Alabama Enough

Nobody ever accused Del Ray Hillian of subtlety. A native of Sand Mountain, Alabama, Hillian was raised on a steady diet of gospel hymns, Alabama football, and southern cooking. When he signed to WonTone Records in the mid-1970s, the label hoped to capture the outlaw-country energy spilling out of Texas and Nashville. What they got instead were songs like Alabama Enough, with lyrics so unselfconsciously devoted to Del Ray's home state that it borders on the sacramental.

Built on a simple acoustic riff and a church-choir chorus, Alabama Enough is part front-porch hymn, part stadium anthem. The lyrics juxtapose Sunday gospel and Saturday football, Jesus Christ and Bear Bryant, moonshine and sweet tea, offered here not as irony but as a deeply sincere creed. The bridge lifts into a near-revival as Hillian testifies that he doesn’t need silver or gold, only the wisdom his mama gave him and the rising tide of a crimson sea.

At the time of release, critics didn’t know what to make of the track. Was it parody? Was it sacrilege? To Hillian and his devoted local following, it was neither, or both, or didn't much matter anyway. It was home. In its conflation of faith, football, and folkways, Alabama Enough embodied the Southern populist instinct to see holiness in the everyday, while assuming that you're the only people who do. Over time, the song found its place as a cult favorite, often covered with equal parts reverence and disbelief by bar bands from Birmingham to Muscle Shoals.

While Hillian would never achieve the national stardom of contemporaries like Waylon Jennings or Willie Nelson, Alabama Enough remains one his best remembered signature songs, a regional anthem that insists, without apology, that the things you love and cherish are salvation enough, even when the textual gospel disagrees.