Origin
The band's website says that the song is based on a composite of people who actually lived in the Van Zants' original neighborhood in Jacksonville, FL. Specifically, the country store "is based on Claude's Midway Grocery on the corner of Plymouth and Lakeshore in Jacksonville." The business has since been renamed Sunrise Food Store, but still occupies the same location. The Loew character is sometimes thought by Skynyrd fans to be inspired by Shorty Medlocke, the grandfather of Rickey Medlocke, Lynyrd Skynyrd's drummer during their 1970 tour and one of the band's current guitarists.
Read more about this topic: The Ballad Of Curtis Loew
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