Copperhead Road - Steve Earle

: music, January 12 2021 ▶

If you are looking for a proper theme music to go with your pickup truck, while flying the Confederate flag, chatting with your full-tactical-gear buddies how to topple the government, look no further! Steve Earle made it perfect, in 1988, recording the "Copperhead Road" (US Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks - reaching 10th position). Earle never became extremely popular, but continues to create "neo-rockabilly" songs up till today.

There is nothing subtle - the lyrics paint a young man, with moonshiner's roots, depicted often as redneck (popular theme in many country songs, nothing bad with it). He goes to war twice, probably felt himself on the right spot there, then using his family property on the Copperhead Road to grow weed. The place is know to be an outlaw territory, and authorities, who try to go there, never return. As a young kid I somehow connected the song to the Vietnam war era, not fully understanding the lyrics, also influenced by a movie or two, but, as the melody progresses in more rhythmic rock-folk, you can literally hear the Huey-s flying overhead. The guy never overcame the war. The nightmare continues. Somehow he accepts to be an outsider in his own country and grasps the last thing he got - his "family heritage" and the last stand his "daddy and his daddy before" made on the Copperhead Road.