Marking the 25th anniversary week of Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley’s musical partnership, it’s a Friday Factory Tune with the word “factory” actually in it. The Drive-By Truckers once again report on them Southern boys, in this case the members of Lynyrd Skynryd, just trying to get out of town. They rejected life in the factory, specifically a Ford factory. Auto manufacturing has changed since then, as President Obama attested at a Ford factory yesterday.

DBT took a break from warming up for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to play the 9:30 Club in D.C. last month. It was a pretty good show, and you could definitely see how they have developed a loyal following of Southern boys (and girls) who romanticize about being alienated in small-town Alabama back in the ’70s. Best of the genre, “Zip City,” which not only mentions Reynolds Aluminum in Sheffield, Ala., but ends with Cooley’s description of a driving life considered:

Zip City it’s a good thing that they built a wall around you
Zip up to Tennessee then zip back down to Alabama
I got 350 heads on a 305 engine
I get ten miles to the gallon
I ain’t got no good intentions

Thank goodness for auto factories.

DBT allows people to record their shows, and you can hear the 9:30 Club performance at archive.org here.

In light of the White House-Congress-Big Labor deal to give unions an exemption from the excise tax on “Cadillac health plans,” we wanted to post the Drive By Truckers doing “Carl Perkins Cadillac,” but the quality is poor. Instead, here’s Bulldozers and Dirt (with a little bit of off-color language).

And here’s DBT’s Patterson Hood doing “George Jones Talking Cell Phone Blues,” which should appropriately be the theme song for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s alliance with activists groups to ban cell phone use in cars. Seriously. It’s a campaign of full-blown prohibition.