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Drive-By Truckers
Biography
Flaunting a mix of Southern pride, erudite lyrics, and a muscled three-guitar attack, Drive-By Truckers became one of the most well-respected alternative country-rock acts of the 2000s. Led by frontman Patterson Hood and comprising a rotating cast of Georgia and Alabama natives, the band celebrated the South while refusing to paint over its spotty past. History, Southern folklore, politics, and character studies all shared equal space in the Truckers catalog, which offered up its first blast of gutsy, twangy rock with 1998's Gangstabilly. However, it was the band's ambitious double-disc concept album, The Southern Rock Opera, that became their unlikely magnum opus. A two-act affair, the album explored Patterson Hood's fascination with 1970s Southern rock (specifically Lynyrd Skynyrd) while tackling the cultural contradictions of the South.

In 1985, college friends Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood (whose father, David Hood, was a Muscle Shoals session player whose bass can be heard on the Staple Singers' "I'll Take You There") formed a punk-inspired band named Adam's House Cat. The group disbanded six years later, and Cooley and Hood launched several follow-up projects before moving to different cities.
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