Neil Young’s 1970 track ‘Southern Man’, from his breakthrough album After the Gold Rush, is one of the most controversial songs he ever wrote. The material doesn’t beat about the bush, telling its protagonist in the first lyrical line, “better keep your head” in threatening tones, backed up by harmonisers who included Young’s Buffalo Springfield bandmate Stephen Stills.
It fuelled a feud with southern rock back Lynyrd Skynyrd, who felt compelled to write the song ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ in response, even though they weren’t actually natives of the state. Their compulsion stems from the song’s title, which explicitly associates the American south with “bullwhips cracking” on the backs of cotton-picking slaves before the US Civil War and the “crosses” set alight and “burning fast” by white-supremacist group Ku Klux Klan, who terrorised southern black communities in the first half of the 20th century.
“Southern change gonna come at last,” Young suggests in the song’s chorus, in reference to the civil rights movement of the 1960s that effectively put an end to legal segregation between white and black communities in the South. It’s implied that the “Southern Man” he’s addressing is against this change, as was the case among the ten million voters who tried to elect white-supremacist third-party candidate George Wallace as president in 1968. The overwhelming majority of these voters were in the deep south of the United States, and Wallace won the popular vote in the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.
Young is almost taunting the Southerners who were on the wrong side of history during this momentous period for the country, asserting that change is coming whether they like it or not. The line, “Don’t forget what your good book says” reminds them of the Christian values they claim to uphold, which are supposed to include loving thy neighbour and turning the other cheek.
But who is the song about specifically?
Young is talking about the white demographic in the south as a whole; it’s true. This is why he provoked the ire of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who didn’t feel that most southerners bore any responsibility for the actions of an extremist few. He also has more specific targets, though.
Namely, the landowning families who made fortunes off the backs of black slaves working their land, particularly for harvesting cotton. “When will you pay them back?” he asks them, demanding reparations for the descendants of slaves who toiled in the fields without pay and suffered under the yoke of white plantation owners.
Young claimed in the liner notes for his 1977 compilation album Decade, on which ‘Southern Man’ appears, that he wrote the song “on a civil rights march after stopping off to watch Gone With The Wind at a local theatre”. The references to the “cotton” and “mansions and shack” that Young “saw” invoke the classic Civil War-era story of the movie, which centres on a plantation-owning family and includes a scene in which three men who fought for the southern Confederacy attack a black shanty town after the war.
Perhaps the ‘Southern Man’ Young is addressing Rhett Butler, the male protagonist of Gone with the Wind, specifically. Butler is the archetypal unfeeling, pro-slavery Confederate soldier who ends the film by leaving the wife he has raped.
However, the song’s final verse points to a more modern inspiration. Young suddenly changes perspective, addressing a woman with “golden brown” hair by the name of “Lily Belle”. Here, he’s referring to a horrific incident which took place a year prior to the song’s release, in which the African-American Lillie Belle Allen was murdered by the gunfire of a white supremacist mob.
Ironically, that incident took place in the city of York, Pennsylvania, which is technically in the Northeastern United States. And so, Young’s song isn’t just about a southern man after all. Indeed, the whole country still had some way to go before it could effect the “change” he was calling for.