ABSTRACT
Drive-By Truckers’ double CD Southern Rock Opera is the most daring and developed expression of rock and roll attitude since the Clash’s Sandinista.
The subject of the Truckers’ Opera is the “duality”—their word-of life in the land where blues began. Like (Rhythm &) Blues people, white folks in the South feel they’re different from mainline Americans. Their country and Southern Rock musics have celebrated that difference and registered the Great Shame of the South as well. All those cheating songs hint that white Southerners knew they were guilty a generation before the Civil Rights Movement. Though they weren’t trying to hear that unless they’d had a drink and even then their favorite singers had to slip around the truth.
