the kid poet and the tennessee daredevil

There is nothing more important to me than Southern dirtbag shit. I think about racing hand-me-down cars on empty roads, floating in a pool that doesn’t belong to you, and making out in your boyfriend’s car under a stranger’s fireworks that they probably bought in a different county. I think of time-worn ringer t-shirts hiding farmer’s tanned arms. Broken sunglasses and gas station sodas. Pitchers of beer and mean gossip. Big dogs at your bare feet and ATVs. Waylon's songs leaking out of a broken speaker. A wasp building a nest at your backdoor. There’s a slowness that comes with this dirtbaggery. But there’s also a tinge of cruelty, a flicker of malice woven through this quilt of amusement and humor and camaraderie.

Everything is larger in the South. The looming shadows, the sun’s rays. The secrets and the truths. Time. The sun doesn’t set until late down there and I think that’s one of the reasons why storytelling is such a big part of the region’s culture. It took a while for radio and TV to get set up so what else was there to do but shoot the shit and take your time while doing it? Everyone can tell a story that winds and weaves. Everyone remembers that one thing their great-grandmother’s, second cousin, twice removed once did and they need to tell you about it now. You want to hear it too. 

With this penchant for storytelling comes the characters, because the South is also a place of spectacular showmanship. If the tales are tall, so are the people they’re about. Born out of that particularly sunburned brand of brotherhood comes the people, real or not, who become legends: John Henry, Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, the Hatfields & the McCoys.

When retelling these tales, the storytellers craft these stories in their image — emphasizing what they choose to. History and facts are not important here, it’s about the feeling. I think these feelings are present even now in contemporary conceptions, they just need new interpretations while the core, always applicable, can remain intact. Oftentimes it's the strength and near-magic of the characters that gets illustrated. Perhaps the tragic endings receive the most attention to warn listeners about these men’s lives. Other times it's something more underscored, like how these characters represent social ideals like masculinity and how they’re strong and fearless and the listener should be, too.

These narrators and folk heroes are still all over the region, inventing new tales every day. But, when I think of my favorite storyteller, I think of Jason Isbell. When I try to conjure the closest thing the South has to a contemporary folk hero, I think of Johnny Knoxville. 

the kid poet

The first time I saw Drive-By Truckers was when I was a kid. They were playing a free music festival that I have no recollection of. But my parents talked about it a bit over the years. My parents are very Southern. My mom is from a farm in Mississippi, my dad grew up in Chattanooga, and they met in New Orleans. The Truckers were just another Southern thing my parents liked: like REM or college ball or Mardi Gras. It was categorized as such with the band only really permeating my periphery when Patterson Hood penned op-eds on Southern politics or they randomly popped up on the outlaw country station.

Later I found them again on my own, largely by way of Jason Isbell. As you may or may not know, Jason Isbell was brought into Drive by Truckers when he was around 21 after playing a single show with the band. When I was in my early 20s and aimless, I reveled in that story. I had heard of just getting in the van and going but he actually did it. After a childhood of turmoil and heartbreak, he left his small town and played under the lights of the 40 Watt Club for years. He stood in front of festival crowds, cigarette bit between his crooked teeth, and tuned his guitar that people traveled to see him play, not the founders Patterson Hood or Mike Cooley — they came to see Isbell play. 

The part of Isbell’s story that captured me the most was the fact that it didn’t end right. He toured with the band for a few years, got too into partying (notable because the whole band was a party band), got married to who would be their bassist, got divorced, and was kicked out, all before he was 30. Even with all of that discography and guitar prowess he brought to the group, he was told to leave. According to him, he hardly even remembers the six years he spent living out what he previously called his dream. This adds a bitter note to that era of Truckers albums, my favorite era, and makes his contributions to the band all the more important to me. I hang onto every word and every note. His perspective is finite and precious.

Jason Isbell learned how to play guitar in his childhood bedroom. He practiced when his parents, who had him as teenagers, were arguing. By all accounts in that complicated home, he would slam his door, turn up his amp, and play for hours instead of listening to them. It’s in that small room, under those furious circumstances, that Jason Isbell became the country legend he is today. His parents eventually divorced. I wonder how it feels, to have your artistry born out of those moments. 

Isbell was a quiet kid, observing the relationships around him and studying the land he grew up on. His mother has a story about a young Jason inquiring about the nature of her relationship with his dad. In the memory, he let her explain their complex situation and listened carefully before saying that while he loved his dad, he couldn’t imagine anyone being married to him. He was just a child then, trapped in an environment that made him aware of the limitations of love. This thoughtful, heart-on-his-sleeve perspective became crucial to Isbell’s artistry. Over time, he used this attention to the minuscule to bury himself in the details of his home—his family, his physical house, the town he lived in, and the South itself—constantly looking for change and finding contradictions.

One night in 2001, Isbell’s mom told him about her family’s blood feud. 

In the mid-80s, Jason Isbell’s great-uncle shot and killed his neighbor. Isbell’s great-uncle, Hollan Hill, shot and killed his neighbor, Dude Lawson, and got away with it. Isbell refers to Hill's defense as the "he needed killin' defense.” This means that his great-uncle was protected from further investigation because of a loophole in Alabama’s old justice system and a disinterest from police in investigating the murder. (Read the comments of that link.)

In the recorded stories, Dude Lawson was a real outlaw while Hollan Hill was a beloved community member. After one too many incidents, Hill pulled up outside of Lawson’s trailer in a green Plymouth sedan, and he and his brothers fired several shotgun rounds into Lawson’s chest and in front of two witnesses, Lawson's son, Calvin, and Calvin’s girlfriend. 

The injustice is very obvious. The contradictions, too: Lawson being a “Bad” man and Hill being a “Good” one. The story’s modernity is very visible as well. Blood feuds are a distinct microgenre of Southern storytelling but this is a real event from the late 20th century, a story that happened while Isbell was alive. A story that he saw the aftermath of and could mull over. A story he could reflect on and build songs off of. 

So, alone on a porch in Houston, he wrote “Decoration Day” in a single sitting.

In the documentary, Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed, Patterson Hood, co-founder of the Truckers, mentions briefly how unbelievable it is that Isbell threw together “Decoration Day” at his age. It's just a very measured and grown-up song. It's a song told with such scaling emotions that you just can't believe he wrote it so fast, so young, and so early in his career. This compliment from Hood eventually led to my endless listens to that song through January 2025. 

Isbell spends most of “Decoration Day” just naming places around Alabama, making the listener overly familiar with the area as if they’re in the dilapidated landscape too. it's righteous in message but spitting mad. While Isbell is from the Hill side of the feud, it's told from the perspective of Calvin Lawson, the son of Dude Lawson who witnessed his father’s murder. In the song, he envisions violence and the defense of a family name. He, as a Lawson, remembers the details of Dude Lawson's death and begrudgingly picks up a kind of pseudo-paternal duty to fight the Hills back and protect the family pride Dude instilled. 

So, since this song is not told from the perspective of a Hill, but rather a grieving foil, Isbell can wield his contempt for his family. He names their wrongdoings and imagines their murders. But he also shifts to a more introspective side — he laments on someone caught in an argument that existed before he was born, a fight that ruins his family. He loses his dad over it. Sound familiar?

In the scope of the band, it’s a fan favorite, sung on guitar or piano depending on the mood, and buried once Isbell left the band. But he digs it up independently now. It’s so good that the Drive-By Truckers named their 2003 album after it. Overall, I think what draws me to the song is the familiarity. While it’s a personal story, a private family matter, it fits into an archetype of Southern lore. These families are reminiscent of uglier feuds with more dire consequences. It’s a story about the patriarchal pressures of the Southern identity and awash in the blood the region spills over and over again. 

“Decoration Day” has a sister song. At least to me, one of Isbell’s other contributions to the titular album. Its twin flame is “Outfit.” Both songs feel searingly honest and mirrored – ruminating on Southern social cultures and familial relationships through a conversation Isbell’s dad had with him as his future in music began to take shape.

Personally, I did not like“Outfit” the first several times I heard it. I was underwhelmed by this semi-autobiographical, country-ish song about his dad talking to him. The old man givin’ some advice before Jason hit the road or whatever. That is simply a genre staple. I am also largely unimpressed with Southerners obsessed with maintaining a common identity without introspection, which I initially felt that this song relied on. That wasn’t fair. I think my real problem was how it prodded at my own sensitivities as a Southerner who moved away. I lost my Louisiana accent a long time ago and my Texas twang is buried in the flattened voice I have now. So when Isbell named an accent as something crucial to the Southern identity, it stung. A bit immature maybe but I didn’t want to hear it. So I skipped it for years and accused it of being too overly emotional in a way that I felt pandered. 

But the song fits in that early Isbell catalog. While his topics have changed over time, Isbell was initially obsessed with the Southern identity. This is obviously, the main motive of Drive-By Truckers — they’re a band embattled in constant and desperate need to define The Southern Thing. However, in 2003, when Isbell’s contributions made it to their album, the differences in how they approached this question were made clear. 

Hood and Cooley, both in their late 30s when the album was written, primarily used their lived experiences as white Southern men, to approach their revelations on the region. Both of these men grew up during the Civil Rights Movement, born in an Alabama that elected George Wallace and in a state that witnessed the events of Bloody Sunday. Yet, they also came of age in Muscle Shoals, the music recording capital of the South, and watched on as artists from all over the world visited their hometown and used their local musicians to record immediately iconic records. Drive-By Truckers’ songs reflect this dynamic, and when Hood and Cooley are behind the pen, their lyrics rely on these personal experiences and decades of observing turbulence. 

Isbell on the other hand grew up in the 80s and so far up North in Alabama that he almost lived in Tennessee. Joining the band at 21 meant that he didn’t have the same decades of hard living Hood and Cooley brought to the lyrics, so Isbell focused on the stories he knew. Isbell brought his family into his songs, he brought his hometown into his songs, and most importantly, he brought folklore into his songs, combining fiction and reality to understand the South.

This blend of familiar fact and fiction serves as kind of a canvas for Isbell to study what makes a Southerner, what Southern values look like, and how a Southern man can fail. He pinpoints the fragility of Southern men’s family, anger, pride, and vulnerability. 

This brings me back to “Outfit.” In all my years of eye-rolling, I just asked the question: who would Isbell be pandering to? Who in 2003 was pandering to Southern dudes who were into loud rock? I didn’t ask this until recently when I watched an old performance of “Outfit.” It’s an undeniable live hit, one of their most melodic songs, and easy to thrash along to after dirges about whiskey and women and women who don’t have whiskey. Anyway, while Isbell crooned the slow song, the camera cut back and forth between him and the crowd, the spotlight hitting the throng singing lines about their mothers, their cars, and eventually themselves. The shining moment was when the sweaty crowd of Southern guys climbed over each other to yell my now favorite line “Don’t worry about losing your accent, a Southern man tells better jokes,” to Isbell, each one ferociously fighting to be the person who yelled the lyric the loudest. 

And honestly, when I think of that lyric right now, I don’t think about the Southern men in my life, in fact just one name comes to mind: Johnny Knoxville. 

the tennessee daredevil

I think of Jackass as a Southern creation. It is just intrinsically and socially Southern. Southern fried to its core. The whole franchise is rooted in that bizarre flavor of antics that I associate with the rowdiest frats in Arkansas and ruddy-faced regulars in Kentucky bars. And I think Jackass reflects that camaraderie because that’s exactly where the maestro behind it all is from. 

The Southern identity I see in the show and movies comes primarily from Johnny Knoxville, the stage name of one of this century’s greatest creative forces: PJ Clapp. While he is a reality TV personality with lots of concussions and a podcast now, he’s ultimately just a guy who grew up in a family of Tennessee pranksters who made his own family of pranksters the second he got the chance. 

Timeline-wise, Johnny Knoxville started to get famous around the exact same time that Jason Isbell joined Drive-By Truckers. In 2000, Knoxville’s television pitch, a kind of gross-out DIY stunt show was picked up by MTV and Jackass was born. He was an overnight sensation, but it didn't start there.

Knoxville always wanted to be famous. That much is clear. Sometime in the late 80s or maybe early 90s, PJ Clapp moved to LA for school for acting, only turned up a few jobs, and instead started pitching to magazines and writing articles to pay his rent. His career continued to careen downwards, but he really felt the pressure to Do Something once he got married and found out he had a kid on the way. Suddenly overwhelmed by the need for financial stability and still hungry for his big break, he pitched an explosive article to a raunchy skateboarding magazine — Big Brother. This is effectively the shot heard ’round the world. Or at least heard ’round my world. 

The strongest Knoxville’s accent ever gets while in character is in Self Defense. This is the first of his filmed stunts and is very straightforward. In the stunt, he tests the effectiveness of self-defense equipment of varying degrees. He starts with pepper spray, a taser, and a stun gun, before working his way up to unloading a live round in his chest. So essentially, for no reason other than the reward of the risk (the reward being money and definitely some notoriety), Knoxville shot himself to test the durability of a cheap bulletproof vest. 

It’s a jarring and incredibly grainy stunt video even by Jackass’ later DIY standards. While the rest of the tests take place in a friend’s backyard, Knoxville and his crew drive out to the desert for the handgun portion. Present accounts recall that no one wanted to shoot him, no one wanted this to happen at all, so Knoxville, still focused on getting the (literal) shot, resorted to aiming the gun at his own chest while his friends looked on, the camera actually shaking from the cameraman’s palpable anxiety. With the desert in the background and the eventually iconic Knoxville silhouette of a giant belt buckle/converse high tops in full view, plus the general illegality of the stunt, it’s almost real outlaw shit. It would be if it weren’t for his friends begging him to put the handgun down in the background audio. Knoxville doesn't listen and plays Russian Roulette with himself for several long seconds, maybe minutes, before the gun finally goes off, sending him stumbling back. 

The gunshot echoes through the empty desert and the whole crew starts running for the car. In the video, Knoxville triumphantly rips off his ringer tee, tears off the cheap bulletproof vest, and reveals that there was not a single scratch on him. It worked. The risk was worth it and a couple of years later, as a reward, Jackass hit cable. 

There are two very notable parts of the stunt that I want to focus on. The first is that this is one of the only times you can hear people calling him PJ in the whole series, accidentally breaking the facade of Johnny Knoxville. This feels gratingly wrong, like the whole persona hasn’t been thought out yet and you’re watching the earliest tryout of the name and character. Maybe it feels like his friends are taking off his armor. Yes, Johnny Knoxville is shooting himself in the chest, the people filming have known PJ Clapp way longer.

The second detail is what I said earlier — that while he doesn’t speak much in the video, Knoxville’s accent is in full force through the gun test. Its return is clearly brought on by his shaking nerves. I kind of get it right? Like, I can hear my own Louisiana lilt reappear when my emotions are heightened. 

But every time I hear Knoxville’s twang get twangier, I wonder if he meant to let it go. I would never accuse him of burying it on purpose, after all, he named himself after his hometown, but I do think about what an oddity he was. And it’s not like he was divorced from his Southern identity in his fame. In an old interview about his self-inflicted game of Russian roulette, skateboarder Jeff Grosso talked about how he waited months for the video to hit Big Brother’s VHS releases “because this fucking weird dude from Tennessee shoots himself.” Johnny Knoxville is pretty impossible to separate from his home. So why does it feel bad? And why do I keep thinking about Jason Isbell?

Johnny Knoxville is a Southern folk hero. He was born out of desperation. He is charismatic and handsome. He launches himself out of canons. He feeds himself to dangerous animals. He has been gravely injured but always recovers. He surrounds himself with other obnoxious, but brave, men like himself. Johnny Knoxville balances a thin line between reality and fiction. He’s both a myth and a man.

He's the perfect example of Isbell's observations on Southern men.

they ain't give us trouble before that we ain't brought down on ourselves

The first song I brought up in this essay was “Decoration Day,” the near-ballad about Isbell’s real-life family blood feud. This is a song about bitter violence and about mulling over vengeance. Not necessarily a Jackass-ian comparison on the surface but I see Knoxville in it. 

Look at where Jackass came from. In a 2001 Playboy interview with Knoxville just says it: “This is my attempt to emulate my father.”

The interview goes on to an aside: “Clapp fils is not sure he lives up to the old man's expectations. Not that he isn't trying.” 

That’s right. While it might seem like just a TV show compiling the Biggest Assholes You Know lighting their heads on fire or barfing on each other, it's literally Knoxville’s way of connecting to his father. Which brings me to the “Decoration Day” of it all. Much like the narrator of the song, Isbell’s interpretation of a grieving and vengeful Calvin Lawson, Knoxville is living up to the big personality of his father — embroiled in this bizarre pranking ritual because it's the environment he grew up in. 

Knoxville has talked about his home environment a lot, it’s something he clearly loved. His dad, Philip, owned a tire shop, but pranking was his real passion. Philip Clapp was a professional prankster: from sending friends fake letters from STD clinics, to gross pranks like tricking people into drinking laxative milkshakes, to dangerous pranks like staging a gunfight at Christmas. Sound familiar? 

His stuntman career was genetic. Like the Lawson son contemplating living up to his father’s legacy in Isbell’s imagination, Knoxville did the same. After denying his destiny, he finally turned to the career he was almost born and trained to do when his other options weren’t panning out. 

As the prodigal son of pranking, Knoxville built the whole series around the dynamic he saw between his dad’s social circle. He recruited his friends as fellow stuntmen and pranksters like his dad’s friend group and he ran the entire gambit on styles of pranking, ranging from annoying to gross to full-on stunts. It’s under these conditions that Jackass originated. But it all truly began when Knoxville, with his Tennessee accent biting through his sentence, said the fated, but effortlessly inviting words. “Hi I’m Johnny Knoxville. Welcome to Jackass!” 

Beyond contending with Jackass' origin story, there’s also contending with Jackass itself. Which is, as established, personal to Knoxville and his family and his remembrance of his father. So like all good Southern tales, Jackass is ultimately a revenge story.

Revenge comes in both short-term and long-term ways throughout Knoxville’s franchise. Short-term revenge is simply the premise of the project, to regularly inflict pain on each other. Ex: Dave England inviting Steve-O to eat the vomit omelet in the TV show. Bam Margera sneaking fireworks in his parents’ bedroom in Jackass the Movie. Chris Pontius sticking a fish hook through Steve-O’s cheek in Jackass Number Two. Knoxville torturing Margera in a snake pit in Jackass 3D. England pogo-ing on Danger Ehren McGhehey in Jackass Forever. However, sometimes these moments turn spiteful or angry. England was purposefully making Steve-O sick with the vomlette and Knoxville’s consistent fear-based torment of Margera broke the rules of engagement. While some tense moments are over in a second, others seethe and worsen. Nowhere is the second form of revenge, long-term, more clear than the arc from the TV show to Jackass 3D.

The show begins with its lo-fi origins, the crew didn’t even meet really until the second season, they all just submitted their ideas and went back to whatever jobs they had before taping. The show was a hit. So, fueled by the momentum, Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville film the entire rest of the show at once, packaging groups of vaguely related episodes as seasons ready for MTV’s coveted Sunday night slot. 

The pop culture obsession was instant. While some crew members quickly become household names, they largely experience fame together in these early years — the red carpet treatment, celebrity intrigue, and public interest. Then came Jackass: The Movie in 2002, a box office smash hit. The Jackass pandemonium didn’t stop and the time between Jackass the Movie and Jackass Number Two is marked by hugely successful TV spin-offs like Wildboyz and Viva La Bam. But the party had to end and between Jackass Number Two and Jackass 3D, it all shifted. The paparazzi, high-profile dating lives, alcohol, and drugs that seemed so glamorous were suddenly dangerous.

In Steve-O’s book, Professional Idiot: A Memoir, which I read all of, he describes the shooting of Jackass Number Two as a relief but says the premiere was like attending his funeral. At the time there was a mutual feeling that this would be the last Jackass installment and that their stardom was all burning out. He literally pissed on the red carpet over his anger that his fame could soon be fading. 

After Jackass Number Two, another box office blowout, the crew was permanently on uneven ground. Knoxville’s celebrity was cemented and director Jeff Tremaine’s career was guaranteed, but everyone else was stuck fighting for the limited attention span the world had for those guys from that one gross show.

Eventually, after marriages, divorces, and rehab, Jackass 3D was greenlit. This movie installment was released a decade after the show was originally picked up. Meaning that on top of the various states of wellbeing everyone was in, there were also 10 years of pranks, injuries, threats, and tension to reconcile with while on the set. As much as the crew does seem like a family, their relationships splintered, and ultimately, rivalries grew.

So in 3D, a storyline begins to thread through the franchise as external unchecked and hardly checked fame clash and internal resentment towards each other plays out in stunts. The brotherhood of the project frays over time and pranks become revenge. Stunts that previously would have gotten a laugh, instead end in a fight. Jokes that meant nothing in their original form became insults a decade later. I am obviously just speculating as a frequent viewer and fansite reader but it is hard to ignore how the crew seems to split up and take sides, furious with each other, while Knoxville stands at the center, sailor cap cocked, orchestrating it all. 

So, in “Decoration Day,” — yup, I am going to connect this all. Hang on. So, in “Decoration Day,” Isbell sings from the perspective of Calvin Lawson, not a Hill, despite being on the Hill side of the feud. In the comments section of the full story I linked above, real Lawson family members (in this case, we will assume they actually are family members, I believe these kinds of things) responded to the retelling and Isbell’s quotes with their perspective. These family members voiced an anger that Isbell (again, a Hill) took their family’s pain, made it his own, and cashed in on it while they still suffered from the aftermath of the violence. Isbell’s storytelling is sympathetic, often condemning his family’s crime, but at the end of it all, he is the one called an ingénue for his songwriting while the murder is ignored.

In Jackass, a similar dynamic forms, in which Knoxville is an affable, charismatic, beloved leader who also happens to profit off of the injuries of others. Let me be clear, Johnny Knoxville dishes it as much as he takes it, he didn't get those dozen concussions from nowhere and the sunglasses became a fashion staple because he was constantly hungover. But the truth remains that while he was meeting with executives and locking down Spike Jonze as a producer, Pontius didn't have a place to live. In Steve-O’s self-help book, A Hard Kick in the Nuts: What I've Learned from a Lifetime of Terrible Decisions, which I also read, he highlights the financial disparity (and popularity disparity) that still exists between the crew members and how some guys are always willing to do Jackass (for cash) while the actual people who can decide if they will, like Knoxville, are less willing (since they don’t need the money). 

Knoxville’s celebrity is self-made in that he was a nobody from Tennessee, but it's also reliant on both his family legacy and his friends’ willingness for violence against each other and their own bodies. It’s contemporary folklore. 

don't tell them you're bigger than jesus, don't give it away

The second song I talked about was “Outfit,” the goodbye Isbell’s dad gave him while he was on the precipice of stardom. It’s a tragic song. It begs but doesn’t plead, firm in its suggestions. Ultimately it is just autobiographical, but it’s common enough in its core that I think of PJ Clapp and his father, Philip Clapp, who he was named after, and I think about Johnny Knoxville’s characterization of Southern masculinity. 

The song starts off straightforward, Isbell recalls how his father told him to go explore his own life by comparing it to the monotony of his own, “You want to grow up to paint houses like me, A trailer in my yard till you're twenty three.” While it’s a familiar description of blue-collar work, it's made to seem life-consuming and gently mocking, like Isbell’s father is finally revealing to his son that his life has sucked or something. It reminds me of Philip Clapp’s tire shop in Tennessee vs PJ Clapp’s acceptance to an arts school in California. 

Later lyrics compare the phases of life Isbell’s father has experienced, the life-changing and the dull. But the whole time, he encourages Isbell to leave and not look back. To know that he has this paternal support. 

Don't call what you're wearing an outfit, don't ever say your car is broke / Don't sing with a fake British accent, don't act like your family's a joke / Have fun, but stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister's birthday.

This advice is the lyricism I once thought was too pandering. Now, I hear them and think about how many Southerners I know experienced something similar, how it’s not pandering, just common advice. How regional folklore highlights violence in Southern men and obsesses over the paternal lines in a family. Anyway, Knoxville lived this song.

PLAYBOY: Were the citizens of Tennessee relieved when you headed to the West Coast?

KNOXVILLE: They were very supportive of me when I moved out to Los Angeles, but they were just waiting for me to make the move and then come back. For the first five or six years my mom and dad kept my room exactly as 1 had left it. My father and I packed my belongings into this Suzuki Samurai and drove for three days: Motel 6s and truck-stop food-casseroles with Cheez-Its crumbled on top. We almost perished around Kingman, Arizona. A big piece of construction equipment rolled out into the middle of the inter-state, and we had to veer off onto the grass. Dad actually flew out and drove back to Tennessee with me a couple months later when I ran out of dough. I worked for a few months to make money and, once again, he drove out to LA with me. We made the trip three times. God bless him for that.

While the internal dynamic of the song is applicable to Knoxville, so is the content of the lyrics, namely the pertinent reminder, “don't act like your family's a joke.” Because, essentially, on one hand of Southern celebrity, Isbell warned about mistreating his identity and on the other, Clapp decided to treat his Southerness as a long-running joke, enter: Johnny Knoxville. 

It’s clear that Johnny Knoxville loves his home. Why else would he own and wear a full Tennessee Vols uniform to a stunt without the Vols? It’s a hilarious costume from the Punt Return stunt in season 2 of Jackass. One that acknowledges his bad taste in SEC football teams and recalls his home. But not all of his jokes are as supportive of his home as this.

The South is a complicated place. Everyone knows this. The region is beleaguered by centuries of racism and decades of government negligence as well as in constant company with its violent history. A vicious hatred is woven into the fabric of the region, but so is a homegrown resistance. Part of solidifying a Southern identity is deciding when to be funny and when to be serious. I get it, jokes about the South are constant and the material is endless but there are some aspects of the region’s history that I find impossible to make light of; and playing into stereotypes of the racist white Southerner is rarely a solution and more likely causing problems with how your identity is interpreted.

At the exact same time Isbell was weighing the morality of the South in the new millennium, Knoxville was wearing an Evel Knievel-style Confederate flag on his helmet and starring in Dukes of Hazzard. I think both of these things are pretty pathetic interpretations of his home. It’s as simple as this: it truly doesn’t matter what he wanted to get out of these bits if he ultimately was just perpetuating the South’s history with racism and its assumed alignment with violence.

Back to Isbell’s solemn reminder to not “act like your family’s a joke.” This line has always stung personally. But I also see it in Knoxville’s actions. I don’t think he was embarrassed by his Tennessee identity, again, I wouldn’t accuse someone of that, but I think he was too comfortable capitalizing ideas about the South’s backwardness for an audience who would never care about the nuances. 

Since then, Knoxville has retired these loser-antics and instead rarely mentioned his home again. After all, he has lived in California longer than he lived in the holler. He never apologized either, opting to let this version of himself associated with the South’s darkest reality fade away. 

Over two decades in stardom, Knoxville is still upholding Isbell's lyric in “Outfit,” “don't worry about losing your accent.” Said like someone who has watched hundreds of hours of Jackass and its affiliates, Johnny Knoxville rarely lets his Southern accent fully escape anymore. Sure, he has a twang. He pronounces Jackass with a loud emphasis on the “ACK” sound, the same way I do. When he’s dropping snakes onto Bam, he says his name like “b-AY-m.” But watching the franchise, you can hear how it flattens over time. 

In the earliest episodes, before Knoxville was a true TV personality, his accent is thick. His gravelly voice cuts g’s off of -ings and he runs his sentences together. He overemphasizes the “O” in Steve-O like he’s an SEC coach calling a play, and when he tries to get sprayed by a skunk, he almost sounds like Boomhauer in King of the Hill. He generally speaks slowly, that Tennessee sweetness still coursing through his consonants and vowels. It's the same accent my family has. 

As two high-profile Southern projects from the same complicated time, I have been stuck in this friction between the two — Knoxville’s family-fueled but outdated Jackass antics and Isbell’s self-inflicted obsession with building a better, more cohesive South by hand (even if misguided at times) through the Drive-By Truckers. 

So I was away from home this winter, stuck inside, surrounded by the ice and snow, and it clearly weighed on me. Obviously, if I spent months trying to piece together pop culture conceptions of the South 20 years ago. 

I don’t remember this time and wouldn’t remember the feeling, but it’s the background I grew up in front of and so I need to understand it. I don’t know. I wish I was home. I also think I might try a Jackass stunt in my free time. But only if my friend is up for filming me.