"Sweet Home Alabama" quickly shot up to #8 on the charts shortly after its release as a single in 1974, making it the most successful southern rock song of all time and ensuring that it would influence generations of subsequent music. Speaking more generally, Skynyrd emerged from the same earthy blues-rock tradition that had produced bands ranging from the Rolling Stones to Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Allman Brothers. Lynyrd Skynyrd, with its famous triple-lead-guitar attack, built a harder sound than the Swampers… but always kept a hint of that swamp music flavor. (Besides Skynyrd, other major artists who made the trek to Muscle Shoals to record music ranged from the Rolling Stones to Aretha Franklin to Bob Dylan to the Staples Singers. The session men there-a group of musicians known as the Swampers because they sounded like they were playing swamp music-perfected a bluesy, authentic sound that backed a staggering number of rock, soul, blues, and country hits in the 1960s and '70s. The Muscle Shoals Sound Studio was a tiny recording studio in a small town in northern Alabama that had an outsized impact on modern music. The last verse of "Sweet Home Alabama" gets a lot less attention than the controversial earlier bits that deal with Neil Young, George Wallace, and Watergate, but Ronnie Van Zant's shoutout to "the Swampers" in Muscle Shoals refers to another profound influence on the band's sound. (Ronnie Van Zant said he owned every record Neil Young ever released.)
Lynyrd Skynyrd also loved his music, and the band's grungy, straightforward, hard-rocking sound owes something to the countless hours they spent listening to Young's work with Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, and as a solo artist.
Young's strident criticism of southern racism prompted Skynyrd's response in "Sweet Home Alabama," but Young's influence on the band wasn't limited only to disputatious lyrical content. The most obvious influences for "Sweet Home Alabama" are invoked in the song itself-Neil Young's social criticism tunes "Alabama" and "Southern Man," and the music of the Muscle Shoals session musicians known as the Swampers.