Sweet Home Alabama?

So, El 3atal called me today to share in an absolutely surreal moment. He held the phone out so I could hear the tune playing on the radio station and it was... Sweet Home Alabama. I have to say that it is, perhaps, one of the best songs of all time. Now, admittedly, I am from Alabama and therefore naturally biased. But, come on. It's an awesome song.

However, being from Alabama, I can appreciate the oddities of the song as well. As the best known song about Alabama, it is ironic to me that it was written and sung by a bunch of Jacksonville (FL) boys. The culture in Jacksonville being much like Alabama, I can forgive them that. They recorded the song partly as a tribute to their first time in a recording studio (in the hopping metropo-not of Muscle Shoals, AL) and partly in response to Neil Young's indiscriminate implication that all Southerners are racist in his song Southern Man. Being an Alabama girl who doesn't like Southern Rock, it's funny that I still accord the song a place on my best of all time list.

So, hearing it on the radio in a Arab country is just too funny. And, it's not the first time I've had a like experience. In college, I spent December and January in Sweden. I was on a train between Malmo and Lund when a bunch of girls in the back started singing John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads. Okay, I LOVE John Denver. And this song absolutely speaks to me and always has. "I hear her voice In the mornin' hour she calls me The radio reminds me of my home far away And drivin down the road I get a feelin That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday." At that moment in time, I no longer felt like I was far from home in a strange place where I don't speak the language. It's amazing the way that music transports you to another place. It can, in a split second, bring you home again....

I leave you with a link to You Tube where you can watch the boys of Lynyrd Skynyrd rocking out about MY home. And, I hope that each of you has someone to sing a song that is truly great about your home as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHsDa9_HSlA

Happy Homecoming!