Sputnik Monroe, Patterson Hood and the Duality of the Southern Thing

Apr 23, 2026

Hello!

We’ve released two episodes since the last newsletter, and they’re both connected in a way. The first is about a rebellious and crusading wrestler named Sputnik Monroe. The second is an interview with Patterson Hood, co-founder of the band Drive-By Truckers whose songwriting has been a big inspiration for this show.

It was Patterson who first told me about Sputnik. In the early 60s, through a combination of benevolence and self-promotional zeal, Sputnik managed to desegregate the Ellis Auditorium, the biggest arena in Memphis at the time. He later toured the South as part a rare interracial tag team with a Black wrestler named Norvell Austin.

Patterson was drawn to Sputnik’s story and tried to write a song about him for years. But he never pulled it off. When we spoke, he offered to try and dig up some outtakes from an old hard drive. This would allow us to tell the story of Sputnik through different versions of an unreleased Drive-By Truckers song by Patterson Hood! The inherent (and wildly time-consuming) challenges of such a story structure for a weekly narrative podcast were overshadowed by the opportunity to hear one of my favorite musicians muse on his creative process while intercutting different versions of a Truckers song no one except his bandmates has ever heard.

This may be the best episode we ever do, I thought.

But Patterson never found the recordings.

So we split the difference. I found three great talkers — Jerry Phillips, son of the legendary rock and roll producer Sam Phillips; writer and filmmaker Robert Gordon, who wrote the book It Came From Memphis; and wrestling historian Steve Johnson, who probably knows more about the history of wrestling heels than anyone alive — and did our own episode about Sputnik.

I then interviewed Patterson — remotely — at his home in Portland, Oregon, as he sipped a cup of tea in his sun-drenched living room. His own life and evolution (he grew up in Florence, AL, as the son of David Hood, a bassist for the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, aka The Swampers) was so interesting we didn’t even touch on his failure to write that Sputnik Monroe song.

I hope you enjoy them.

Jed

P.S. After the Sputnik episode came out, a listener graciously informed me that, back in 2017, the musician Otis Gibbs beat Patterson to the punch and released a song titled, simply, Sputnik Monroe. It’s good!

P.P.S. You may recall our recent two-parter about Operation Sideswipe, the bizarre car insurance scam in New Orleans. One of my favorite writers, Patrick Radden Keefe (whose riveting new book, London Falling, just came out), recently published a big piece about it for The New Yorker. He was present for Vanessa Motta’s fraud trial and the story includes all sorts of crazy details I hadn’t heard before. Check it out here.

This is the second time in recent months that the old New Yorker has published a long narrative about a story we here at Gone South got to months earlier. (See “The Man Who Broke Into Jail” back in March.) I can’t say whether the folks at the NYer are listening to pod, but I will say they have great taste.