Southern Rock - It Was An Era More Than A Sound
"Southern rock" is a bit redundant; it's like saying "rock rock."
- Gregg Allman
As the Gregg Allman quote above states, there is something redundant about the phrase "Southern Rock", if you are referring solely to a style of music. Rock and Roll and all of its precedents - blues, gospel, jazz, country, bluegrass - are products of the American South. Books such as Bill C. Malone's Southern Music/American Music or James L. Dickerson's Mojo Triangle concisely cover this history. This is the level at which Mr. Allman wisely points out redundancy.
However, here at Swampland, we define Southern Rock as an era in music history.
The Beginnings: From Southern Soul to Big Pink
By the hippie/counterculture movement had begun spread from strongholds like San Francisco throughout the country. The hippies were foundational values of independence and freedom began to resonate beyond the Bay Area as others began to apply them to their own cultural roots.
The British Invasion music that inspired the hippie movement didn't happen in a vacuum. Southern blues and soul artists that had already influenced "Invasion" artists like Clapton, Harrison, and the Rolling Stones were finally getting notice within the counterculture in their own right.
In 1967, Otis Redding, the king of Southern Soul music, had a monumental performance at the Monterey Pop.
Although Otis Redding tragically died 6 months after this performance, the seeds were sown. An intersection had been identified, and a cultural collision was about to occur.
If one album could be cited as the road sign where music's path forked and headed in a new direction, it might be the Band's Music From Big Pink. Although 4/5ths Canadian by birth, the heart and soul of the Band was its Arkansan drummer and singer, Levon Helm, a man equally well-schooled in the same music foundation as the British Invasion. However, Helm did not learn this music from a vinyl record. He could and did go a watch performances like Sonny Boy Williamson's King Biscuit Hour in person - just a stone's throw away from his Arkansas home.
The Band was formed by Ronnie Hawkins, another Arkansan. Hawkins went north of the border for an extended Canadian residency. Helm was the only original Arkansan who gritted through the cold winters. He and Hawkins hand selected four Canadian teenagers all with a great love of Southern music to replace the original Hawks.
When Helm and company split from Hawkins, they became known as Levon and the Hawks. Helm guided this ensemble back to his Southern homeland as they spent many years playing jook joints and other rough and tumble clubs. These experiences, Helm's stories, and a winter in Woodstock with Dylan led the Band to strip the pompous Sgt Pepper-inspired pop music of that time back to something a little more real and down to earth. Taking this "step back" to something simpler, the Band became leaders to a new musical movement.
[A]nother interesting factor was that I got the tapes of Music From Big Pink and I thought, well, this is what I want to play - not extended solos and maestro bullshit but just good funky songs.
Eric Clapton referencing the demise of Cream in 1968
This clip of the Band's performance at Woodstock already captures their music's appeal. Set against clips of the workmen preparing the open field for the Woodstock event, from bulldozing a temporary road to building a stage, their sounds are of and from the earth with an appeal as old as time itself.
The stage was now set for something real - something "southern" (tip of the hat to Michael Buffalo!)
The Wexler Effect
As one of the founders of Atlantic Records, Wexler had already headed south years before lured by new sounds. His Atlantic New York-based studio had grown stale.
The arrangers were out of ideas, the songwriters out of material, the session players out of licks, and I was out of inspiration. [But i]nspiration was on the boil at Stax.
-Jerry Wexler
Atlantic soon became a partner with Stax Records in 1961, Otis Redding's label. The label released all of Redding's biggest hits making the Atlantic name almost synonymous with "Southern Soul" worldwide. By the time of Redding's tragic death, Atlantic had begun to move on from being primarily a home for black artists. It had also become the preferred destination of British rock bands like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones as both wanted to get a closer connection to their musical "roots".
After Redding's death, Wexler found his heart still in the south. The Stax partnership long over, Wexler was now recording in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Miami as well as scouting throughout the South for more inspiration. Without realizing his effect, Wexler was either directly (by co-founding Capricorn Records with Otis Redding's manager, Phil Walden) or indirectly (by bringing so many artists down south to record like Dusty Springfield) financing the dawn of the Southern Rock era.
1969
Somehow, this became the year. The Beatles were still together - just barely. Like Clapton, George Harrison longed to make music like the Band. Mainly, musicians started to see Wexler's wisdom and began looking South for inspiration. Late in 1969, Wexler supervised a session for the Rolling Stones down in Muscle Shoals that would yield the songs "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses", cornerstone songs for the Rolling Stones first Atlantic-distributed record, Sticky Fingers.
The Southern Rock era had quietly begun, but let Jerry Wexler's Billboard Magazine piece from December 1969 entitled "What It Is – Is Swamp Music – Is What It Is" serve as our guide....
After giving "shout outs" to artists like Tony Joe White, Delaney and Bonnie, Eddie Hinton, the Band, Taj Mahal, Leon Russell, Donnie Fritts, and Dr. John, as well as mentioning studio scenes in Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and Miami, Wexler describes it like so:
It is the Southern sound! R&B played by Southern whites! It is up from Corpus Christi, Thibodaux, Florence, Tupelo, Helena, Tuscaloosa, Memphis! It is the flowering of the new Southern life style! It is Duane Allman, the Skydog guitar wizard out of central Florida whose hair is longer than Dennis Hopper’s .... It is Southern rhythm sections made up of young country cats who began with Hawkshaw Hawkins and turned left behind Ray Charles and Blue Bland. It is Joe South and his great gift of melody and the lowest-tuned guitar this side of Pop Staples....
It’s not rockabilly, either, but the echoes of early Sun [Records] are there. Ghosts of beginning Elvis and Cash and Vincent; listen to ‘Suspicious Minds’ live with the Sweets backing Elvis, and that’s definitely it.
The words? They are plain old representational words – Southern folk communicating with each other in beautiful, unornate spare earth talk. There is field lore. There is love on a farm. There is swamp myth. The people who play it and sing it are conditioned by the way they grew up, Southern lifestyle: it’s in the ground they walked on, the grits they ate, the water they drank. Their imagery has humor and insight, and the references, although they are regional and even parochial, are easily comprehended.
In these three small paragraphs, Wexler announced the dawn of the Southern Rock era.
Before 1969 ended seminal albums by Southern artists like the Allman Brothers Band's debut, Delaney and Bonnie's Accept No Substitute, and Elvis's From Elvis In Memphis would all be released. It is only fitting that the man helped bring Southern Soul to the world would now usher in the Southern Rock era.
As Wexler presciently ended his Billboard piece, "There’s more – it’s only just beginning."
Duane forms a band
The Allman Brothers became the people's band. They were Southerners living in the South playing Southern music.
- Phil Walden, founder of Capricorn Records
As the counterculture movement expanded to include both Southern Soul and the Band's "rooted" spirit, it further morphed to encompass unique cultural touchpoints. Individuality began to win out over "group" think. No one embodied this more than Duane Allman.
Phil Walden bought Duane Allman's contract from Rick Hall down in Muscle Shoals with Wexler's help. Together, Walden and Wexler schemed to form a new label, owned by and based in Walden's home town of Macon and distributed by Atlantic. The initial idea was to cut soul records like Stax, and Capricorn did cut a few. However, the power of Duane Allman soon changed the direction of music's road again.
Allman had spent his teenage years in Florida playing behind soul singers. Then, he formed a series of bands influenced by British rock heroes like the Yardbirds. By the late 60's in the midst of a dispute with Liberty Records, Allman had mothballed an early version of the Allman Brothers Band called Hourglass that featured his brother Gregg as well as Paul Hornsby, Johnny Sandlin, and Pete Carr. Duane then landed in Muscle Shoals and played on Atlantic sessions for soul stars like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett. This was where Wexler and Walden found him.
Given free reign by Walden, Duane formed his own band from the ground up. Neither a songwriter or singer, Allman's guitar was a catalyst, guide, and magnet for what would be the quintessential "Southern Rock" band. Assembled from pieces of Berry Oakley's Jacksonville band, adding in Jaimoe who Allman had met on the soul circuit, and finished off with his brother Gregg recently freed from his California record deal, the Allman Brothers Band immediately changed the course of music history and southern culture.
The Southern Rock Era
We did everything we could against being commericial. We used our guitars like a brass section, playing all these [improvised] harmony lines.... It was musical telepathy. We were into individual expression. We were also lucky the time was right for free thinkers. It was a free period. Our models weren't big moneymakers, but the blues giants of the thirties and forties - Robert Johnson, Elmore James. If it hadn't been for FM radio, we would have never been heard.
- Dickey Betts on the Allman Brothers Band
Betts and the Allmans didn't have the goal of being commericial, but as he said, "the time was right." Live audiences loved the Allmans. The FM radio format perfectly fit their longer jams. Mostly, southern kids identified with them. Without knowing it, the Allmans were at the center of a movement.
The MTV Effect
By the time MTV came along, the Southern Rock era was already on life support. The rise of the corporate record business.
No band showed the change better than 38 Special
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