Patterson Hood is a prolific writer and performer whose character-driven stories are packed with political subtext. He is best known as front man, singer, songwriter and guitar player for the critically acclaimed rock and roll band Drive-By Truckers, but is also a writer of essays, columns, and short stories as well as a solo performer and producer. In the past few years, he has written an op-ed on the on-going controversies surrounding the confederate flag for The New York Times Magazine, a piece on Vic Chesnutt for The Oxford American's annual music issue, and retrospectives on David Bowie for American Songwriter and Merle Haggard for NPR. Most recently in October of 2016, Patterson published his first short story featured in "The Highway Kind," a car-themed crime fiction anthology.

Drive-By Truckers have released 14 studio albums and played well over 2,500 shows in the past twenty-eight years. They also released a 35-song, career-spanning box set in 2015 that was recorded live at The Fillmore in San Francisco. "Southern Rock Opera," Drive-By Truckers' best-known work, is a concept album that examines growing up in the post-civil rights South and something called "The Duality of the Southern Thing." Hood penned an article for The Bitter Southerner in 2013 titled "The New(er) South," and in it he revisits many of those same themes found on the record by giving a glimpse into his first 28 years of life in Alabama. "I grew up as a living part of the legacy of Muscle Shoals music," Hood says. His father, David Hood, co-founded Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and was a bassist in the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section, more casually known as "The Swampers."