Deep roots: Muscle Shoals, Alabama / Roots: Athens, Georgia / Current homes: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Oregon

We know we’re homers for DBT, but we must point out that they’ve released two other albums since we began the BS in 2013, neither of which approached the top of this list. This time, though ... this time is different. Drive-By Truckers, in their 20th year as a band, made the best record of their lives and their boldest statement. While planning for The Bitter Southerner’s upcoming music column, I played “What It Means” for Dr. Joycelyn Wilson, an honest-to-god professor of hip-hop who will write that column periodically for us. She heard these lyrics: “If you say it wasn't racial when they shot him in his tracks / Well, I guess that means that you ain't black, it means that you ain't black / I mean, Barack Obama won and you can choose where to eat / But you don't see too many white kids lying bleeding on the street.” Joyce said, “I’m going to teach that in my class next semester.” I replied, “But it isn’t hip-hop.” She replied, “Yes, it is.” Ah, yes, I thought. Subject matter trumps musical style. So, there you have it, DBT. You officially recorded a hip-hop song. The heart of this record is two North Alabama boys — Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley — finally getting completely fed up with Southern kinsman who defend a racist flag. “American Band” gave those folks a very loud piece of their minds, and the band followed it up on tour by hanging a Black Lives Matter banner on the side of Jay Gonzalez’s Hammond organ. As Cooley puts it in “Surrender Under Protest,” the album’s most powerful song, “Does the color really matter on the face you blame for failure, on the shamin' for a battle's losing cause? / If the victims and aggressors just remain each other’s ‘others,’ and the instigators never fight their own?” This album is another teaching tool. It’s a record that many Southerners will hear and check themselves. And maybe, it’s a record that will reach those who feel like “others," and they will learn about the many other Southerners out there who stand with them.