Episode 3 - Flags and Myths

Episode 4 is the legacy episode — the beautiful parts and the complicated parts both. How "classic rock" radio (AOR → tested song libraries c.1980) froze a handful of songs and shrank the genre to a postcard. The "Free Bird" meme and "Sweet Home Alabama" as shorthand. Then the hard center: the Confederate-flag controversy, handled through the host's honest first-person reckoning — wearing one at 12 as "rebel"/love-of-the-music, learning what it carries (the battle flag vs. the CSA flag, the civil-rights-era revival, the 1861 cornerstone statement), and landing on the music, not the symbols. The "long-haired country boy" myth vs. the genre's real diversity (Jaimoe, the Black blues roots). And the bridge forward: Petty, Seger, Americana, modern country — plus Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera and "the duality of the Southern thing" as the master class.