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‘All I Can Do Is Write About It’ — The Country Soul Of Ronnie Van Zant

January 15, 2020, by JimC

Do you like to see a mountain stream a-flowin’
Do you like to see a young ’un with his dog
Did you ever stop to think about, well, the air your breathin’
Well you better listen to my song

And lord I can’t make any changes
All I can do is write ’em in a song
I can see the concrete slowly creepin’
Lord take me and mine before that comes

— All I Can Do Is Write About It
Ronnie Van Zant

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd obsessively. Knew every song, word for word. Skynyrd frontman and lyricist Ronnie Van Zant was right up there with Waylon Jennings as a musical hero. In 1987, 10 years after Van Zant was killed in the Mississippi plane crash* that wrecked America’s most potent rock band, my friends Barry Glen and Vince Bell and I saw the reunited Lynyrd Skynyrd at the Universal Amphitheater in L.A. The crowd shot to its feet on the first chord of Workin’ For MCA and stayed there through the last note of Freebird, cheering, singing along — and there weren’t a whole lot of dry eyes in that house. People loved that music; it ran hard in our blood.**

Turns out, I still feel that way.

That big wheel has turned a million times in the past 42 years and my musical paths have branched and wandered, and I no longer wear out One More From The Road on endless repeat in the tape deck of a 1973 Chevy Impala. But damn — the songs still hold up.

*

The other day I stumbled across a fine post on the Abbeville Institute’s blog entitled The Southern Muse of Ronnie Van Zant. The author captures the complex and very Southern nature of the singer and songwriter who died with his boots on at the age of 29. Ronnie Van Zant was a tough, mean redneck and a gentlemanly and sensitive poet; a harsh and (literally) ass-kicking taskmaster and a generous bandmate; a drunk, crass-and-crude Whiskey Rock-a-Roller and a thoughtful country boy in love with the landscape and lifeway of his homeland. He was a kid who didn’t like school, but had an eidetic memory for everything from auto parts to song lyrics, which he never wrote down.

While Sweet Home Alabama and Freebird are obviously Ronnie Van Zant’s deathless contributions to the American rock catalogue, blogger Jeff Rogers correctly locates the essence of Ronnie Van Zant in songs like Simple Man and All I Can Do Is Write About It.

Several themes occur in Ronnie’s lyrics. These themes also permeate the Southern literary tradition; the importance of family, a deep connection to the land, to place, the presence of the past, a stoic resolve to take life as it comes, and the recognition of humanity’s fallen nature, and the ability to point that out, and even laugh at it when called for.

All I Can Do Is Write About It rings truer and truer every day, living in a beautiful landscape that I love to ramble — but which is swiftly becoming something else. Rogers:

Jacksonville in the 1970’s was a rapidly growing Sun Belt metropolis in the throes of suburban sprawl. The same thing was happening all over the South in what historian C. Vann Woodward had termed ‘The Bulldozer Revolution.’ Suburbs with names like Pine Lake, Happy Meadows, and Oak Forrest were being built on the outskirts of cities throughout the South. (It’s funny how subdivisions are named after the things they destroy.) With them came the shopping centers, strip malls, fast food restaurants, the interstates, by-passes and cross-town connectors. Ronnie saw this change taking place and hated it. He viewed this as destroying an older South, a rural and wild landscape that he cherished and which had helped form him.

“All I Can Do Is Write About It” from 1976’s Gimme Back My Bullets is Ronnie’s plaintive, nostalgic lament for this loss. It’s the sort of song that only die-hard Skynyrd fans will know. It wasn’t a hit, and I don’t think they ever performed it live. It’s the most country-sounding song that Skynyrd recorded. In fact, it’s far more country than anything heard on ‘country’ radio today. The producer of Gimme Back My Bullets, Tom Dowd, considered it a masterpiece, and it’s one of my favorites.

Damn straight.

*

We could use a lot more Ronnie Van Zant in these culturally and ideologically polarized days — a man who comfortably contained the fundamental Southern American contradictions and didn’t give a good-goddam for labels. He was who he was. And the core of who he was can be summed up in another one of his more obscure lyrics:

Let me tell you something, let me tell you true
What’s right for me might not be right for you
Well, you live your way, I’ll live mine
And I hope that you’re happy all the time…

…I’m a country boy and I’m as happy as I can be…

They buried him with his trademark Hi-Roller hat and his favorite fishing pole. He would have been 72 years old today. Fly high, Freebird.

Lynyrd Skynyrd at the height of its powers, bringing the heat in July 1977.

* The crash took the lives of guitarist and vocalist Steve Gaines, backing vocalist Cassie Gaines (Steve’s older sister), assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary, and co-pilot William Gray. Other band members were severely injured but survived and recovered.

** There’s no Lynyrd Skynyrd without Ronnie Van Zant. The 10-year tribute was a fine thing, honoring the band, it’s legacy and its ardent fans. I have no interest in what it became after that.

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Comments

  1. Matthew says

    January 15, 2020 at 7:20 am

    Is it just me or do a lot of musicians die on plane crashes?

    Reply
  2. Frankie says

    January 15, 2020 at 9:34 am

    Saw them in 1976 at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. One of the best shows I have ever seen. Wore out One More From The Road in college.

    Reply
  3. Barry Glen says

    January 15, 2020 at 2:16 pm

    “Turns out, I still feel that way.” —Me too, Amigo!

    Reply
    • JimC says

      January 15, 2020 at 3:08 pm

      Great to hear from you Barry.

      Reply
  4. VBell says

    January 15, 2020 at 2:42 pm

    That was one hell of a night.

    Reply
    • JimC says

      January 15, 2020 at 3:08 pm

      Indeed it was.

      Reply
  5. RLT says

    January 15, 2020 at 7:56 pm

    I been meaning to tell you to check out the website, “The Bitter Southerner,” Jim, but I couldn’t have asked for a better segue than this post. To borrow your phrase, it “contain[s] the fundamental Southern American contradictions and [doesn’t] give a good-goddam for labels.” It’s just amazing stuff.

    Van Zant was gone too soon. I turn 29 this year and so much of your post (and his body of work) rings true for me right now. It’s a bit dark, to be honest.

    On the other hand, the titular poem of my thesis just got picked up by Dark Mountain. So that’s pretty damn exciting.

    Reply
    • JimC says

      January 15, 2020 at 8:40 pm

      That’s tremendous. Congratulations. Please let us when it publishes.

      Reply
      • RLT says

        January 16, 2020 at 3:14 am

        Thank you, and I owe you thanks in more ways than you know.

        The two biggest influences on my work since coming to grad school are that journal’s manifesto and its founder Paul Kingsnorth’s novel, “The Wake,” and I have you and Craig to thank for turning me on to them. That’s the soil my thesis is growing in, and the stuff I find on FP and RIR has made for an incredibly rich potting mix. Getting my project’s title poem published in Dark Mountain is an immensely-fulfilling way to come full-circle.

        Despite being a grad student whose specific focus is on poetry, this project is the first time I’ve been excited about writing poems since…well, ever, actually.

        So thanks again fellas—and I’ll keep you apprised of the situation.

        Reply
        • JimC says

          January 16, 2020 at 6:51 am

          You made my day RLT. That’s what this campfire is all about and I can’t tell you how much it means to us that it’s serving its purpose well.

          Reply
  6. .lane batot says

    January 16, 2020 at 8:57 am

    Dang, Jim–another coincidental similarity–did I ever mention to you my first(family cast-off) car was 1970 Impala? Man, the stories I can tell about the adventures in that behemoth! It was nicknamed “The Tank” by high school compatriots for good reason! It also got me through most of college. I kept a contraband pet rabbit then(as all pets were banned in the college dorm where I lived) who regularly rode shotgun in that car–Sophia was her name, and she INSISTED on being up front with me–wouldn’t deign to hang out in the spacious backseat, for some reason….. I once gave a girl a ride home from college, over the long Xmas break, if I’m remembering correctly, in answer to a request posted on a college billboard–car owners often shared petrol expenses with riders to help defray the costs of that OUTRAGEOUS gas price hike of a whole dollar a gallon back in them days!. I described my maroon Impala’s appearance to her on the phone before I swung by her dorm to pick her up, and warned her about the rabbit in the front seat, and how she would need to sit in the back. When I picked her up, she looked thoroughly confused at first, but after we got her loaded up, she said she got mixed up and thought I was driving a Rabbit(which there was a Volkswagon Rabbit model of auto in those long ago days….), but understood when she saw my pet rabbit in the front seat. I commented that she would have been REALLY surprised, I reckoned, if I had driven up in a Rabbit with an actual impala in the front seat! Which would not have been unlikely at all, if you knew me very well…..

    Reply
    • JimC says

      January 16, 2020 at 9:10 am

      “I commented that she would have been REALLY surprised, I reckoned, if I had driven up in a Rabbit with an actual impala in the front seat!”

      Needed that image this morning…

      Reply
      • .lane batot says

        January 17, 2020 at 10:18 am

        …..it occurred to me later(much too late) I may well have told this tale to you before. Hard to remember whom I’ve told what anymore–chalk that up to old age and/or multiple medias. If so, apologies all round….

        Reply
  7. Lynn Woodward says

    January 28, 2020 at 4:44 pm

    I never got to see them, despite growing up in Georgia. (But then I was only 14 at the time of the crash and my mother let me go to my first concert at age 16, Queen, with a boy from church. She thought that would be safe…) But the Allman Bros and Skynyrd were about 50% of the music we listened to on the rock station.

    Good documentary about the LS band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AePnPCSFCfI
    Which also mentions the Muscle Shoals (not mussel) recording studio, and if you haven’t seen that documentary, Muscle Shoals, do it — one of my favorites of all time.

    I always wanted to know about their name…
    That’s in this video about the last flight:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6W4U-nxXL4
    If I’m hearing it right, the band would change their name frequently. Leonard Skinner was their gym teacher, and not exactly fondly remembered for being a strict disciplinarian, including sending Bobby and Gary to the principal’s office for having long hair. And the name started as a joke. Be careful what you joke about, as it may stick to ya.

    Thanks for sending me down another rabbit hole, Jim! And I wonder what the music scene would look like today if Ronnie was still alive.

    Makes me want the Anvil Blasters to cover “All I Can Do is Write About It,” “Simple Man,” and why not a few others while we’re at it!

    Reply

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