Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars Read Online Free PDF Page B

of artists and musicians would come in the 1960s. Through heredity, they would carry the glory of the Old South within them, as well as the innate fear that stoked almost parodic hubris. As weathered and withered as they were, Southern Men—that is, southern
white
men—were, as regional historians Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson write, “still ‘lords and masters’ at home in the South, regardless of class,” even if only in their minds.
    One heady example of the cultural clash and angst-ridden pride within the New South was a rock band from the prosaic streets of Jacksonville, who would flourish as the vanguard of southern pride and rebirth by recasting the ethos of the Southern Man in all his glory and anguish. It was quite a ride they got themselves on. But, inevitably, it was an illusion, a devil’s bargain, for them and the new Confederacy.

    Far from Jacksonville’s booming downtown corridor of corporate skyscrapers, waterfront hotels, the University of Florida campus, and the NFL Jaguars’ home turf at EverBank Field, the old Van Zant homestead still stands today as it did half a century ago, buried deep “across the tracks” on the city’s west side. They don’t call the neighborhood Shantytown these days; it just doesn’t sound appropriate anymore—though, given this conscience qualm, it is ironic that one
can
find the name Shantytown, as if given éclat by the band that hailed from these streets, far from its original latitude, on a bar in the chichi Springfield downtown section. Fans of the contemporary music culture of the city also know Shantytown as one of the scene’s clique of native rock bands.
    Back where time has stood still, however, in an area no one would ever call an American Rome, the Van Zant place is, as it was back then, a one-story white, wood-frame house set back behind shrubbery at 1285 Mull Street near the junction of Woodcrest Road. The place has been remodeled a few times, but one can easily imagine the Van Zants’ quotidian activities here. In the backyard, wash hangs on a line. Bikes and toys are strewn on uncut grass. Old mattresses are stacked high outside a shed in the corner of the yard. A pickup truck is parked in the driveway. A R OOM FOR R ENT sign sticks out of the ground. Dogs bark. The sky is bright blue; the sun shines. Faint music streams from a radio somewhere inside the house.
    In the rootstock of mid-twentieth-century civilization, this milieu and not anything close to a manor house
was
the South and, thus, the only life that Ronnie Van Zant knew and could write songs about living in and getting away from. As Ed King, an early, vital member of Lynyrd Skynyrd who added the signature third lead guitar to their congealing sound, recalls the band’s sine qua non: “When you get right down to it, Ronnie was a country singer fronting a rock band. He was writing country songs, because that’s what he knew. His musical roots were very southern.”
    This was something Ronnie had no compunction about owning up to. His music may not have been in the mold of George Jones or Lefty Frizzell, but his blood ran with the same genetic code. When he sangopenly of this in the self-explanatory “I’m a Country Boy” on
Nuthin’ Fancy
, he did so with a defiant chauvinism:
    I don’t like smoke chokin’ up my air
    And some of those city folks well they don’t care
    I don’t like cars buzzing around
    I don’t even want a piece of concrete in my town.
    Van Zant’s world was one in which he didn’t feel concrete under his feet when he trod his streets, headed somewhere through abandoned properties and weed-strewn lots or, later, down the roads in his red Mustang, usually way too fast. The west side of Jacksonville, which can’t really be called poverty stricken, is typical of much of the bowels of Florida: hard-working, lower-middle-class men and women happy to