Songfacts®:

• Hootie & the Blowfish lead singer Darius Rucker takes on racism in this song, where he sings about those with "hatred trying to hide your fears." He's a proud native of South Carolina but had a hard time dealing with the state's regressive attitude toward race - it was the last state to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a paid holiday, for example.
  
  Rucker is Black but his three bandmates are white, and the band makes the kind of smoothed-out rock music that draws a predominately white audience. This put him in a lot of places, like certain golf courses and fraternity houses, where he was a rare minority, and he had some ugly encounters along the way.
• In the first verse, Rucker sings about how South Carolina flies the Confederate flag at the state capitol building:
  
  Why is there a rebel flag hanging from the state house walls?
  Tired of hearin' this s--t about heritage not hate
  
  South Carolina was one of the Confederate states in the US Civil War, fighting to keep slavery legal. The Confederate flag went up at the capitol in 1961 to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the start of the Civil War. State leaders claimed it was part of their "heritage" and should be celebrated. Most Black citizens disagreed, seeing it as a symbol of segregation and slavery.
  
  Over the years, there were efforts to get the flag removed, but they weren't successful until 2015, when it finally came down. When Rucker wrote this song, it was still flying high and very much an issue.
  
  "If I didn't love South Carolina so much and if I didn't love my friends and family, I would never live there 'cause the government is absolutely asinine," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, the South Carolina government can all go to hell."
• "Drowning" first appeared on an EP called Time that Hootie & the Blowfish released independently in 1991. All of the songs on the EP (the others are "Time," "Running From An Angel," and "Let Her Cry") ended up on their 1994 debut album, Cracked Rear View in far more polished form. By the time the band recorded the album, the songs had been throughly tested on the road and tweaked accordingly.
  
  "What better test market do you have but to get up with no pretension or anything in front of a group of people who have paid $3 to get in a bar and play that song and watch how they react?" the band's drummer Jim Sonefeld told Songfacts. "All these songs that ended up on Cracked Rear View in '94 had been played hundreds of times in front of people."
• Nanci Griffith's 1989 song "It's a Hard Life Wherever You Go" gets a mention in the lines:
  
  Nanci singing it's a hard life wherever you go
  About some fat racist living in Chicago
  
  In that song, Griffith sings:
  
  A cafeteria line in Chicago
  The fat man in front of me
  Is calling Black people trash to his children