Drive-By Truckers - The Dirty South - Writeup
Comments by Patterson Hood and Jason Isbell

The following is a brief rundown of the songs with notes by me (except for where otherwise noted) and a few key lines or verses. - Patterson Hood

WHERE THE DEVIL DON'T STAY

"Tell me why the ones who have so much make the ones who don't go mad
With the same skin stretched over their white bones and the same jug in their hand" *

Mike Cooley wrote this one, based on a poem by his uncle Ed Cooley. Ed got to be there when we recorded it. Think he packed for a long evening of recording, but we'd been playing it live for a year or so and ended up nailing it in one take. Think Ed might have been a little disappointed by that.

TORNADOES

"Pieces of that truck stop, litter up the highway, I been told
And I hear that missing trucker ended up in Kansas
(or maybe it was Oz)." **

I wrote this one back in 1988. It was inspired by two tornadoes, two Music Biz guys from Nashville, one empty theatre, one front-page headline, and "too many goddamned train songs". Way too long a story to go into here. For the really curious, here's a link to the whole dirty story.

THE DAY JOHN HENRY DIED

"That new machine was cheap as hell and only John would work as well,
so they left him laying where he fell the day John Henry died." ***

Jason Isbell: My grandfather used to play and sing to me when I was a kid. "John Henry" was one of our favorites. I was always intrigued by the fact that John beat the steam engine, but didn't live to enjoy his victory.

According to family legend, my grandfather could pick four hundred pounds of cotton in a single day in his prime. When he first heard that men were making money-riding bulls, he hopped on the biggest one he could find and made his brother tie his feet together underneath the animal. Somehow he got loose before he got trampled. He spent years working in a rock wool plant producing the material that was fazed out in favor of the cheaper, safer alternative -- asbestos. He died last year of lung cancer.

PUTTIN' PEOPLE ON THE MOON

"Double Digit unemployment, TVA be shutting soon
While over there in Huntsville, They puttin' people on the moon" **

I wrote this one in the van, shortly before we completed the album. Sort of my latest, and best attempt at a song that I've written and re written at least a dozen times since the mid-80's.
This song deals with "rocket envy", a non-diagnosable psychosis affecting people in an economically depressed community, located just 60 or so miles from The NASA Space and Rocket Center.

To make matters worse, our community is downstream from industry, contributing (surely) to our massive cancer rate.
"Mary Alice got cancer just like everybody here
Seems everyone I know is gettin' cancer every year
And we can't afford no insurance, I been ten years unemployed
So she didn't get no chemo so our lives was destroyed
And nothin' ever changes, the cemetery gets more full
And over there in Huntsville, even NASA's shut down too" **

CARL PERKINS' CADILLAC

Cooley's song about the legendary SUN Records folks and the music industry in general.
It took on an extra poignancy last fall with the back to back passing of Sam Phillips and Johnny Cash.

THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA

As a kid, I spent every weekend at my Great-Uncle's farm (my family's old homestead) where I rode go-carts and acted out my favorite movie scenes in the woods. George A. is an amazing man (still kicking hard at 84) and I have long tried to capture a glimpse of those times in a song.

During World War II he was drafted and ended up on the island Iwo Jima in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. As a curious child, I'd often innocently ask him about all that. One night while watching the old John Wayne movie (The Sands Of Iwo Jima) on TV, he simply said that he "never saw John Wayne over there".

So many of the folks I've written about in this album feel forced into doing terrible things. George A. was no doubt, changed by his experience, but I know him to be easily one of the greatest men I have ever met, thus, making it a much trickier subject to write about.

DANKO / MANUEL

"Got to sinking in the place where I once stood." ***

Jason Isbell: When I started writing this one, I wanted to capture some of Levon Helm's feelings about the deaths (and lives) of Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. The longer I worked on the song, the more impossible that became. I felt like the best I could do was to explain my own attitude toward being a working and traveling musician.

The horn parts came to me in a dream.

THE BOYS FROM ALABAMA

"Don't piss of the Boys from Alabama / Better take it like a man
Ain't nobody gonna stick anything up your ass / If you remember who your friends are" **

TBFA was the first of a series of songs we worked on based (loosely) on some of the folklore surrounding The Redneck Mafia whose exploits have inspired countless books and a few (really bad) movies.
As kids, we all saw some of those movies (the most famous being the original "Walking Tall" from 1973) telling of the good Sheriff Buford Pusser and his battle against the bootleggers.

I never cared for those movies, but there was no denying the cultural phenomenon they became.
It always seemed to me that a far better story lay in "bad guys" point of view.
This year, Hollywood blew its chance to get it right, yet again.
This song could be the opening sequence for the movie I'd like to make about it.

COTTONSEED

"I used to have a wad of hundred dollar bills in the back pocket of my suit
I had a .45 underneath my coat and another one in my boot
I drove a big ole Cadillac, bought a new one anytime I pleased
And I put more lawmen in the ground than Alabama put cottonseed

I spent a few years on vacation, sanctioned by the state I mentioned
But a man like me don't do no time too hard to come back from
The meanest of the mean, I see you lock away and toss the key
But they're all just loud mouth punks to me; I've scraped meaner off my shoe

Somewhere, I ain't saying, there's a hole that holds a judge
The last one that I dug myself
And I must admit I was sad to lay him in it, but I did the best I could
Once his Honor grows a conscience, well folks, that there just ain't no good" *

THE BUFORD STICK

"Hit an embankment doing 120 on a straight-away
The Lord works in mysterious ways" **

This was one last stab at the folklore surrounding Sheriff Buford Pusser from the point of view of a man that would just as soon see him dead. I wrote this one in the studio at FAME right before we wrapped the album. It was originally set to be a country type song, but (producer) David Barbe suggested we put the pedal to the floor on it. We love David Barbe.

DADDY'S CUP

"You just wait till them little legs get long enough to reach the gas
Once you put her on the floor one time their ain't no turning back" *

NEVER GONNA CHANGE

"You can throw me in the Colbert County jailhouse / You can throw me off the Wilson Dam
but there ain't much difference in the man I wanna be and the man I really am

We ain't never gonna change" ***

Jason: This one's pretty self-explanatory. It centers around a North Alabama man who refuses to live in fear. There are quite a few of those.

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN

"Who's gonna mow the cemetery when all of my family's gone?" **

Cooley and I have been playing various versions of this song since about 1990 (Adam's House Cat).
It has always been one of our favorites to play, but was a last minute addition to this album.
In the mixing stage, we swapped a song called "Goode's Field Road" for it because we wanted a harder rocker for this spot on the album. GFR was one of my favorites on the album but I stand by this as the better call.

A first take from the FAME sessions.

GODDAMN LONELY LOVE

"Stop me if you've heard this one before:
A man walks into a bar and leaves before his ashes hit the floor.
Stop me if I ever get that far.
The sun's a desperate star that burns like every single one before.

And I could find another dream,
one that keeps me warm and clean
but I ain't dreamin' anymore, I'm waking up.

So I'll take two of what you're having and I'll take everything you got
to kill this goddamn lonely, goddamn lonely love." ***

Jason Isbell: I tried real hard to come up with a different way of saying this, but it just seemed to fit.
Loneliness can be drowned if you hold it under long enough, but it takes a lot of other things with it.

David Barbe deserves some credit for the way this track turned out. He's a walking encyclopedia of cool old sounds.

* Lyrics by Mike Cooley © Wayward Johnson Music (BMI)
** Lyrics by Patterson Hood © Soul Dump Music (BMI)
*** Lyrics by Jason Isbell © House of Fame Music (BMI)
As always: Turn it up.
Patterson Hood - April 2004 (Athens, GA.)