This is a map of every location mentioned in a Drive-By Truckers song so far. I am a huge fan of their music, but the motivation for creating this map goes beyond personal fandom.

I believe in the importance of mapping people’s stories to better understand them. Everything that happens, every culture and philosophy, is partially influenced by its geographical surroundings. I believe that it is critical to name the places that you’re talking about, as specifically as possible, thereby highlighting what is unique about them and resisting the forces of capitalist homogenization. Drive-By Truckers have done that for the much-maligned and misunderstood American South ever since their first album, focusing mostly on the Shoals region and Birmingham.

“Puttin’ People on the Moon” is a great song because it shows the divergent fates of Huntsville and Sheffield in the 1980s rather than painting the region as a homogeneous “South.” Likewise, “What It Means” is powerful because it shows the geographic ubiquity of police killings in America, from Ferguson to “right here on Ruth Street [in Athens, Georgia].”

This map is limited by the songs themselves, which are written from a white Southern perspective, and are fairly US-centric. Foreign countries (Iraq, Japan) show up only as battle sites. A black geography, an immigrant geography, a queer geography of the same region would yield very different maps. I don’t consider this a weakness, but I would recommend supplementing this map with Adnan Rasool’s map of Atlanta hip hop and numerous others.