Sweet Home Alabama is the prompt for this month’s Fiction in Fifty words. You can join in by making your own fifty word story in response to the prompt. Link yours to (or just post it in) the comments on Rebecca Douglass’s blog post this Sunday. You can also check out the Fi50 page on her blog for the next months’ prompts.
Getting one’s facts right…
I thought of this as a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, but then I thought it was probably older than them, and they probably didn’t do it anyway.
To me it’s a song lyric like,’standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona’ and then you discover there really is a Winslow in Arizona, and they’ve made a Big Thing out of the corner of the main crossroads in their small town.
When Glen Frey of the Eagles died, the local folks put tributes to him down at their statue immortalising the song. This pic is from the Durango Herald, online via Google images.
So having Googled Winslow, Arizona to make sure it wasn’t Wilmslow (which is in Cheshire) and I’d misheard (easily done), I thought I’d better check Sweet Home Alabama.
- It’s Lynyrd Skynyrd, not CSNY.
- They wrote this song about their impressions of Alabama and as a tribute to the studio musicians at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, where they recorded from 1970-1972.
- Some of the lyrics jab at Neil Young, who wrote less positively about Alabama (which is why I probably got the CSNY bit mixed-up).
- Neil Young wrote Southern Man and Alabama, which were songs from his After the Gold Rush and Harvest albums respectively, both of which I loved.
- Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote Sweet Home Alabama in response to Young
- BUT, Young performed Sweet Home Alabama at a concert in tribute to the three LS band members who died in a plane crash in 1977.
- The song features in at least a dozen films and many tv series.
Many thanks to songfacts.com for all these great pieces of information. I’ll be back for more!
Sweet Home Alabama (Fi50)
I’ve been travelling so long. I’m lost.
Some nights, I wake to the sounds of the city, the country, of life, death, or just the wind.
Loneliness. Freedom.
It’s in my head, it’s nowhere. Reality is fantasy.
But… Thanksgiving… the smell of apple and cinnamon.
I nearly remember home, sometimes.
© J M Pett 2019
Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote *Sweet Home Alabama* in response to Neil Young's Southern Man. Read my 50-word #flashfiction on the same prompt #Fi50 and join in Share on X
Interesting facts about the song. I like your tale, too.
Thanks, Patricia!
Nice story. And thanks for doing the research on the line. I was pretty sure it was from some song, and that’s a far as I went!
Here’s mine, if any of your readers want to take a look.
https://www.ninjalibrarian.com/2019/05/fi50-sweet-home-alabama.html
I’m glad I looked it up then!
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