The Dirty South (album)

The Dirty South is the sixth album by Alabamian country-rock group Drive-By Truckers, released in 2004. The Dirty South is Drive-By Truckers' second concept album (the first being Southern Rock Opera). The album like its predecessors examines the state of the South, and unveils the hypocrisy, irony, and tragedy that continues to exist.

Patterson Hood's Tornadoes was originally written in 1988 in reaction to the closing concert for the Adam’s House Cat Nightmare Tour. The Nightmare Tour set list was composed almost exclusively of songs containing metaphors or imagery of trains, but the lack of the tour’s success forced Hood and his band to abandon the concept and start afresh. Hood read an eyewitness account of the tornado in the local paper the next day and wrote Tornadoes after reading her statement that “it sounded like a train.” Puttin’ People on the Moon, written by Hood, tells the story of a town downriver of Huntsville and their “rocket envy” or economic depression due to the negative environmental and economic effects of NASA’s Space and Rocket Center.

Mike Cooley’s Carl Perkin’s Cadillac recounts the celebrated SUN Records, Sam Phillips, and the music industry in general.

The Dirty South contains a three song suite ("The Boys From Alabama", "Cottonseed", and "The Buford Stick") about Sheriff Buford Pusser. The Boys From Alabama was inspired by the misconceptions and “really bad movies” of the Redneck Mafia and recounts the movie Walking Tall from a "different point of view". Hood felt that telling the story from "the bad guy's" point of view would be more interesting. Cooley's "Cottonseed" tells a story of corruption, crime, killing, greed, fixed elections, guns, drugs, whores and booze and uses subtle imagery to provide a very negative interpretation of Pusser. Hood's "The Buford Stick" completes the suite by providing examples of the negative effects of Pusser's actions while offering a less glorified view of the mythology surrounding Pusser.

While most of the songs are written as stories, Jason Isbell's song, "The Day John Henry Died," uses southern imagery to tell the story of his grandfather. Isbell said that it was about "winning the battle but losing the war." Isbell's second track on the album, "Danko/Manuel," is a departure from the usual southern gothic lyrical style written by Cooley and Hood. Originally Isbell tried to tell the story of Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and The Band's demise, but found the scope of the concept too difficult to actually do justice to their story, and instead shifted the concept to a telling of life of a musician through the eyes and actions of Danko and Manuel.

As of February 2008, The Dirty South is Drive-By Trucker's best selling album.