One of the most indelible highlights of Tom Petty’s homecoming concert with The Heartbreakers at the O’Connell Center on Sept. 21, 2006, came when the Gainesville native reached into his bag of deepest tracks for a song he rarely played live, but on that day and at that time, felt exactly right enough to do just that.

The song was “Southern Accents,” the title track of the 1985 album of the same name in which Petty addressed his heritage and humanity in one unstoppable turn that left a lump in the hearts and souls of those who attended the sold-out show just as it did most everyone who had ever heard it.

“There's a Southern accent, where I come from; the young 'uns call it country, the Yankees call it dumb,” he sang. “I got my own way of talkin’; but everything gets done with a Southern Accent, where I come from.”

For the 66-year-old singer/songwriter, member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the man who put Gainesville, Florida, forever on the musical map as a native son born and bred, the key phrase here is not just that Petty’s remarkable impact on popular music came wrapped and delivered with a Southern accent — which it did, of course — but that everything he mostly touched got done in remarkable ways and to stunning degrees of success.

Everything got done because Thomas Earl Petty came into the world in 1950 with a musical talent and spirit so strong it was as if such an inner force was born not to be denied.

It wouldn’t be denied as he grew up in Gainesville with a father who verbally and physically abused those he loved and steadfastly opposed his son’s career choice, at least in the beginning. And it wouldn’t be stunted as he honed his talent in early bands like the Sundowners and The Epics and then slogged with the latter’s chief successor, Mudcrutch, six nights a week and four hours a night at Dub’s and other spots in town.

It wouldn’t be quashed as a dream when he rallied his band and led them out west against all odds to that promised land of popular music, Southern California, where those who went on to make it will tell you that their toughest battles only just began once they got there.

It wouldn’t be stopped as he and the emergent Tom Petty and The Heatbreakers lifted themselves one by one up the rungs of a hard-fought ladder of success including getting a record deal, and recording an album and songs — from “Breakdown” and “American Girl” to “Refugee” and “Don’t Do Me Like That” to mention just a few of the earliest — that earned the band a growing contingent of fans while defying musical labels.

Those and other Petty-penned hits, including “Here Comes My Girl,” “The Waiting,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream” and “Free Fallin’,” instead became signature tunes of the ’70s and ’80s, helped the singer sell a reported 80-million albums throughout his career and earned Petty and The Heartbreakers inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Such eventual career success wouldn’t be waylaid or cut short when, in his 20s, Petty battled his own record company through a contentious lawsuit and defied its attorneys while famously picking his fingernails with a pen knife during one meeting.

Somehow, the young Floridian — whose musical dream was sparked at age 11 when he met Elvis Presley on the set of the latter’s “Follow That Dream” in Ocala, and then went fully ablaze after seeing The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” two years later — not only enjoyed commercial success on his own terms but would go on to become contemporaries and even bandmates with some of his own biggest idols, including Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Roy Orbison, with the Traveling Wilburys.

Though he moved away from his hometown at age 24, Petty never forget his humble beginnings or musical roots, but instead returned occasionally for performances in Gainesville and even re-formed his best-known local band, Mudcrutch, in 2008 to record its own albums and enjoy its own tours for the first time.

Tom Petty may have come by his “Southern accent” simply by being born in North Central Florida on Oct. 20, 1950. Yet by the end of his life, however, he had found — time and time again — ways to make it, inimitably, his very own.

This column was previously published on Gainesville.com on Oct. 3, 2017.