Searching for Your Inner Redneck

This stylistic experimentation won't come as a huge surprise to seasoned Mule-watchers. It's more like the icing on the cake as the trio signals its intentions to enter its next evolutionary phase. Still, the band does pause en route to salute its deep roots. A rollicking, barrelhouse reprise of Robert Johnson's country-blues standard "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day" -- something every Southern rocker worth his moonshine learns to play at some point -- appears as a bonus track hidden at the end of LBI. You know the saying: You can take the boy out of the South, but you can't take . . .

"That's not the kind of parade we want to join, son," my late daddy once told me. At the time, I was maybe 7 years old, and we were watching a Sunday afternoon motorcade of cars and pickup trucks rumbling past our house and headed out to the countryside. Later I learned why this "parade" earned my father's disdain: The American and Confederate flags decorating the autos' aerials were visual codes for the local Klan's weekly family barbecue and cross-burning. I also came to understand much later that the term "redneck" as employed by my father simply signified a Southern man's coming to terms with his unavoidable cultural heritage, not some racist, right-wing identification with his inner bubba.

Danny Clinch

Liver than you'll ever be: Gov't Mule (from left), Allen Woody, Warren Haynes and Matt Abts.

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More About

• Warren Haynes
• Allen Woody
• Matt Abts
• Gov't Mule
• Dickey Betts

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So I pray you'll understand when I tell you I'm kinda proud to be a redneck myself. At the very least, I think Warren Haynes will understand. I bet he's proud to be one, too.