It’s probably best that Patterson Hood never finished his screenplay. Back in the late 1990s, Hood’s band, the Drive-by Truckers, were close to calling it quits; hoping to go out with a bang, they took the unfinished movie script Hood had been working at for years, about a fictional band based loosely on the biography of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and translated it into Southern Rock Opera, a wild two-disc sort-of concept album that made the Truckers into a Great White Hope.

It’s not just that Southern Rock Opera saved the Drive-by Truckers and paved the way for the equally admired (and better-distributed) follow-up albums Decoration Day and The Dirty South. Having the story told as a rock record instead of a screenplay or novel probably kept Hood from following his own worst creative instincts and writing it all down.

On the page, Hood comes off as the worst kind of Southern writer – nostalgic, reactionary, obsessed with the idea of Southernness as a very real condition, like an extra limb, that’s both a gift from God and a curse. Hood’s defensive about his home region, and masks his provincial insecurities with white-trash bravado.

His liner notes and song commentary – he’s written thousands of words for CD inserts and the band’s Web page – read like bad college fiction modeled on Harry Crews. Worse, he’s a clumsy writer, relying on affected diction and cornball romanticism. (From the notes to The Dirty South: “Welcome to The Dirty South. It’s a tough place to make a living, but we ain’t complainin’, just doing what we got to do. Trying to raise our kids and love our women. Do right by the ones we love. … I’ll try not to fuck up too bad. Maybe I’ll live to tell the tale.”) He’s also condescending, a tone that’s probably somewhat inherent in a songwriter detailing what his songs are about. But it’s a tone that only rarely surfaces on record.

Not that a clear prose style has anything to do with quality rock and roll. Southern Rock Opera, Decoration Day and The Dirty South are, individually, among the best American rock albums of the last five years, and collectively a pretty breathtaking achievement. They’re intelligent, dense and allusive, and played with a righteous conviction that approaches the religious. But Hood seems to conceive of his band, in part, as a large-scale project for the reclamation of the mythology of the South.

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