If you lived in the American South during the last decades of the twentieth century, Dale Earnhardt was part of your life.

The new Amazon Prime mini docuseries Earnhardt has been an instant hit, telling the in-depth story of arguably the greatest NASCAR driver of all time. Drawing mostly on old footage of Earnhardt’s racing career and private life, combined with interviews with family and colleagues, the series offers the fullest picture to date of the iconic stock car driver.

We learn that Earnhardt knew nothing but racing from birth. Early in his career, he wanted desperately to impress his father, the NASCAR star Ralph Earnhardt. That father–son relationship would repeat in the next generation when Dale Earnhardt Jr. determinedly followed in his father’s footsteps even though Senior cut Junior no breaks.

The documentary captures how Earnhardt’s aggressive driving style earned him the nickname “the Intimidator,” instantly making him the bad boy of racing and the outlaw hero to fans.

With the help of his wife, Teresa, and later his daughter Kelley, the racing legend would build a company that branded his likeness on every kind of merchandise imaginable, a Disneyfication of the Earnhardt name unlike anything ever seen in NASCAR before or since.

This is fun stuff for viewers—especially NASCAR fans, who universally seem to love this series.

But if the series were just for NASCAR fans, I wouldn’t be writing this essay. Earnhardt is also about my own Southern experience and that of millions of Southerners of a certain age. I remember the time and culture in the documentary because I was almost completely immersed in that world for the first thirty years of my life.

I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1974. Earnhardt’s NASCAR career began in 1975. I didn’t grow up a NASCAR fan, per se. I went to three major track races as a teenager and followed the sport to the degree that some friends and family cared about it.

But my particular tastes are beside the point. NASCAR permeated Southern culture throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, rivaled only by college football. Stock car racing was to Southerners what the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox were to different sets of Northerners. If New Yorkers had Yankee Stadium and Bostonians had Fenway Park, Alabamians and Carolinians had Talladega and Darlington. These were not mere venues. They were shrines.

In Earnhardt, the footage takes viewers right back to that seemingly simpler time and ethos: fishing, hunting, big-haired girls, mullets, muscle shirts, and Oakley sunglasses. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company still sponsored the Winston Cup series. Few to none in 1987 thought twice about a cigarette company backing stock car racing’s biggest competition, which Earnhardt won seven times, a record he shares with fellow seven-time winners Richard Petty and Jimmie Johnson.

Earnhardt represented the South in his time. He wasn’t trying to, at least not at first, but he did.

Dale Earnhardt Sr. came from a racing family, to be sure, but with only an eighth-grade education and no help from his father, he earned his own place as one of the greatest in his field. Dale recalls his father telling him, “If you want to race cars, son, you have to do it yourself.” So that’s what he did. He started by buying a car from the junkyard that he and his friends fixed up for the track.

He was deeply driven to win his entire life and did so on his own terms. And the next generation followed him. In old footage, we see Dale Jr. palling around the track with his middle school friends in their NASCAR shirts and caps. These boys badly wanted to be men, in the way manhood was understood in that era.

They wanted to be Dale—all of them. A man of few words, who took no prisoners and had no pretense. Earnhardt was a good son, father, and husband. Though he had flaws—as his children acknowledge—he took his responsibilities as a man seriously and earned the respect of everyone around him: family, friends, and the pit crew.

But the macho aspect of Earnhardt’s legend is also on display in the docuseries. Dale Jr. recalls watching professional wrestling as a child—a feature of my childhood as well. Big, burly men making their own luck in a fantasy world. Characters from the ’70s and ’80s like Burt Reynolds’s Bandit from the Smokey and the Bandit movies and Bo and Luke Duke from The Dukes of Hazzard television series were the kinds of cowboys most little Southern boys wanted to be. They escaped the cops, got the girl, and looked cool doing it.

Dale Earnhardt was the real-life version of that—a symbol of masculinity, particularly Southern masculinity, in an American popular culture that was increasingly rejecting conventional manhood soon after his death in 2001.

But Earnhardt mythology was inescapable in the South back then. There were as many “3” car numbers on hats, shirts, car bumpers, phone booths, and diner walls as there were crosses. “Raise hell, praise Dale” became a folk slogan. His funeral was comparable to Elvis Presley’s (a comparison made in the documentary), where the vast outpouring of grief and public devotion from the public gave even Earnhardt’s family and inner circle a greater sense of just how much he had meant to the culture. They knew it before, but on that day they truly felt it. The widespread love for him went far beyond admiration for a top race car driver.

Earnhardt represented the South in his time. He wasn’t trying to, at least not at first, but he did.

Yet when Dale Earnhardt died during the 2001 Daytona 500, the New York Times headline read, “Stock Car Star Killed on Last Lap of Daytona 500.” His name didn’t even appear in the headline. While this isn’t mentioned in the documentary, it’s something I have always remembered. It was a reminder of the distance between the Times’s culture and mine.

There are other documentaries about Dale Earnhardt, but the Prime docuseries is in a league of its own. Kelley Earnhardt Miller told USA Today, “There’s been a few different documentaries and pieces done but I don’t think anything this comprehensive. A kind of human side of our dad, not the racer, not always the racer that people know. The father and the person and the friend and all that he was to people.”

I posted on Facebook how much I loved Earnhardt after watching the first episode. My aunt, who is a big NASCAR fan and has attended many races over the years, commented, “We finished it tonight. Some was hard to watch as we saw it in person.”

“Brought back good memories and some sad ones too,” she added.

Earnhardt is about a “stock car star,” yes. But it is also about a particular people, living in a particular place, in a particular time, through one man’s remarkable story.

And for that, it’s well worth watching.