Southern Man vs Sweet Home Alabama ..

The inspiration behind this topic is today's quiz conducted by the IQCircle in Infy.. The quiz was a pretty cool one with the usual set of thought-provoking questions.. The audio and visual questions were actually quite good.. Although we(I, Pinaki and Ashwin) didn't fare too well in the quiz(not surprisingly!) all of us enjoyed the questions and we had a good time wrestling with them..

One of the audio questions was to connect the 2 songs mentioned in the topic of this post.. I did a little bit of research on the relation between the two songs after the quiz.. Neil Young's song "Southern Man" is a song which questions the racist practices by white-skinned people in the Southern states of US during the '60s.. Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote the song "Sweet Home Alabama" in response to this..
The lines below from this song make this clear
"Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down.
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
a southern man don't need him around anyhow. "

Although Lynyrd Skynyd's song was supposed to point out(or so I think) that not all Southerners are Red-necks and that Neil Young's generalization was not accurate, the song created lots of controversy and the band was tagged as a racist band. In fact to this day, people interpret the song as they wish.. To follow the story of this debate, this is the link where I found a detailed account of the whole issue.

One can of course keep debating on such sensitive issues, but the fact remains that Neil Young himself has performed the song "Sweet Home Alabama" in some of his concerts and whatever differences existed between him and Lynyrd Skynyrd, they have been cleared a long time back..
Well, as far as I am concerned, both the songs are really great and I'd rather listen than go about demeaning them.. Personally I prefer listening to Sweet Home Alabama though..

I shall probably collect all the questions asked in the quiz and post them sometime.. Maybe tomorrow, its time to go home today..