Sweet Home Alabama Bass Cover

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/TJH3113

Turn it up.

Lynn is going to Bethel Woods to see Lynyrd Skynyrd tonight. She’s going with one of her oldest friends, so I’ve got the night off and plan doing a bit of playing. Besides Rush, I’ve probably seen Skynyrd more times than any other band (I’m not a huge Skynyrd fan, but she is, so there you have it), although that number might be just about tied with The Doobie Brothers, since The Doobies seem to open for a lot of people. What does that mean to you? A Lynyrd Skynyrd cover, of course.

The song, which probably needs no introduction, is Sweet Home Alabama off of their “Second Helping” album which came out in 1974 and prominently featured the late, Great Leon Wilkinson on bass.

I may have said this before, but some of the first music I played in a cover band was Lynyrd Skynyrd, along with a sprinkling of Stones, Bad Co., Cars, and stuff like that. Some of the songs we played were Gimme’ Three Steps, Needle and the Spoon, Freebird, and, of course, this one - Sweet Home Alabama. However, this was before I developed any sort of “ear” and was basically just following along with what the guitar players were doing. I find it interesting that we could play stripped down versions of these songs and still have them sound not too awful-bad.

Like the other Skynyrd songs I’ve covered, there’s a lot more going on with this bass line than meets the ear. I’m a stickler when it comes to slides (up or down) and finding the right starting and ending points. I struggled with the up-slides in the segue sections (00:42-00:52) and played them a couple of different ways and in a couple of different positions but this way felt and sounded the best to me. It’s almost like a 1, 4, 8 arpeggio if that makes any sense, starting on the C, sliding up to the E, and finishing on the high C. Leon Wilkinson was a master slider which gave a loose and flowing, yet controlled, feel to his bass lines. I also struggled a bit to pick out this hidden lick at (2:19), I think I got it right. It’s really buried in the mix. See if you hear something different or if you don’ think it’s the bass at all. And something I found a bit distracting was when Neil Young’s voice creeps in at 00:55. If you can’t hear it, it may be more prominent with headphones on, but it gave me the creeps every single time. (I actually learned that it was their producer doing an impression of Neil Young)

I’m playing the Ol’ ’76 Guild B-301 which is packing a Zero-Mod Thumb-rest.