Why the Guitar Solos in “Sweet Home Alabama” Were Almost Taken Out (And the Superstitious Reason They Weren’t)

Every so often, the muse will call a songwriter out of their sleep with an idea that’s too good not to write down. Keith Richards famously experienced this mid-sleep phenomenon with the intro riff to “Satisfaction”. And according to guitarist Ed King, the same thing happened with Lynyrd Skynyrd the night after the band wrote the earliest iteration of “Sweet Home Alabama”.

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Speaking to Classic Rock magazine, King said, “I used to sleep with my guitar next to the bed. The night after we wrote ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, I had a dream in which I played both the short and long solos. I immediately woke up, got the guitar, and started playing what I’d seen in the dream. At rehearsal the next day, I just plugged the solos into the spots where we had rehearsed them. And they fit perfectly.” So King thought. Producer Al Kooper wasn’t so sure.

King said that days after he tracked the guitar solos for “Sweet Home Alabama”, Kooper started expressing hesitation about including them on the final track. The producer told King he played the solos in the wrong key, and he would have to redo his parts.

Why Lynyrd Skynyrd Kept the Original Solos on “Sweet Home Alabama”

Despite Al Kooper’s best efforts to inform the band that a key feature of their Southern rock classic was in a different key than the rest of the piece, Lynyrd Skynyrd kept Ed King’s original solos in the final cut. “The guys in the band, being from the South and believing in superstition and dreams, told Kooper the solos needed to stay as I’d played them. Though they were overdubs, I’d recorded them both on the first take anyway with no mistakes. Kooper says he’s grown to like the solos since.”

Kooper and King’s key debate, however, remains. Since Lynyrd Skynyrd first released “Sweet Home Alabama” on their second album, Second Helping, in 1974, armchair theorists and guitarists have been debating what key the song is really in. Kooper argued that the song began on a D major and therefore was in D major. According to King, the D major chord that opens the song is actually the dominant (V) chord of the song’s true key, G major.

Thus, King resolved his solos as if he were playing in G major (because he believed he was). Paired with the D major feel of the progression, the solos have a D Mixolydian feel—a major mode that features the same accidentals as G Ionian, or G major.

Still, the music theory is just a way to explain what happened after the fact. The real magic of the “Sweet Home Alabama” guitar solos is, just like the band originally argued to Al Kooper, that Ed King received those features from some higher power that visited him in his sleep.

Photo by Jim McCrary/Redferns