Drive-By Truckers

Southern Rock Opera (2001)

Southern Rock Opera tackles Southern identity as a sprawling, self-aware concept record, using Lynyrd Skynyrd's story as scaffolding for a much wider argument about growing up in the region's contradictions. "Let There Be Rock" turns teenage devotion to arena rock into a genuine coming-of-age anthem, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley's dual guitars and dual songwriting voices trading off without ever competing. The record never lets its historical ambition crowd out actual hooks. It remains the album that defined the band's mix of Southern-rock muscle and literary self-scrutiny.

Sleeve notes

Southern Rock Opera · 2001

Drive-By Truckers formed in Athens, Georgia in 1996, built around Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley after their earlier band, Adam's House Cat, broke up. Hood, the son of Muscle Shoals session bassist David Hood, grew up steeped in Southern musical history even as his own songwriting leaned toward the region's contradictions as much as its music; he has pointed to The Replacements and R.E.M. as the acts that shaped the band's earliest sound.

Southern Rock Opera, released in 2001, gave the band its first wide critical notice and established Hood and Cooley's songwriting partnership well before the shifting lineups that later included Jason Isbell and Spooner Oldham. Drive-By Truckers have continued recording and touring steadily since, built around Hood and Cooley's dual songwriting as the group's one constant through every other change, earning a reputation as one of American roots rock's most consistently respected working bands.