Songfacts®:

• "Decoration Day" by Drive-By Truckers is about a feud between the Hill family and the Lawson family. The song's from the perspective of James Calvin Lawson, whose father met his maker in 1982, courtesy of the Hill family down the road. According to James Calvin, it was a well-deserved dirt nap. Apparently, Dad Lawson dragged James Calvin and his brothers into this whole mess, and James Calvin holds a grudge that would make a camel look positively chipper.
  
  Their passionate intergenerational feud has gone on so long that few can remember why such hatred exists between them. James Calvin admits the only reason he's on the side of the Lawsons is because of birth. Swap him at birth, stick him with the Hills, and he'd likely be singing the same vengeful tune, just aimed at a different set of polyester nightmares. It's all so gloriously petty, isn't it? Like fighting over who gets the burnt end of the brisket at a family reunion that makes Chernobyl look like a spa weekend.
• The title itself, "Decoration Day" (an older term for Memorial Day), just adds to the whole morbid Southern Gothic charm.
• Turns out, the whole Lawson-Hill dustup isn't fictional, as reported by The Times Daily newspaper of Lauderdale, Alabama on March 27, 1984.
• Jason Isbell wrote the song just three days after joining Drive-By Truckers while touring in support of Southern Rock Opera. "I'd written songs and recorded demos for the publishing company at FAME studio in muscle shoals but 'Outfit' and 'Decoration Day' were their first songs I wrote that anybody had heard," he told Uncut magazine.
  
  "I wrote 'Decoration Day' on the first your I did with the band. I woke up in Carbondale, Illinois, one morning before everybody else. We had one person sleeping in the van to make sure nobody broke in and stole the equipment. I didn't know that if you woke up early, you were allowed to come in the house. I was scared that if I went in the house, somebody would shoot me, so I sat on the porch and wrote that song. I played it for Earl (Hicks), our bass player, and he didn't like it at all, but I waited for Paterson (Hood) to get up and then played it for him."
• "Decoration Day" deals with elements of southern folklore, a Truckers' trademark. "I was trying to write something that would fit that band," said Isbell. "Their mission statement, not that Paterson [Hood] ever said this but as it occurred to me, was they took jokes and stereotypes about the South and fleshed them into reality, emphasizing with what had been a punchline. That was what I set out to do with songs I wrote for them. Having three song writers was a strange idea dash the whole concept of that band did not make sense on paper, but it worked for some time. I've never been in another band with three songwriters. I don't think many people have."
• "Decoration Day" is the title track of Truckers' fifth album. The album was recorded mostly live with their longtime producer David Barbe over two weeks at Chase Park Transduction Studios, in Athens, Georgia.
• Decoration Day was the first of three Drive-By Truckers albums where Jason Isbell played guitar; he would record two more albums with the band before jumping ship in 2007 to pursue a solo career.