Southern Rockers
Rent from DeepDyve- Southern Rockers
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It is impossible to overlook the shame of the Stars and Bars, but what about the sound of the music itself? There lies glory. Lynyrd Skynyrd in concert, New Brockton, Alabama, 2008, courtesy of Jayuzi, under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License.
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Let’s be honest: Southern rock is a critically despised genre, a redneck sound draped in the Confederate flag and fueled by an oh-so-’70s mix of Jack Daniels and Quaaludes. But the genre’s critics have it only partly right. It is impossible to overlook the shame of the Stars and Bars, but what about the sound of the music itself? There lies glory—especially if you turn it up real loud.
10. The Allman Brothers Band
The genre’s progenitors? I wouldn’t be so quick to place the Allmans at the moment of creation. But it is true they exhibit all that is good and bad about southern rock—the heady mix of blues, rock, country, and soul, on the one hand, and the never-ending on-stage “jam” burdening that other hand like so much deadweight.
9. Lynyrd Skynyrd
Only Elvis’s music lies buried beneath more heaps of cultural symbolism. But that’s what you get for playing in front of the Rebel flag and sparring with Neil Young over the meaning of southern manhood.
8. Lucinda Williams
Oh, she can sing it sweet, but, Lord, have you heard Williams when she plugs in? A voice like a branding iron.
7. Uncle Tupelo
The Rust Belt meets the Bible Belt. The post-industrial descendants of the white southern migrants who found themselves exiled to the steel mills and automobile factories of the Midwest.
6. Gram Parsons
The pre-eminent country-rocker, a radiant songwriter, and a man who died far too young. Did you know that his corpse was stolen and set alight in the deserts of California before it could be flown back to New Orleans for burial? Talk about southern gothic.
5. The Sir Douglas Quintet
They hailed from Texas and summoned the sounds of Mexico. But, please, don’t call ’em Tex-Mex. Makes their music sound like a bowl of bad chili when in fact they were serving up the sweetest stew of borderland soul imaginable.
4. Drive-By Truckers
Latter-day chroniclers of what they call “the duality of the southern thing.” [End Page 142]
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She can sing it sweet, but, Lord, have you heard her when she plugs in? A voice like a branding iron. Lucinda Williams, at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, England, 2008, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License.
3. The Band
“They’re from Canada!” you scream. “The South ’tis but a state of mind,” I reply.
2. Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (a.k.a. The Swampers)
Unseen but always heard. The house band at fame Studios before opening up their own shop in 1969, these guys laid down the beats behind (take a deep breath) Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Bob Seger, Willie Nelson, the Staple Singers, Traffic, the Oak Ridge Boys, Paul Simon, and Rod Stewart, among others.
1. Elvis Presley
The original southern rocker. The great white whale of American culture, in Greil Marcus’s words: a musician, an idea, a force, a living metaphor of the sins and virtues of the South. [End Page 143]
Joshua Guthman is the music editor of Southern Cultures and an assistant professor of history at Berea College, where he teaches American cultural and religious history. He is writing a book about Primitive Baptists and the evangelical self in antebellum America.
