Southern Rock Revival

HOSTED BY
For Immediate Release: Aug. 22, 2007
The Honest Tune Magazine Southern Rock Revival Series is an effort on the part of the South’s premier music magazine, Honest Tune, and a handful of Southern-based entertainment agencies to shed new light on a blighted genre and call attention to the most talented new performers carrying the Southern rock torch today.
The series was originally conceived by Dirt Road Records as a free one-day festival known as the Great Southern Rock Revival that took place back-to-back years in 2004 and 2005 in The Grove Amphitheatre on the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford that featured Kevn Kinney of Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, Randall Bramblett Band, Daybreakdown, Tishamingo, Shady Deal, Sun Tangled Angel Revival, Willie & Me and the Electric Mudd.
The purpose of the Great Southern Rock Revival (GSRR) was to lure the spotlight back to a genre which has meant so much not only to the American music scene, but to the international music community as well. It is a genre that is truly American, in every sense of the word, but has lost its luster over the past 20 years in the wake of such trite, shallow musical movements as disco, bubble gum pop, pop country, hair metal, boy bands, divas, gangster rap and the emergence of the most detrimental of all musical movements – Top 40 cover and tribute bands.
The American music fanatic holds the responsibility to seek out high quality original music in the palm of his or her hand, and that responsibility has been squandered in this day and age of MTV, Clear Channel Radio, and venues and musicians trying to capitalize on the regurgitation of overplayed commercial pop garbage – like cover and tribute bands.
Honest Tune Magazine, with the help of Colton Priest Entertainment, Degy Entertainment, Dirt Road Records, and First Team Marketing has decided to take the Southern Rock Revival concept on the road in the fall of 2007, showcasing some of the best Southern rock bands the South currently has to offer.
Daybreakdown, Outformation, Old Union, Shady Deal and Speakeasy have been commissioned to spearhead the series, which the creators have hinted may become an annual event. Each of these bands embody the traditions, origins and perspectives of Southern rock’s founding fathers, and will set out this fall to bear the burdens of those who laid the tracks for future generations of Southern rockers.
The series will begin on Thursday, Sept. 6 with simultaneous shows in Starkville and Oxford, Mississippi. More Southern Rock Revival Series dates are being added daily, so stay tuned for more…
9/6 Daybreakdown & Outformation Rick’s Café Americain Starkville, MS
9/6 Shady Deal & Old Union Proud Larry’s Oxford, MS
More Shows TBA…
LOOKING BACK
Unlike most of the Top 40 music you hear on the radio today, Southern Rock’s origins can be traced back to a time when most of the country’s musical pop culture was coming straight out of Southern America. In Mississippi in the mid-1920s, near-simultaneous events sparked a revolution in music, the ripple effects of which can still be felt today. In Meridian, a young man named Jimmie Rogers was pioneering a new kind of folk music geared toward the blue collar workers and families who lived out in the country, away from the big cities – hence, country music was born.
In Carrol County, the seeds of the North Mississippi Hill Country Blues were being planted by a little-known farmhand by the name of “Mississippi” John Hurt. Likewise, a young man named Son House from Riverton, just two miles outside of Clarksdale, was reinventing the fledgling blues genre by adding his bottleneck slide to the guitar and increasing the tempo to make blues a danceable sound that would immediately become popular in the noisy atmospheres of the barrelhouses and dance halls from Robinsonville to Memphis, Tenn.
Regarded as the “Father of Country Music,” Rogers was the first country music superstar and is considered to be the most influential troubadour to the generation which followed, including Hank Williams, Sr., Johnny Cash and the subsequent outlaw country movement.
Like many famous Delta bluesmen, House spent a short, sanctioned vacation on Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary made famous in the film “O Brother Where Art Thou?” Although he was not the first to play the blues in Mississippi, House’s impression on the blues was so dynamic, he is credited as being the main influence for both Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, although many who study the blues credit Johnson as being the “Father of the Mississippi Delta Blues.” Ironically, it was House who, in the 1960s, spread the legend that Johnson had sold his soul to the Devil himself in exchange for his mysterious blues mastership. His innovative work may have paved the way for the successes of Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Willie Dixon, Bukka White, Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf as well.
Hurt’s music wouldn’t really be discovered until the 1960s, spawning a new kind of blues in the Hill Country that has since been made famous by R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough.
Those musicians were instrumental in the birth of rock n’ roll in North Mississippi and its 1950s intermingling with the Delta blues.
In 1947, the most successful blues musician to date exploded onto the American music scene. Straight out of Itta Bena, Mississippi came B.B. King, and the tired old blues genre got a shot in the arm that has kept it alive for the past 60 years. Then in 1954, two white men from the same state changed music forever. Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis’ careers will always be viewed in parallels, because not only did the two men from Mississippi take the country by storm during the same era, but they also shared a home at the famous Sun Records, along with Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins. Lewis, aka “The Killer,” and Presley, aka “The King,” brought Southern music into the national spotlight, recording No. 1 hits one after another. To this day, one could argue that the duo of Presley (Tupelo) and Lewis (Natchez) has had a more profound influence on American pop music than any other in the history of rock n’ roll.
THE BIRTH OF SOUTHERN ROCK
In the mid-1960s, the resurgence of folk rock made popular by such experimental artists as Credence Clearwater Revival, The Band and the Flying Burrito Brothers, the British Invasion spearheaded by The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who, The Yardbirds, Cream, The Kinks, The Animals, Spencer Davis Group and The Moody Blues, and the psychedelic rock movement begun by the Holy Modal Rounders and The Deep, but made forever popular by the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, The Doors and Big Brother & The Holding Co., took the spotlight away from the South, and pop music became more of a worldwide phenomenon that was focused for the most part on major U.S. and British cities such as New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Liverpool and London.
Originally formed in Jacksonville, Fla. in 1969 and soon-after relocating to Macon, Ga. permanently, The Allman Brothers Band is widely credited as the first true Southern rock band. Aside from the obvious influences of the Mississippi-born blues, country and rock n’ roll forefathers, Southern rock owes a bit of its heritage to those from outside the South who were likewise influenced by pioneers like Rogers, House, Hurt, King, Presley and Lewis. The Allman Brothers were not as polished and corporate clean as many of the British and New York-based pop bands, but they immediately came into the national spotlight with their second album “Idlewild South” in 1970. Much like the Delta bluesmen and country music legends who inspired them, the Allman Brothers were shrouded in mystique, legend and folklore, giving them an almost mythical perception which endeared them to the young, curious minds seeking out the best of American music post-Woodstock and the Summer of Love. Their ties to the Grateful Dead, who had become famous during the Haight-Ashbury days, capitalizing on the success of Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests and their cult following or entourage (the Merry Pranksters), made them both the South’s and the East’s main psychedelic representation. The death of their band leader Duane Allman in 1971 and the nearly identical subsequent death of their bassist Berry Oakley less than 13 months later and less than three blocks away – both by motorcycle accident – caused the band to sink deeper into its own mythological existence in the eyes of their fans and followers as well as their critics and detractors. But it was their ability to persevere and replace their fallen bandmates with capable fill-ins that kept the band alive in the American mainstream for several decades.
A handful of other Southern rock bands came into prominence over the next five years including Wet Willie, the Charlie Daniels Band, Black Oak Arkansas and the Marshall Tucker Band, but the Allman Brothers were still considered the reigning kinds of the new classic rock sub-genre. That was until 1973, when another band from Jacksonville, Fla. arrived onto the scene. Perhaps the only American band surrounded by more myth and folklore than the Allman Brothers is Lynyrd Skynyrd. Led by one of the most controversial musicians of the 1970s, Ronnie Van Zant, Lynyrd Skynyrd was outlaw country’s rock n’ roll counterpart – mean, nasty, dirty, gritty, brash, unapologetic and hungry for success in a country dominated somewhat by the softer, cleaner-cut, and more sensitive Brits. And although the term Southern rock did not even exist at the time of the Allman Brothers’ and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s prominence in the 1970s, no other band embodied that Southern flair the way these two bands did during their heyday. Skynyrd’s distinctive triple-lead guitar style was a first, and their showmanship was second to none. They were dubbed “the working man’s rock band,” known for their intense rehearsal sessions, which would often last more than 12 hours straight for seven to 10 days at a time, at the Hell House, a tin barn-like shack with no windows and one door on an isolated farm just a few miles outside of Jacksonville.
The band’s first album “Lynyrd Skynyrd” was a huge success and featured what is highly regarded as Southern rock’s most identifiable song – “Free Bird,” a song many believed was an Allman Brothers number when it first began receiving radio play in 1973. But listeners soon began to distinguish between the two bands as Lynyrd Skynyrd became more of a household name with the release of “Second Helping” in 1974, which featured their most successful commercial hit “Sweet Home Alabama,” a tongue-in-cheek retaliation to Neil Young’s “Alabama” and “Southern Man.”
But just like with the Allman Brothers Band, tragedy struck the men of Lynyrd Skynyrd early in their prime and again changed the course of Southern rock music forever. On a flight from Greenville, S.C. to play on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, La. on Oct. 20, 1977, the band’s chartered Convair 240 plane crashed over a swamp in McComb, Mississippi, killing lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, his sister and backup vocalist Cassie Gaines, and critically injuring several other members of the band. Since the tragic plane crash that all but ended Lynyrd Skynyrd’s existence in 1977, several other Southern rock bands have experienced various levels of success. During the late 1970s, .38 Special, The Outlaws, Molly Hatchet, Blackfoot, Dixie Dregs and Sea Level kept the torch burning for both Ronnie and Duane. As a matter of fact, .38 Special is fronted by Van Zant’s little brother Donnie, and the new version of Skynyrd is led by the other little brother Johnny Van Zant.
THE '80s
Heading into the 1980s, Southern rock’s influence on the rest of the world was becoming more obvious as classic rock and arena rock bands such as AC/DC, ZZ Top and The Georgia Satellites showed some spark to the genre, although they admittedly had differing styles. But with the emergence of MTV came new wave and glam rock, which pushed Southern rock out of the mainstream.
Throughout the 1980s, alt-country and the reinvention of improvisational jam a la the Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead produced a generation of bands that have had trouble finding a home in corporate American pop music. Bands such as R.E.M. (1981), Jason & The Scorchers (1982), Dash Rip Rock (1984), Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ (1985), Blue Mountain (1985), Beanland (1986), Widespread Panic (1987), The Black Crowes (1989), Aquarium Rescue Unit (1989) and Uncle Tupelo (1989), have all travelled diverging paths with some, such as the R.E.M. and the Black Crowes experiencing huge success, while others, such as Widespread Panic and Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ have cracked the Top 40, but just barely.
THE ‘90s
The 1990s was the “Decade of Jam,” an anti-corporate movement similar to punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was a decade when hundreds of thousands of fans longed for the freedoms of the late 1960s, but had to wiggle around the new laws of the land. These were fans who wanted to revive that feeling of family and community that was such a prevalent force from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. And these were bands who wanted to tour year-round like their grassroots forefathers such as the Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, but couldn’t find the same commercial success because of the changing of the times.
SOUTHERN ROCK TODAY
Now, in the 21st Century, stricter guidelines by commercial radio, widespread bankruptcy in the record label business due to the fallout of the Napster debacle around Y2K, MTV, Clear Channel and TicketMaster’s stranglehold on the business and the airwaves, and a new, apathetic and musically complacent consumer have taken most of the bread off of the table for most grassroots music machines, and Southern rock is in very serious jeopardy of becoming extinct, much like bluegrass and blues were in the 1980s. Those two genres managed to survive because of intense efforts by those in the music business and the American media, as well as the newfound obsession with both American and European summer music festivals. Now it is time for us to step up to the plate and do the same for Southern rock.
The field of quality original Southern rock bands may be smaller than it was in the 1970s, but there is still plenty of talent out there to be seen and heard. Aside from the bands on board with this year’s Southern Rock Revival Series, some others to keep an eye on are the Drive-By Truckers (Athens, Ga.), My Morning Jacket (Lexington, Ky.), Kings of Leon (Nashville, Tenn.), North Mississippi Allstars (Hernando, Miss.), Son Volt (Kansas City, Mo.) Mofro (Jacksonville, Fla.) and Tishamingo (Athens, Ga.) – all are bands with plenty of potential and have received extensive to moderate commercial success.
In a time when America could use a healthy dose of patriotism and probably more than a little old school camaraderie, maybe we should look to the heart of one of America’s most unique and endearing art forms – Southern American Rock N’ Roll.
Ben Bounds
Originator – The Great Southern Rock Revival
Cofounder of Dirt Road Records & Vice President of First Team Marketing
Starkville, MS
For more information please contact Colton Priest Entertainment