Stephen Deusner - Where the Devil Dont Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers

AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

Jessica Hopper and Charles Hughes, Editors

Peter Blackstock and David Menconi, Founding Editors

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WHERE THE DEVIL DON'T STAY

TRAVELING THE SOUTH WITH THE DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS

STEPHEN DEUSNER

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright 2021 by Stephen Deusner

All rights reserved

First edition, 2021

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Deusner, Stephen, author.

Title: Where the devil dont stay : traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers / Stephen Deusner.

Other titles: American music series (Austin, Tex.)

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. |

Series: American music series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021005210 ISBN 978-1-4773-1804-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2392-2 (library ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2393-9 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Drive-By Truckers (Musical group) | Rock musiciansSouthern States. | Rock musicSouthern StatesHistory and criticism. | Southern StatesCivilization.

Classification: LCC ML421.D72 D48 2021 | DDC 782.42166092/2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005210

doi:10.7560/318041

Contents

Introduction

It is August 2016. The present is bleak and the next few months are only dimly promising when Patterson Hood takes the stage for an intimate acoustic solo set at Saturn in Birmingham, Alabama. The club is decorated with old computer motherboards and spaceships and assorted space-age bric-a-bracthe futuristic technology of an era long pastbut Patterson sits alone onstage in a metal folding chair, the kind you might see at a church potluck, facing the crowd of 150, maybe 200 fans, armed with his guitar and his ragged voice and a seemingly inexhaustible catalog of story-songs about what his band, the Drive-By Truckers, like to call the Dirty South.