Ever listen to the actual song? It’s basically a name check for Southern rock in the 70’s, including:
Tucker Boys (Marshall Tucker Band)
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Dickie Betts
Elvin Bishop
ZZ Top
Willie (Nelson)
Barefoot Jerry (Reed)
CDB (Charlie Daniels Band)
And “the train to Grinder’s Switch” refers to both the home town of Grand Ole Opry comedian Minnie Pearl and Grinderswitch the band.
It’s sort of like that recent meme of using the OK gesture as a white supremacist symbol. “Ha ha, we weren’t ACTUALLY using the gesture to mean white supremacism! We just tricked you into thinking that’s what it meant!”.
If you use a word or symbol with the intent of making people think you meant a certain thing, then that’s what that word or symbol means. That’s how meaning works.
If you say “The South’s gonna do it again” just to make people think that you’re talking about treason, then you’re talking about treason.
That kind of lyric stirs up a certain class of fan who’s into the “Southern ethos” over more than just celebrating rock music.
Maybe Tom Petty was just referencing defiance in the face of a failed relationship in his song “Rebels”.
Even before my father’s father
They called us all rebels
And left our cities leveled
I can still feel the eyes of those blue-bellied devils
Yeah, when I’m walking round at night
Through the concrete and metal, hey, hey, hey
I was born a rebel, down in Dixie
Or maybe not.
Here’s an entire exegesis about Charlie Daniels in general and TSIGDIA in particular.
To which I can only add, I lived in the South in the 1970s. If you were a good ol’ boy redneck who wanted to be a racist in public, you didn’t need to rely on sly subtext to do it.
Let’s call Neil Young and get his opinion.
All I have to contribute to this thread is that Charlie literally implied a slur for Muslims that starts with “r” in a song he released just after 9/11.
Which is, apparently, completely oblivious to the fact that a large number of “good ol’ boys” do treat the flag like a rag, and wear it on their head.
There’s out-and-out “kill all of them” racists, and then there’s the pervasive racism that is as omnipresent in the South as water is to fish. Most of the people who perpetuate that second sort of racism probably don’t think they’re racist, but they do more harm, in the long run, than the blatant ones.
Being “Southern" is a large, peopled swathe of this country.
We are very diverse. Diversity is a good thing. Can we agree?
There’s a small(but loud and obnoxious) group of what amounts to rednecks, thugs with low to no IQ who follow bright colors and noise. Who drive the big noisy trucks with big Trump flags. (Yeah. We hate them too.)
This is not nearly all of us.
I apologize for their behavior.