Patterson Hood, a singer-songwriter who grew up steeped in music and seasoned by the South, will play a solo show at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 7, at the Vashon Theatre.

Hood is a co-founder of the Drive-by Truckers, a band that has occupied a prominent place in rock circles since the mid-1990s. But his lineage in music goes back to his childhood, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. His father, David Hood, plays bass for the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, a group of studio musicians who backed up such soul and R&B legends as The Staple Singers, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Bobby Womack and Etta James.

Patterson Hood’s own career has been defined by hard-driven rock music, though his catalog also includes searching, bluesy ballads. But more than anything else, he is known for writing songs from a uniquely Southern point of view that expresses the duality of the region’s prideful soul and shame.

Reached by phone by The Beachcomber, Hood said he was excited to come to Vashon. Audience members who have seen him perform with the Drive-by Truckers can expect something different from his solo show, he said.

“It will be way, way more intimate,” he said. “The band is a big, fun show — it’s a rollicking good time, even if some of the songs are kind of dark. But when I play solo, there is more storytelling, and I never use a set list — I’ve got a lot of songs to draw from, and I just go where the audience takes me.”

Through the years, Hood’s music has sometimes been pegged as southern rock, but he resists the label.

“That’s not what I listen to or what I do,” he said.

Still, the Drive-by Truckers are perhaps best known for one album in particular, “Southern Rock Opera,” a concept album set in the years between the rise of the Allman Brothers and the plane crash that killed several members of the band Lynard Skynard.

One of Hood’s songs on the album, “Ronnie and Neil,” recounts the legend of a friendship between Neil Young and Ronnie Van Zandt, who culture-warred in their respective songs, “Southern Man” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” Another Hood song, about George Wallace, paints a sympathetic portrait of the long-time governor of Alabama, but tellingly, it is told from the devil’s point of view.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times in 2015, Hood said he had tried to “capture both the Southern storytelling tradition and the details the tall tales left out, putting this dialectical narrative into the context of rock songs.” The essay goes on to detail his father’s contempt for racists, and his efforts to make music that “wrestled with how to be proud of where we came from while acknowledging and condemning the worst parts of our region’s history.”

The op-ed, titled “The South’s Heritage Is So Much More Than a Flag” and written in the wake of a mass shooting by a young white man at a Black church in South Carolina, went on to call for the removal of the Confederate flag from courthouses and state capitols throughout the South.

Hood and his longtime collaborator Mike Cooley founded The Drive-By Truckers in 1996, and the band has continued to tour and release albums. But now, Hood also tours as a duo with Cooley and as a solo act. On his most recent solo album, “Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance,” Hood’s studio band included his father.

In 2016, the Drive-by Truckers released its 11th studio album, “American Band,” which the New York Times described as being full of “left-leaning lyrics … stocked with tales about immigration and guns, blood and burning crosses.” On the band’s tour of the album, a sign proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” adorned the stage.

In his interview with The Beachcomber, Hood said he is currently putting the finishing touches on a new Drive-by Truckers album, set for release in January. He said that writing an album in the age of Trump — an era he called “a crazy, absurd time” — was difficult, but he felt he should not back down from some of the political themes he has become known for.

“It’s a hard time to put into words how I feel,” he said. “Trying to turn that into something musical that I or anybody else would want to hear was pretty challenging.”

Hood now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he moved with his wife and children at the age of 52, after never before living outside of Alabama and Georgia. The move, he said, didn’t give him culture shock, because Portland reminds him of Athens, Georgia, where his band is still based.

“Athens is a very progressive, artsy, music scene college town, it’s like a little Portland,” he said. “But Portland has a different climate I like a lot, it has different trees, and I like seeing Mount Hood in the distance, a block from my house.”

Hood’s show at the Vashon Theatre is another “get” for presenter Debra Heesch, who has brought many noteworthy national music acts to perform at island venues.

Advance tickets, $35 for the first four rows of the theater and $22 general admission, are on sale now at vashontheatre.com. All day-of-the-show tickets at the door (if any are left) are $25.