All I Can Do Is Write About It

Protest songs lie a little. Not about the wrong they name — about the odds. The form pretends that naming the wrong and raising the voices moves the needle, that singing loud enough changes things, and the implication hangs over every verse whether the singer believes it or not.

In 1976, Lynyrd Skynyrd put out a protest song that refuses the pretense, and the refusal starts in the title. All I Can Do Is Write About It. That’s not a hook. That’s a man stating his terms of surrender before the fight is over.

Ronnie Van Zant watched the South he loved get paved over and parceled out — the forests cleared, the rivers dammed, the old ways disappearing — and he understood that he was not going to stop any of it. The one thing left to him was the thing he was good at, so the song is named for it. This was before most people were talking about environmental destruction at all, before “think globally, act locally” became a bumper sticker. There was no movement handing him this language. He just looked at what was happening to Florida and reported it.

It is not the Lynyrd Skynyrd anyone expected. No triple-guitar attack, no swagger. The band that cranked out “Saturday Night Special” and “Workin’ for MCA” — barroom songs they could have kept making forever — set all of that down for five minutes, and Van Zant stopped to ask what was actually worth fighting for. The answer he came back with wasn’t fame and wasn’t fortune. It was the pines and the dirt roads and the way things used to be.

Here is where the song earns the claim. It’s an elegy, not a rallying cry. Van Zant knows the developers will win. He knows the old-timers will die, and he knows their grandchildren won’t remember what the land looked like before the strip malls. He doesn’t argue with any of that, and he doesn’t promise anybody a victory he can’t deliver. The angry version would have been easy to write, and the angry version lies a little too, because anger implies the outcome is still open. This version tells the truth: the outcome is not open.

The arrangement knows what the words know. Mostly acoustic, gentle, almost a lullaby — not the sound of a band trying to win an argument, the sound of a band saying goodbye. When the electric guitars finally come in, they don’t arrive in triumph. They’re mournful. They grieve along with the rest of it.

And the song asks almost nothing of you. Not action, not guilt. It asks you to look at something on its way out, while it’s still there to look at — the most modest ambition a song can have, and the part that holds up, because it’s the part that was true. Van Zant couldn’t save what he loved, so he did the smaller, harder thing: he made a record of what was being lost, so that it was at least seen by somebody before it went.