I’m still working out all of the details on my upcoming trip to Oregon and Washington later this summer. The path seems to be getting clearer to me as I fill in missing pieces. It appears I’m going to have to apologize in advance to my Portland readers. The route will likely skirt the city without actually entering it.
I know, I know, so many geo-oddities in such a concentrated area and I’m probably going to have to bypass Portland. Life often requires compromises and I had to trade certain routes to keep peace in the family. I had to accommodate a preference of my wife in order to extract a concession, so Portland fell. You can always email me if you want to know the details about the nearby spot outside of Portland that I will be forced to visit instead. That happens when four family members all jockey for personal definitions of cool stuff.
That Infernal Song!
Anyway, and more to the point, check out this sweet town I stumbled upon as I mapped various routes from the Oregon coast to the interior.
Sweet Home, Oregon (map) looks like a wonderful town. They’ve got nine thousand residents, great scenery, a nice website and all sorts of outdoor activities. Is it terrible of me that all of those great features were drowned-out by the constant droning of a song I couldn’t dislodge from my head, “Sweet Home Alabama?” — Turn it Up!
I won’t get into controversies associated with that song, whether it tacitly favored or rejected racial segregation. I will note for the record that it contains considerably more nuance than most listeners likely realize. You can research it and form an opinion on your own. That didn’t matter in this scenario where I concerned myself solely with the repetition in my mind. As I’ve discussed before, I don’t need to enjoy a song for it to lodge firmly within my brain. However, I do like this one more than that other one.
For those of you unfamiliar with “Sweet Home Alabama” — maybe you live far away from the United States or you’re a generation removed, or whatever — the band that epitomized the Southern Rock genre, Lynyrd Skynyrd, released it in 1974 and it made it all the way to #8 on the U.S. music charts. The only other thing you need to know, according to Wikipedia: “None of the three writers of the song were originally from Alabama. Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington were both born in Jacksonville, Florida. Ed King was from Glendale, California.” Actually you don’t need to know that. Nonetheless, I found it oddly amusing. I concede that some people will claim that Jacksonville might properly belong in Alabama, though.
An Actual Sweet Home Alabama
I checked one of my all-time favorite sites, the U.S. Geographic Names Information System to investigate Sweet Homes. Sure enough, there is a Sweet Home, Alabama listed in their records.
The good news is that the United States government recognizes Sweet Home, Alabama as a populated place. It lists “McMillan, James B., Dictionary of Place Names in Talladega County, Alabama, 1985. p.138” as its source. Google Books recognizes that such a book exists but apparently it’s too obscure for them to have scanned and made it available to the public within their collection of a bazillion different volumes.
Sweet Home Baptist Church exists there. They don’t offer a website, or at least one that I could find because it gets lost within piles of awful Search Engine Optimization garbage links. Honestly, Sweet Home, Alabama (the settlement) is pretty underwhelming and I’m not impressed. This should be an excellent opportunity for an enterprising Alabaman to put a housing development on an open field outside of Birmingham or whatnot and seize the state’s signature theme song (“Sweet Home Alabama Country Estates and McMansion Farm”). After all, the Alabama Motor Vehicle Division likes it (speaking of license plates).
But wait! I found more!
Maybe we can change the song to Sweet Home Arkansas (map). It’s close enough, right? — a southern state starting with an A? Sweet Home, Arkansas exists as a suburb of Little Rock, just a bit south of Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport.
If that’s not sufficient, how about Sweet Home, Texas?
This one was my personal favorite because it’s only a few miles from my grandmother’s birthplace in Yoakum, TX. She was born in 1909 and lived for another 102 years). It’s also very near Shiner where the Spoetzl Brewery (my visit) makes Shiner Bock and various other beverages. It’s not too far from Borden, the original one too, not that poseur version further north. You could visit all of these places easily as a day trip from Houston or San Antonio.
I’ll also give an honorable mention to Sweethome, Oklahoma. I don’t know any more about it other than it was reputedly settled by people from the Texas version that arrived in Oklahoma during the Run of ’91. Oh, and they spelled it funny.
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