In the 1960s, rock musician Lonnie Mack blended black and white roots-music genres within the framework of rock, beginning with the hit song "Memphis" in 1963.[1] Music historian Dick Shurman considers Mack's recordings from that era "a prototype of what later could be called Southern rock".[2]
The Allman Brothers Band, from Jacksonville, Florida, made their national debut in 1969 and soon gained a loyal following. Duane Allman's playing on the two Hour Glass albums and an Hour Glass session in early 1968 at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama had caught the ear of Rick Hall, owner of FAME.[3]
In November 1968, Hall hired Allman to play on an album with Wilson Pickett. Allman's work on that album, Hey Jude (1968), got him hired as a full-time session musician at Muscle Shoals and brought him to the attention of a number of other musicians, such as Eric Clapton, who later related how he heard Pickett's version of "Hey Jude" on his car radio and called Atlantic Records to find out who the guitarist was: "To this day," Clapton said, "I've never heard better rock guitar playing on an R&B record. It's the best."[4]
Author Scott B. Bomar speculates the term "Southern rock" may have been coined in 1972 by Mo Slotin, writing for Atlanta's underground paper, The Great Speckled Bird, in a review of an Allman Brothers Band concert.[5]
1970s: peak of popularity
Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971.[6]
Their blues rock sound incorporated long jams informed by jazz and also drew from native elements of country and folk. They were also contemporary in their electric guitar and keyboard delivery.[7] Gregg Allman commented that "Southern rock" was a redundant term, like "rock rock."[7]
Charlie Daniels' self-titled debut album, released in 1970, was a pivotal recording in the development of the Southern rock genre, "because it points the way to how the genre could and would sound, and how country music could retain its hillbilly spirit and rock like a mother," according to
Stephen Thomas Erlewine.[12] Erlewine described Daniels as "a redneck rebel, not fitting into either the country or the rock & roll [...] but, in retrospect, he sounds like a visionary, pointing the way to the future when southern rockers saw no dividing lines between rock, country, and blues, and only saw it all as sons of the south."[13]
Daniels later formed the Charlie Daniels Band, a group which fused rock, country, blues, and jazz. Erlewine described the band's sound as "a distinctly Southern blend" which emphasized improvisation in their instrumentation. After the success of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", a single which Erlewine described as a "roaring country-disco fusion", Daniels shifted his sound from rock to country music and "helped shape the sound of country-rock".[13]
The Marshall Tucker Band, from Spartanburg, South Carolina, opened many of The Allman Brothers Band concerts using elements of blues, country rock and blues rock in their music.[14][15] They also collaborated with Charlie Daniels. Their self-titled album, released in 1973, included the hit "Can't You See". Perhaps known best for the single "Fire on the Mountain," the Marshall Tucker Band hit "Heard it in a Love Song" charted in 1977.
By the beginning of the 1980s, the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd had disbanded, and Capricorn Records had gone bankrupt. Leading acts of the genre (in particular, 38 Special) had become enmeshed in arena rock. With the rise of MTV, new wave, funk, urban contemporary, and heavy metal, most surviving Southern rock groups were relegated to secondary or regional venues. Rock musicians such as Molly Hatchet, Outlaws, Georgia Satellites, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Jimmie Vaughan, Point Blank,[18]Tom Petty, Bruce Hornsby, Steve Earle, Widespread Panic, and Kentucky Headhunters, emerged as popular Southern bands across the southeastern United States during the 1980s and 1990s.
During the 1990s, the Allman Brothers reunited and became a strong touring and recording presence again, and the jam band scene revived interest in extended improvised music.
In 2005, singer Bo Bice took an explicitly Southern rock sensibility and appearance to a runner-up finish on the normally pop-oriented American Idol television program, with a performance of the Allmans' "Whipping Post" and later performing Skynyrd's "Free Bird" and, with Skynyrd on stage with him, "Sweet Home Alabama".
Southern rock currently plays on the radio in the United States, but mostly on oldies stations and classic rock stations. Although this class of music gets minor radio play, there is still a following for older bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers play in venues with sizable crowds.[22]
A number of books in the 2000s have chronicled Southern rock's history, including Randy Poe's Skydog: The Duane Allman Story and Rolling Stone writer Mark Kemp's Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race & New Beginnings in a New South. Turn It Up was released by Ron Eckerman, Lynyrd Skynyrd's former manager and plane crash survivor. Sociologist Jason T. Eastman analyzes contemporary Southern rock to illustrate changes in today's southern identity in his book The Southern Rock Revival: The Old South in a New World.[23]
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