Growing Roots in Rocky Soil: An Environmental History of Southern Rock

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It was early summer, and we were in Cohutta Wilderness of North Georgia--a couple of Atlanta high school kids off for a weekend backpacking trip. We drove into woods ready to conquer wild--off to get our hands dirty, to get our feet wet just a few counties over from where Burt Reynolds and director John Boorman filmed James Dickey's Deliverance. We skidded along old fire roads as we entered wilderness, piping Allman Brothers through rattling speakers of 4x4. As we crested a small ridge, song Dreams commenced, and Gregg Allman belted out soulful line, went up on mountain / To see what I could see / The whole world was failing right down in front of me. Perfect. As a young adventurer in South, somehow I felt that music of Allman Brothers provided ideal soundtrack for our excursion into woods. Why? This was question that sparked this study. There as yet no agreed-upon definition of southern and some of biggest names in genre have questioned suitability of label. Gregg Allman once laughed at term, arguing that rock 'n' roll originated in South as a fusion of various musical genres: Saying southern rock, Gregg argued, is like saying rock rock. Phil Walden, owner of Capricorn Records--a label that signed numerous southern rock acts from Allman Brothers to Marshall Tucker Band--said of southern It's not a term I am particularly crazy about. Despite Walden's reservations, term caught on and has been used since 1970s to describe a diverse array of rock 'n' roll groups from South that blend country and blues musical forms with a jam-band performance style. (1) Recently, historians have joined debate, deconstructing southern rock to uncover its basic elements--what music journalist Mark Kemp calls an otherworldly musical stew of country, blues, jazz, and gospel--and explain its implications for southern (if not American) culture. Historian Paul Wells, for example, described southern rock as essentially reactionary, suggesting that southern rock offered disenchanted youth escape from (not engagement in) contemporary debates about race and democracy. Rather than deal with conflicts of Civil Rights era, Wells argued, southern rockers clung to rural roots, committing themselves to unquestioning traditionalism in face of national anti-South criticism. (2) Southern historian Ted Ownby offered a corrective to Well's analysis, portraying southern rockers as rebels fighting both established regional norms and national critics. Ownby recognized southern rockers' attempts to honor a tradition of southern masculinity that valued heavy drinking, heated brawling, and reckless philandering, but he also acknowledged young musicians' rebellion against regional mores, arguing that the tension was between being a rebel against southern traditions in late 1960s and being a Rebel as part of tradition of white southerners, and challenge was to find ways to be rebels of both kinds. Ac cording to Ownby, southern rockers' rejected the security and morality of nineteenth-century southern homestead, even as they praised aspects of patriarchal culture that pervaded it. (3) Barbara Ching expanded Ownby's thesis in her comparative study of Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd, positing that southern rockers engaged in a struggle over role and meaning of white southern manhood. Ching observed that southern rock served as a musical anesthetic for defeat and anger felt by marginalized southern male, allowing rebellious youth to vent their frustrations about a national culture that viewed them as unsophisticated dullards and backward bigots. But while southern rock had a therapeutic effect for southerners dealing with a troubled past, it also helped solidify national perceptions of southern male as unreconstructedly macho and [a] fascinating barrier to progress. …