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
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”
—Neal Cassady (1926–1968)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)