, Van Zant said: “The lyrics about the governor of Alabama were misunderstood. sought to desegregate downtown businesses… was the scene of some of the most violent moments of the Civil Rights Movement. It has been pointed out that the choice of Birmingham in connection with the governor (rather than the capital Montgomery) is significant for the controversy as “In 1963, the city was the site of massive civil rights activism, as thousands of demonstrators led by Martin Luther King, Jr.
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