I know: You want to talk music, and you hate it when rock crits wallow around in their childhoods and their drug habits and never get to the blasted point about the blasted band.

So let's talk about me.

See, you really can't think anything worth thinking about the damn-near genius of the Georgia-based (but mostly Alabama-born) Drive-By Truckers -- except maybe "yeeeaaahh, rawk on!" -- without facing it as an exercise in critical autobiography filtered through the gestural vocabulary of Southern Rock, that 1970s nether region ruled by the Allman Brothers and the ghost of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Ronnie Van Zant.

Theirs is a 3-D exegesis, in triple-axe guitar assaults, stadium anthems and power ballads, on what it means to be from the South, to carry its boogie and its bogeymen in your bones, to want to wave the rebel flag but wish it didn't threaten your black friends, to be the scapegoat and dunce to Yankees and millions of foreigners who've never seen kudzu and never set foot in your home town.

It's about folks with family in the army and family in jail, who drink too much or quit after the divorce and keep a gun in the closet that, like certain characters on the Truckers' new Decoration Day, they might use to blow their own heads off one day after church. And it's about having grown up a smart, anti-racist, artistic freak next door to those characters, getting your ass whupped by quarterbacks and finally fleeing to a college town like Athens, GA, where they hate Skynyrd and you do, too.

You get into punk rock, 'zines, film, hip-hop, activism . . . while still living in a shotgun shack and rehearsing your band above a uniform shop. You start to wonder where your type fits into -- as the Truckers' Patterson Hood calls it on the band's 2001 masterpiece, Southern Rock Opera -- "the duality of the Southern thing": black/white, country/city, modern/old-time, sinner/saved, myth/reality, pride/shame.

You listen again, and if you're Hood, you realize Skynyrd's chunky beats sound like the soul and funk your father David built as bassist in the famed Muscle Shoals rhythm section, on hits by Percy Sledge, Etta James, Aretha Franklin and Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham (the latter plays Wurlitzer piano on Decoration Day). In fact, when Skynyrd moved up from Florida, the band made a beeline for the Muscle Shoals studio. When you and pal Mike Cooley start your first group, you record there too, but upstairs in the spare room.

You also note that Skynyrd's guitars kinda sound like Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Despite the famed musical feud (Young's Southern Man/Van Zant's answer Sweet Home Alabama), the two became friends. Van Zant hadn't been defending racism, but saying southerners weren't all racists. And when he and two other Skynyrds died in a 1977 plane crash, Young was a pallbearer.

And so, with Cooley and three other burly southern men, you start a new Southern Rock band, one that integrates country, punk, blues and even hip-hop (you call your 1998 debut album Gangstabilly). Because deep down, it's all American music, kindred in structure and feel, in power, humour, darkness and glory.

You spend years creating a double album that documents it all: your lives, Skynyrd, Van Zant, Young, 1960s Alabama state politics. It's an absurdly ambitious successor to Randy Newman's classic 1970s Southern concept album Good Old Boys. The process breaks up a few marriages, but the result blows listeners away and snags you a major-label deal.

But the next record is softer, bleaker, drawing on the personal traumas you endured working on your opus. The record company drops you. Decoration Day, named for the date Southern churches set aside to put flowers on loved ones' graves, comes out on small New West Records this week, with seals of approval by Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone. The Truckers hit the Horseshoe in Toronto on Tuesday.

With all this self-reflection going on in what could be mistaken for a party band, I can't help echoing it: Why do the Truckers' Southern parables, curses and wisecracks speak to me, who grew up white and half-heartedly Catholic in a muted, busted, post-industrial Ontario town?

If you're raised without a strong cultural heritage -- or in one alien to your locale, or betwixt and between many of them, which almost amounts to the Canadian Condition -- a pure dose of regional tradition can be hard to digest. I didn't appreciate country, blues or classic soul, for instance, till I came to them through Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Prince. Many people need a Paul Simon to get them into African music, a Clash or a Pogues to make reggae or Celtic music cool.

These aren't dilutions of the originals. They're the "meta" versions: not imitations, but investigations and recontextualizations. They're neither homage nor parody, but contain both in their gaps and distances, their inevitable ironies. By inventing Meta-Southern-Rock, the Truckers can ironize a notoriously irony-free genre, using the style itself to examine why it alienated them, but never mocking it.

This is where I come in: I totally get having a love-hate relationship with your home town, despising whatever the brutes and bullies liked (I still can't stand Led Zeppelin). You make your break for big-city bohemia as fast as you can, but once there -- well, as Cooley sings on Decoration Day: "Rock 'n' roll means well, but it can't help telling young boys lies."

With that entrée, I begin to notice how much the Truckers have to tell a non-Southerner, about whiteness, class and the bigotry I grew up around; about guilt, being stuck versus being lost, and homesickness. And also about the South: My latecomer's passion for twang and soul has led me down there in recent years, to get my preconceptions scrambled, partly by members of the Truckers' extended families. This week, I bought my first Skynyrd record, the Muscle Shoals sessions. (The Allmans may take a bit longer.)

For others, Brad Morgan's killer drumming, newest member Jason Isbell's graceful guitar or Earl Hicks's chugging bass lines may be enough. Or the way writers Isbell, Cooley and Hood can each range from balls-out screechers to tragic vignettes and homespun philosophy ("don't call what you're wearing an outfit/ don't ever say your car is broke/ don't sing with a British accent/ don't act like your family's a joke").

But when a bunch of big subversive rednecks can start off holding a mirror to a faraway landscape and end up making me, as sardonic Yankee songwriter Neil Cleary sings, "love the bands that love the South," then damn straight: It's personal.

cwilson@globeandmail.ca