Songfacts®:

• Set in the weary landscape of Depression-era America, The Drive-By Truckers' "My Sweet Annette" tells the haunting story of a groom who deserts his fiancée at the altar. After a single night walking the maid of honor home, he elopes with her - Annette's best friend, Marilee.
• Patterson Hood wrote the lyrics, with music credited to The Drive-By Truckers. Hood drew on family history for the story's Depression-era scenario but shaped it through a deeply personal lens. "In 2000, we were all going through really rough patches in our relationships," he explained to Uncut magazine. "I wrote 'My Sweet Annette' based on family folklore, in the parking lot of a venue in Dayton. I wrote from the POV of the asshole who left her, out of my own guilt from my divorce."
  
  The groom's unflinching self-condemnation - "Lord have mercy for what we done" - reflects that guilt channeled into a character set nearly 70 years in the past.
• The period around Hood's divorce was a creatively explosive one. Personal turmoil often has that effect on songwriters; Bob Dylan had his Blood on the Tracks era, and the Truckers had this. Hood couldn't stop writing songs during this period of personal turmoil, describing it to Salvation South as a "very fertile time."
• "My Sweet Annette" appears on the 2003 album Decoration Day, the band's fifth. The record was produced by David Barbe and recorded at Chase Park Transduction Studios. Most of the album was tracked live over about two weeks, with seven of the 15 songs coming from first takes.
• The following musicians augmented the core Drive-By Truckers lineup:
  
  John Neff: pedal steel
  Scott Danbom: fiddle
  Clay Leverett: high harmony
  
  Neff is a founder member of The Truckers, playing guitar and pedal steel guitar for the group until 2012. The country instrumentation, pedal steel and fiddle, gives the song a plaintive, old-timey quality that perfectly suits its 1930s setting.
• Decoration Day was the first Truckers album to feature on guitar Jason Isbell, who'd joined the band in late 2001 and contributed two songs, including the title track.
• The album reflects a two-year period of turmoil following Southern Rock Opera.
  
  "By 2000, our home relationships were failing, I was beginning a painful divorce, we were in the thick of recording Southern Rock Opera without any money, and relations within the band were coming apart," Hood reflected in Uncut. "The majority of Decoration Day was written that year, on the road."
  
  Hood summed up the album's theme on the band's website as a meditation on "choices, good and bad, right and wrong, and the consequences of those choices."
  
  "My Sweet Annette" embodies that: the groom makes a ruinous choice and lives with it, voice intact but conscience shredded.
• The Decoration Day album was originally targeted by Lost Highway Records, who wanted to release a trimmed version that excluded all Mike Cooley songs. The band refused, bought the album back, and released the full 15-track version through New West Records, a decision that has only been vindicated with time.
• "My Sweet Annette" has been a staple of the band's live sets since its release, including a notable performance with Lydia Loveless in April 2023 and a live acoustic version included on The Definitive Decoration Day box set recorded at Flicker Bar in Athens, Georgia on June 20, 2002.