Beer signs, backroads, and a barroom handshake: Kid Rock and Hank Williams Jr. throw down on “Redneck Paradise”.
Late 2012, Kid Rock is back in self-produced mode with Rebel Soul, cutting a Southern-rock shuffle called “Redneck Paradise”. The song didn’t start in his camp—it was written years earlier by the Young Brothers (Eric and Jason) and sent his way, a postcard from small-town nights he knows by instinct. On the album, he leans into it with Twisted Brown Trucker’s loose swing and a grin that says he’s describing a place as real as a map.
The twist arrived a few months later. In 2013 he revisited the track as a duet with Hank Williams Jr., turning a solo strut into a back-porch conversation. The remix tightens the low end and clears space for Bocephus to bark and laugh his way through the verses—two voices trading stories over a swampy groove, more neighborly than combative. It’s less crossover than cross-pollination: Kid Rock’s rock/hip-hop twang finding easy common ground with Hank’s honky-tonk bite. The single landed that summer, framed as its own release rather than just an album cut redux.
The video keeps that energy local. After a scheduled shoot popped up in Alabama, the crew rolled into Troy and lit the Double Branch Lounge like a postcard: neon tubes, wood paneling, friends packed shoulder to shoulder. Director Eric Welch shoots it like a night that didn’t need dressing—longneck bottles, call-and-response on the chorus, two headliners comfortable enough to share the center of the frame. No plot, no gloss, just the room doing what the room does.
What sells “Redneck Paradise” isn’t mythology so much as detail: porch steps and tailgates, a bass line that idles like a pickup, Hank’s baritone landing like a punchline. Onstage it slides into the set as a crowd-pleaser—easy to shout, easy to play, built for festival sun. Critics were cool on the album’s throwback streak, but the song’s second life with Hank turned it into a regional favorite and a reminder that Kid Rock’s happiest place is still a bar band with the mics turned up.
As part of Rebel Soul’s run, the track underlines what that record tried to do: tip a cap to country and blues without losing the Detroit backbeat. The Young Brothers’ seed of an idea grew into a traveling snapshot—first a Kid Rock vignette, then a friendly duet that sounds like it’s been sung on porches long before the cameras showed up.
Musicians:
Kid Rock — lead vocal; guitars; arrangement
Hank Williams Jr. — lead vocal (remix/single version)
Twisted Brown Trucker — backing band on album version Produced by Kid Rock; remix released as a standalone single featuring Hank Williams Jr.; video directed by Eric Welch (shot at Double Branch Lounge, Troy, Alabama).
