Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers: “The book is partly a band biography of the Drive-By Truckers, partly a travelogue through the South they depict in their songs, and partly an examination of the cultural and political underpinnings of their music. The chapters are all grounded in specific places—including the Shoals, Birmingham, Memphis, Richmond, and Athens, Georgia. Geography is more prominent than chronology, although it does trace their arc from southern rock band to American Band. That 2016 album is renowned for its very explicit political songwriting, but I argue that their songs have always had a political edge to them. They have always grappled with gun violence, income inequality, extremism of all kinds, the urban/rural divide, Confederate flag and monuments and Southern iconography in general, but for most of their career they did so through the filter of characters and stories and places. On American Band they confronted these matters very directly and very explicitly, which has carried over to The Unraveling and The New OK.” (Bookshop/University of Texas Press)
The Drive-By Truckers’ Athens Beginnings: An Exclusive Excerpt from Where the Devil Don’t Stay:
Somewhere in between, Patterson would write songs, wordy compositions about his rock heroes, about broken branches of his family tree, about his first and current wives, about this corner of the country he called home. He played in a few bands, including a rock outfit called, regrettably, the Lot Lizards. And he started to dream up a new band, one with no fixed lineup and no rehearsals, one that could swing from hard-crunching southern rock to jangly acoustic alt-country, one that would specialize in barely keeping it between the ditches: raw, powerful, gloriously sloppy. He wanted something that was unhinged and wild and unpredictable even to those onstage, but also he wanted something with the flexibility of the Hot Burritos, something that could accommodate more personalities and songwriters than just himself. Before he gave his notice at the High Hat and graduated to the 40 Watt sound booth, the Truckers would be up and running, testing this concept with some harebrained schemes, some shit-eating grins, and a lot of seat-of-their overalls touring.
The Drive-By Truckers Book a Road Trip of Music and Geography:
Perhaps the best known lyrical phrase in the Drive-By Truckers discography comes on “The Southern Thing” track from Southern Rock Opera in which Patterson Hood tussles with the concept of “the duality of the Southern thing.” And how a region’s culture, lifestyle and sociology is consistently two things at once, seemingly at odds with each other. In the book, Deusner writes “That phrase puts words to my own vague struggle about where I come from: disgrace and pride, forgetting and remembering, change and stasis.”
THE READING ROOM: Tracing the Drive-By Truckers’ Physical and Moral Map
LGM Podcast: Where The Devil Don’t Stay
Author Stephen Deusner put together a Spotify playlist for the book.
Patterson Hood and DBT’s politics previously: “The song doesn’t offer any answers; I have none.”, The More things Change, The More They Stay the Same, The Duality of the Southern Thing