Where The Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling The South With The Drive-By Truckers

★★★★ Stephen Deusner

The Southern States explored by one of their finest rock bands.

The Drive-By Truckers have covered a lot of territory these past 25 years, but plenty of it comes down to an oft-quoted line from 2001, the “duality of the Southern thing”. It’s also Stephen Deusner’s jump-off point for his clever and engaging book: a history of a left-leaning Southern rock band, alive to the complexities and iniquities of their home. “Their music makes you feel OK to be bitter about the place,” observes Jason Isbell, who served a drunken and maritally fraught apprenticeship in one of the band’s best line-ups. Deusner tours the South with the band as fully-engaged interviewees, visiting key Truckers destinations and tackling everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Confederate statues as he goes. And if the textual focus on individual songs can sometimes get a bit dense, at least it’ll keep sending you back to that rich and hefty discography; a decent trade-off. John Mulvey