There's an old adage in the Bible Belt: Prophets are never honored in their hometown. The Drive-By Truckers, who call Alabama home, have been cold-cocking roadhouses across America for years, building a rep as alt country's rockingest neo-rednecks. To promote Southern Rock Opera, an audacious new double CD ostensibly about the legacy of Lynyrd Skynyrd, main singer/songwriter Patterson Hood booked them 75 dates in 90 days.

But there's nothing doing in Florence and Muscle Shoals, the adjoining Alabama towns that raised them. The Muscle Shoals karaoke joint the band filled last time refused to have them back. "They used to not book us because we didn't draw," groans guitarist/songwriter Mike Cooley. "Now they don't book us because they don't like the kind of people we do draw." The Florence club that finally did say yes shut down three days before the gig. So the Truckers are playing acoustic at a house party hosted by their friend Dick Cooper, a local rock old-timer who road-managed the opening band on the 1977 Skynyrd tour, which ended in a fatal plane crash in the Mississippi swamps. Folks they've known forever are talking drunkenly over the music, forcing Hood, who fought laryngitis earlier this week, to grovel for quiet.

One Trucker, guitarist Rob Malone, hasn't bothered to show up (he'll leave the band a couple of days later and be replaced by Jason Isbell). When several strings on their borrowed guitars pop all at once, well over an hour into the "show," anyone would forgive the guys for calling it a night and downing a few more cans of PBR in sarcastic toast to the region they once dubbed "Buttholeville." Instead, they play for two more hours, mesmerizing the fidgety partygoers. Cooley sings "Zip City" in his portentous baritone, firing off belated comebacks to a deacon's daughter who wouldn't screw him when he was 17. (He's still bitter about the Evangelicals who made the area a dry county until the '80s. "One of the local jokes is 'Why don't the Church of Christ fuck standing up?' 'Because people might think they're dancing,'" Hood says.) Hood winds up the set with a heart-splitting version of Southern Rock Opera's climactic "Angels and Fuselage," which imagines the passengers on that fated Skynyrd plane "scared shitless of what's coming next," waiting to belly-bump the ground.

Poetry among the wreckage--that's the Drive-By Truckers for you. Or, to employ the phrase Hood coined for the theme of Southern Rock Opera, "the duality of the Southern thing." Like their contemporaries Slobberbone, the Shiners, Honky, and Supagroup--sometimes lumped together as "the redneck underground"--the Truckers wrangle with the bullshit myth of "white trash" as a heritage because it would be a lie to run away from it. "We stumbled on all these subject matters in our own backyard that nobody was really writing about," says Hood.

A big smiley guy who grows out his beard on the road, the 38-year-old Hood loves to say "belligerent"; it's the way he describes himself, his band, and virtually everybody he respects. A born dramatist, he talks with more fervor than most frontmen sing with, and his Springsteen-length introductions to songs such as "Wallace," about America's most famous segregationist, and "18 Wheels of Love," about his mom falling for a truck driver, are often longer than the songs themselves. "I wrote a thousand songs before I started high school," he declares. "I figured I better learn to play guitar, because the kind of songs I write aren't the kind that people cover. I also had probably the most uncooperative voice in the world."

Every band has a history, but history is about the only thing the Drive-By Truckers have. Hood's great-great-granddad fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War--even though he opposed slavery--and took home a bullet hole in his side. His father, David Hood, was the bassist in the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios band, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, who played a string of successful sessions with everyone from Aretha Franklin to Bob Dylan. The younger Hood still burns to live up to that legacy. But by 1984, Julian Lennon was the kind of act coming to Muscle Shoals. ("He nailed a girl I went to high school with," says Hood.) So young Patterson became a punk rocker.

"'The Chocolate Vomits,' that's what my name for all those groups was," says Hood's father, a self-effacing man who still lives near Wilson Lake in the area and serves some of the best barbecue you'll ever devour. Hood replies, "I never wanted to be a session person. My dad never took his guitar out of the case around the house. That was his job." Instead, Hood began playing in a band called Adam's House Cat with "mean-ass drunk" Cooley, a country-music fanatic and son of a construction worker who subsidized Mike's guitar lessons until he became a teenage cock-rocker.

Adam's House Cat were hated locally, not least for "Buttholeville," which they used to introduce by saying, "If this song pisses you off, it's about you!" But their rep spread, and when, in 1988, Musician magazine named them the nation's best unsigned band, capricious record labels came calling. "We spent four out of the six years we were together on the verge of a record deal," says Hood, now able to laugh at his rock-star-wannabe days. The unreleased album they recorded in 1990 featured a Replacements-like wailer called "Runaway Train" that was slated to be the first single. "I still hate Soul Asylum!" Hood shouts. "I heard their 'Runaway Train' song [a 1993 hit] on the radio and went nuts. I'd see that fucker with his torn jeans, and I was ready to kill him."

For a number of years, Hood was in stasis, writing hundreds of songs that were never performed, working as a soundman in Athens, Georgia, and starting over. In 1996, the Truckers began in earnest and have since gone through a couple of lineup shifts (the current incarnation features Jason Isbell on third guitar, longtime pal Earl Hicks on bass, and Brad Morgan on drums). They released two studio albums (1998's Gangstabilly and 1999's Pizza Deliverance) and a live record (2000's Alabama Ass Whuppin') and toured 200 dates in a year. Southern Rock Opera, originally released in late 2001, was funded with $20,000 put up by a dozen investors--friends and supporters happy to offer what Hood calls "a little bit of a fuck-you to the music business." Last summer, after the album had received too much acclaim to ignore, Universal's country label, Lost Highway, reissued it, which guaranteed real distribution but made the band uneasy: "You have to negotiate through the Universal people," says Hood, "and that's the goddamn evil empire."

Southern Rock Opera funnels the band's history into an opus as belligerent as it is self-aware. It's all there, from a song about the friendship between Ronnie Van Zant and Neil Young to a somber ode to Birmingham hard times to a recounting of Hood's arena-rock youth. "No winking involved," says Chicago country-rocker Kelly Hogan, who makes a cameo playing Skynyrd vocalist Cassie Gaines. The Truckers are rock maniacs who called one of their tours "Get Them Pants Off" and slam whiskey onstage, but as Hood walks through the newly restored Muscle Shoals Sound Studios the afternoon of the acoustic show, he becomes a Southern historian, extolling the virtues of soul man Bobby Womack and pointing out the spot in the corner where his dad used to work his bass.

Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section guitarist Jimmy Johnson produced Lynyrd Skynyrd's first sessions here, an experience that moved the band to write "Sweet Home Alabama," and Hood's dad knew the Skynyrd guys pretty well. Which raises the question: Is Opera myth or truth? "It's not exactly accurate or anything," Hood says. "If you can capture the spirit of the truth, you're probably doing enough." Still, when the Truckers were invited to open for a Skynyrd tour this summer, Hood was a little nervous about meeting legendarily gruff guitarist Gary Rossington: "If he reaches out his left hand to shake my hand, I know not to take it, because he'll deck me with the right."

Performing 30-minute sets deep in the heart of Skynyrd country, the Truckers earned standing ovations from the "Freebird" faithful. "The Southern Thing" was a peak moment. "They yelled as much for the line about Martin Luther King as they did for the one about Robert E. Lee," Hood is careful to note. Rossington even came backstage and made the band's year. "He said, 'The album's a little weird, but I enjoyed the show,'" Hood recalls. "I appreciated his honesty. I guess the album is a little weird."