Songwriter Ronnie Rogers, who previously had hits with Ed Bruce, Dave Dudley, Tanya Tucker and others, recalled to country music journalist Tom Roland that the idea for "Dixieland Delight" came to him when he was driving down Highway 11W, a road in Rutledge, Tennessee. The song's first line soon led into an image of the main character's other arm wrapped around his girlfriend and - with a long, hard work week at an end - envisioning a weekend of fun and relaxation with her. When Alabama recorded the song in 1982 for The Closer You Get, it differed substantially from the acoustic demo cut by Rogers.
Content
The song's title refers to the girlfriend of the singer. Later in the song, Rogers conjures up images of various forest animals and how they bring peace to him, before returning to how the main character plans to become intimate with his girlfriend during their weekend outing. The song picks up the tempo somewhat with a fiddlebridge before a reprisal of the refrain.
Released in January 1983, "Dixieland Delight" became Alabama's ninth No. 1 song on Billboard magazine's Hot Country Singles chart. To date, "Dixieland Delight" remains one of the group's most popular songs. The original album version was edited by nearly 1½ minutes for release as a single. The differences include:
Shorter fiddle bridges; the second one almost immediately goes into the final reprisal. Also, a slower guitar riff is edited out before the tempo picks up for the segue leading into the first fiddle bridge.
The single edit is included in several of Alabama's greatest hits collections, including For the Record. The full-length album version is included on the band's second greatest hits album.
Legacy
"Dixieland Delight" is one of Alabama's most enduring singles, and is closely associated with 1980s country music as a whole. The songe has been referenced in Brad Paisley's 2011 single "Old Alabama", by Midland in 2017's "Make a Little", and Russell Dickerson's 2017 hit "Every Little Thing". The song has become a fight song for the University of Alabama, played regularly at Crimson Tide home football games. The song was briefly dropped in 2015 after complaints about vulgar additions to the lyrics by some fans, but was reinstated three years later, with a plea from university officials to not sing the modified version. In 2018, the song's publishing rights—once owned by two different companies, but later solely reverted to Rogers—were sold to Downtown Music, a global independent rights management and music services company. Billboard columnist Tom Roland considered the deal unusual, citing it as a rare example of a single song deal. Roland noted that Downtown "expects to garner favorable placements and higher visibility by highlighting its attributes."
