Sweet Home Alabama (film)
Melanie, in her wedding gown in the rain, finds Jake planting lightning rods in the beach to create more sand sculptures. She tells him they are still married, and as they kiss, sheriff Wade "arrests" them and takes them to Jake's mother's bar where their friends and family are waiting. They finally get their first dance as husband and wife, to the tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama." A mid-credits sequence shows that they have a daughter, Melanie continues to thrive as a designer and Jake opens a "Deep South Glass" franchise in New York. Andrew is engaged to marry a girl named Erin Vanderbilt.Although centered in a fictional version of the town of Pigeon Creek, near a fictional version of Greenville, Alabama, the film was mostly shot in Georgia. The Carmichael Plantation, which Melanie tells the reporter is her childhood home, is the Oak Hill Berry Museum, a historic landmark in Georgia which is on the campus of Berry College in Rome, Georgia.
Alabama (American band)
Alabama was formed by guitarists Randy Owen and Jeff Cook, and bassist Teddy Gentry, three cousins born and raised near Fort Payne, Alabama, an area with strong country music roots. Owen and Gentry grew up on separate cotton farms on Lookout Mountain (a plateau that stretches across northeastern Alabama, through northwest Georgia and into Tennessee), learning guitar together and singing in church before the age of six. Gentry and Owen played in numerous groups during the 1960s, ranging from pop to bluegrass. Cook joined the band in 1969 forming the group Young Country, which first jammed together around Christmas. Cook also played in numerous bands and was a rock and roll disk jockey. The three cousins all shared vocal duties, with another cousin, drummer Jackie Owen, completing the group's first lineup. The band's first performance was at a high school talent contest (playing a Merle Haggard song), for which they won first prize and tickets to the Grand Ole Opry. Despite this, all were busy with prior commitments to pursue music: Owen still in high school, Cook working for Western Electric, and Gentry laying carpets full-time. The band grew further inactive when Cook went to college and Owen into the military.