Robert Lurie, writing in Chronicles about the Drive-By Truckers. A taste:

… the Drive-By Truckers represented the Old South and were a sort of rejoinder to R.E.M. But the label is not entirely appropriate, at least not in the way Old South is generally understood, for there is little antebellum splendor in the band’s lyrics. Rather, most of the Truckers’ songs focus on the farmers and hardworking country folk who got left behind when Henry Grady’s New South really began to take hold—when the smokestacks and factory farms pushed those who had once lived off the land into lives of desperation. Hood, Cooley, and post-Southern Rock Opera addition Jason Isbell present these people as dynamic human beings with strengths and foibles, not as the ignorant hicks they are so often portrayed to be in movies and TV. And yet the songwriters are not afraid to look at the dark side of things. On Southern Rock Opera, Hood tempers his regional pride with an honest appraisal of the South’s shortcomings. The track “Ronnie and Neil” serves as a sort of manifesto, in which he uses the Neil Young/Lynyrd Skynyrd feud as a metaphor for the distorted prism through which many non-Southerners view the South:

And out in California, a rock star from Canada writes a couple of great songs
About the bad sh-t that went down
“Southern Man” and “Alabama” certainly told some truth
But there were a lot of good folks down here
And Neil Young wasn’t around

Bill Kauffman cites DBT lyrics to good effect in Ain’t My America, which first alerted me to the band. (I’m rather late to the bandwagon, you might say.) And the Truckers not just a band whose lyrics deal with themes of keen interest to conservatives: they’re also craftsmen of the finest hook-laden Southern rock you’ll find anywhere. Well worth a listen.