Sweet Home Alabama

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The Deep South in a (usually) more positive light. The Rural South in the United States is a land of honest, down-to-earth folks, unlike the pretentious City Slickers in New York or "New South" Atlanta. Some may have their little quirks, but everyone takes those in stride. When one wants to escape the morally bankrupt superficiality of city life and get in touch with one's true self, the South is the place to go to.

A Sub-Trope of Arcadia. Frequently features Southern Hospitality, a form of Sacred Hospitality.

Whether white or black, the churches are usually Baptist or Pentecostal, which is to say this trope usually averts Christianity Is Catholic.

Examples of Sweet Home Alabama include:


Anime & Manga

  • Turn a Gundam is set in a post-apocalyptic future that bears an uncanny resemblance to late 19th century Dixie.
    • Ironically enough, Nochis (the town where the story begins) is placed in New Jersey on official maps.

Comic Books

  • Bart Allen was sent to live in Manchester, Alabama (which is real, despite what Impulse #1 claims) with his mentor Max Mercury (Max specifically chose it for reasons made clear in issue 16). This is deliberate; the series is based off Mark Waid's childhood in the South.
    • Manchester, is the No Communities Were Harmed substitute for the actual city of Birmingham (which like Bart's town, has a statue of Vulcan on top of a really high pillar in the middle of town).
  • Most of Marvel's Southern heroes play up this aspect of the south. Namely, X-Men members Rogue (from Mississippi), Cannonball, Husk, and Icarus (the last three being siblings from Kentucky).

Film

  • Gone with the Wind
  • The Blind Side: Well, it's actually Tennessee, but still. The film also has elements of Deep South.
  • The fictional Crowley Corners, Tennessee from Hannah Montana the movie is one of these places. Actual filming was done in the city of Columbia, about 50 miles south of Nashville.
  • In The Legend of Bagger Vance, Will Smith gets on fine in 1930s Savannah, Georgia.
  • Cookie's Fortune: If Atlanta is "the city too busy to hate", Holly Springs is the town too lazy to hate. Everyone's laid back with everyone else, and ethnic prejudice is nonexistent.
  • Doc Hollywood
  • Forrest Gump
  • Fried Green Tomatoes
  • Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: Both the (nonfiction) novel and the movie.
  • Mystery Train
  • My Cousin Vinny: plays it both ways. Some of the Southerners are portrayed as rednecks and somewhat dim but the rest are presented as decent folks. The Northerners act more like stereotypical New Yawkers. It's basically stereotype vs. stereotype and played for laughs.
  • The movie Sweet Home Alabama is about a Southern girl who thought for a moment that some New York yuppie could be her Mr. Right. Obviously not; her Mr. Right is her childhood sweetheart back home in Alabama.
  • The Notebook
  • Steel Magnolias
  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
  • Big Fish
  • Where the Heart Is
  • Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
  • Harold and Kumar: Escape From Guantanamo Bay features the titular duo staying with a couple who initially appear to subvert the stereotypes. They don't seem to mind the duo's ethnicity and even help the two of hide from government agents. They also make a joke about how "they keep their inbred son in the basement when they have company. However, then it turns out they were serious, and they are brother and sister.
  • The character of Wooderson from Dazed and Confused seems to inhabit this trope, although the rest of the film isn't particularly like this. (It's set in Austin, Texas.)

Literature

  • Every single book by Fannie Flagg.
  • The Savannah Reid mysteries.
  • All of Charlaine Harris's books, the most famous being the Sookie Stackhouse series.
  • Looking for Alaska, set in a boarding school in Alabama.
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
  • Joan Hess's Arkansas mysteries tend to be like this, as even the weirdos and idiots of Maggody are seldom anything worse than annoying.

Live-Action TV

  • Dr. McCoy of Star Trek has a slight Southern accent (which was DeForest Kelley's natural accent; he was from Atlanta) and is a self-described "simple country doctor" from the "Old South" where he attended the University of Mississippi. He is presumably from this version of the South.
  • Raytown in Mama's Family.
  • Mayberry, North Carolina in The Andy Griffith Show.
  • Hooterville in Green Acres and Petticoat Junction.
  • Evening Shade.
  • When The Dukes of Hazzard wasn't making the characters ridiculous characters it was showing the sense of honor and hospitality people have in the Southern US.
  • Hee Haw.
  • Sergeant Eugene "Sledgehammer" Sledge of The Pacific is, appropriately enough, from Alabama. His family is portrayed as honest, hardworking folk. His family also has Black menservants, but they don't treat them badly.
  • The CMT reality show Sweet Home Alabama, naturally
  • Pretty much every time Blanche talks about her childhood in Atlanta on The Golden Girls.

Music
My own song 'Alabama' richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don't like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue
—Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace
  • Despite its Shout-Out to the Trope Namer, Kid Rock's "All Summer Long" explicitly takes place in "northern Michigan.
  • "Georgia on My Mind" by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell, made famous by Ray Charles, which was made the official state song in 1979, although originally written about Carmichael's sister, Georgia Carmichael.
  • Phil Harris' song "That's What I Like About The South" is filled to the brim (of the mint julep) with this.
  • Take Me Home, Country Road does for West Virginia the same thing that Sweet Home Alabama does for Alabama.
    • Similarly, James Taylor's "Carolina In My Mind" is about Taylor's childhood in North Carolina, but it's also popular in South Carolina.
      • Not to be confused with "South Carolina On My Mind" by Hank Martin and Buzz Alredge, South Carolina's (second) state song.
    • Likewise, "My Old Kentucky Home" does the same for Kentucky.
  • Too many Country Music songs to count.
  • Boondox has elements of both this and Deep South in his lyrics.

Newspaper Comics

  • Pogo leans more this way, although some of the Okeefenokee Swamp denizens are less than brilliant. Most of them are Sweet Home Alabama, with elements of The Deep South every so often coming in.

Video Games

  • The Terrans from StarCraft Embrace this trope, then mix it with Heavy Metal for some reason.
    • Taking it one step further, the Trope Namer song loads up on Jimmy's jukebox during the infamous Bar Fight.
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