The real South Drive-By Truckers inherit the reflective legacy of Lynyrd Skynyrd BY JONATHAN PERRY

Telling the truth can get you dirty looks from the folks you’re pointing a finger at — even if those folks are first and foremost yourself and what you’re really doing is just holding up a great big mirror. The Muscle Shoals–based Drive-By Truckers are a band who like to hold up big mirrors that capture what they call "the duality of the Southern thing."

On the strength of a string of recent albums starting with 2001’s Southern Rock Opera (Lost Highway/Mercury), a sprawling 20-track song cycle that contemplated the 1977 Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash and took off from that tragic event to meditate on Southern mythology, identity, and politics, DBTs have emerged as one of the most enigmatic roots-rock bands in America. Founded by Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood during the late 1990s, DBTs — like much like the region they write about — are a snarl of contradictions and contrasts, most of which can be found fermenting inside the troubled, emotionally tormented songs that made up last year’s Decoration Day and the just-released The Dirty South (both on New West). Like its predecessors, the latter is a bracing work of baleful power and reach wherein recurring themes of power, corruption, failure, desperation, and vengeance collide amid the clamor of crunching electric guitars and a handful of brooding ballads. "The Buford Stick" and "Never Gonna Change" hit steel-hammer sturdy and sure with a visceral energy and a stormy urgency that distills these themes into fierce, pure rock and roll built for stepping hard on the gas. "I think a lot of people, young and old alike, are pretty starved to death for that sound," says Cooley over the phone from his Birmingham home. "When I was growing up, I loved rock and roll, and there were a lot of records that I loved where I couldn’t begin to tell you what the lyrics were about."

Just as, a generation ago, Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote both "Gimme Back My Bullets" and the pro-gun-control cautionary tale "Saturday Night Special," so DBTs’ running commentary on death and survival in the American South is equal parts caustically critical and proud, provincial populist. And though they’re given to wrapping their stories inside surly, Skynyrd-style anthems and burly, triple-threat guitar epics, the band’s claim that their biggest fan base lies north of the Mason-Dixon line may reflect the idea that songs about segregationist George Wallace cut a little too close to the bone for the home-town folks. Cooley certainly thinks so. "When we started this thing called Drive-By Truckers, Atlanta was the only Southern town that got us and liked us, and Atlanta’s about as Southern as Boston. I hope nobody in Atlanta gets pissed at me for saying that. So much of the struggle that you see in Atlanta is people trying to hold on to their history and who they are. But as far as the rest of the South goes, I guess we don’t have anything to say that people here are intrigued by or maybe haven’t already thought about themselves."

Cooley is kidding, sort of, but as is the case with so much of DBTs’ material, the point where stretched truths end and tall tales begin can get as shady as the bootleggers, crooked cops, and two-bit hustlers that populate The Dirty South. It’s a region the band members know intimately. Four of the five Truckers — Cooley, Hood, bassist Shonna Tucker, and new guitarist Jason Isbell — grew up in Muscle Shoals (drummer Brad Morgan is from Greenville, South Carolina), and much of The Dirty South was tracked at Muscle Shoals’ seminal FAME Recording Studio, where Hood’s father — a session musician — recorded with some of the era’s biggest soul acts three decades ago. That sense of torch and tradition being passed courses through the album.

It wasn’t always this way. "In the early days, we got written off in the press as a bit of a novelty act because our songs were kind of funny," says Cooley about their 1998 debut, Gangstabilly, 1999’s Pizza Deliverance, and 2000’s live document Alabama Ass Whuppin’. "When we started doing this, we just wanted to have a good time, write songs, play them the way we wanted — and not have anybody else tell us how to do things otherwise." Even, as he hints, if that meant holding up a great big mirror to the Southerners inside themselves and getting a few dirty looks along the way.

Drive-By Truckers perform this Tuesday, September 14, at the Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, with Allison Moorer opening; call (617) 562-8800.