 This might be the most controversial thing I've said in my entire career. I'm proud to be from the South. How can I, as supposedly enlightened liberal, be proud to be from the land of slavery and segregation? Well, I'd like to say it's because we're also the home of Aretha Franklin and my memos, Candamatas. That is, I embrace the good stuff and reject the bad. Just like people who love the Godfather series pretend the third one doesn't exist, plenty of Southerners embrace Dolly Parton and Chitlins while condemning the plantations in Jim Crow. At least, that's what I'd like to say. The reality is a lot more complicated. See, Southern history can't be separated like that. It's not like a tray of Texas barbecue where all the ingredients are neatly divided. It's more like a big pot of Louisiana gumbo where everything mixes together. The great irony of the South is that most of the stuff that makes us proud is the product of the stuff we're ashamed of. Blues music created in the South on slave plantations. The civil rights movement born in the South to fight our racist institutions. So what does a Southerner do? Embrace my heritage and get saddled by all the baggage that comes along with it? Or condemn it, which means forsaking the people in places that raise me. That's the biggest thing about trying to defend the South is making sure you don't come across as a straight-up apologist or whatever. When I think of Southern pride, I don't think of pieces of art or conquering civil rights. I think of a guy waving his gun around an Alabama flag, being like, hell yeah, Jesus in guns, that's what we do. I think the people he's talking about, they don't have the shame. I'm ashamed of my pride right now. You know what? I'm proud of your ashamedness. I'm far from alone in this conflict. In fact, there's an extensive canon of literature, art, and music that addressed the specific challenge of being a proud Southerner. The song The Souther Thing on our Southern Rock Opera album was sort of my attempt to illustrate the fact that if you were to ask 10 different Southerners what it means to be Southerner, you'd get 10 very different answers, often answers that completely contradict each other. Sometimes even from the same person. And so I was trying to write a song that would articulate that point of view by often kind of having different lines contradict each other within the framework of that song. The damn shame about Southerner Thing is that the truckers don't really play it live anymore. Since even though the song specifically condemns slavery, it nevertheless inspired fans to break out the rebel flag at their shows. And I was like, wow, they totally did not get what the song is saying at all. They hear the word flag and go, whew, flag, I got one of them, you know. And it's like, this is not acceptable. So we basically quit playing the song and we only rarely play it. You know, it probably gets played four times a year. But it's still, you know, I'm not sure if I'm articulating what I was trying to with that song. Like I said, man, this Pride Thing is complicated. If you've ever heard the Leonard Skinner song Sweet Home Alabama, then you've witnessed how this dynamic plays out in real life. See, back in 1971, Neil Young wrote the song Southern Man and Alabama to brutal assessments of the South's racist past and present. In response, Skinner wrote Sweet Home Alabama, which extolled the brighter side of Southern culture and pointed out that the North wasn't exactly free from sin itself. Now, in the minds of a lot of music fans, Sweet Home Alabama is a little bit like a battle cry, a defiant middle finger to anyone who dares criticize Southern culture. But in reality, the song and the history is a lot more nuanced than that. It's a very simple song and a very complex song at the same time. The Sweet Home Alabama song at least appears to defend George Wallace. They claim that that wasn't their intent and that the backup vocals are saying boo, boo, boo and all that. And I don't know, we can give them a pass as they're not here to talk about it. The song name drops, in addition to Neil Young, it name drops my dad because my dad was one of the Swampers. And in the Muslim Souls verse, they pay tribute to the Swampers who infamously were a bunch of white guy musicians that made their living backing up Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett, Bobby Womack and Percy Sledge and Clarence Carter and all these amazing African-American soul singers. Neil and skinnered front man Ronnie Van Zant became close friends and were about to collaborate on a tune. But in a tragic turn of events, Ronnie perished in a plane crash before they could get down to business. However, I'd like to think if he were still alive, they could write a tune that pointed out that A, being proud of the South does not make you a mouth-breathing bigot and B, you can and should criticize the South without throwing the entire region in the dumpster. The truth is, we like it when things are clean. There's good and evil, there's heroes and villains. When things get too messy, we scrub our memories or our views just a little to make our mind okay with things. But that's impossible to do with the South. There's too much history, too much horror and to be totally honest, too much awesome. And to tell you the truth, I'd rather have a messy picture that's real than some altered reality. And that's why I continue to love the South, blemishes and all.