in his own words:
"In 1975, Van Zant said: “The lyrics about the governor of Alabama were misunderstood. The general public didn’t notice the words ‘Boo! Boo! Boo!’ after that particular line, and the media picked up only on the reference to the people loving the governor.”[5] “The line ‘We all did what we could do’ is sort of ambiguous,” Al Kooper notes. “‘We tried to get Wallace out of there’ is how I always thought of it.”[5] Towards the end of the song, Van Zant adds “where the governor’s true” to the chorus’s “where the skies are so blue,” a line rendered ironic by the previous booing of the governor. Journalist Al Swenson argues that the song is more complex than it is sometimes given credit for, suggesting that it only looks like an endorsement of Wallace.[5] “Wallace and I have very little in common,” Van Zant himself said, “I don’t like what he says about colored people.”[5]
Music historians examining the juxtaposition of invoking Richard Nixon and Watergate after Wallace and Birmingham note that one reading of the lyrics is an “attack against the liberals who were so outraged at Nixon’s conduct” while others interpret it regionally: “the band was speaking for the entire South, saying to northerners, we’re not judging you as ordinary citizens for the failures of your leaders in Watergate; don’t judge all of us as individuals for the racial problems of southern society”.[4]"
