Session Work and the Spark
Before there was a genre, there was a session guitarist in Muscle Shoals. Duane Allman arrived at FAME Studios in 1968, quickly becoming the primary player, recording with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and King Curtis. He learned slide guitar that year after falling from a horse and injuring his left elbow. His brother Gregg brought him Taj Mahal’s debut and a bottle of Coricidin cold pills. Duane emptied the bottle, washed off the label, and used the glass tube as a slide, playing along to Statesboro Blues. The Coricidin bottle became his signature tool.
Frustrated working as what he called a “robot” for the studio, Allman moved to Jacksonville, Florida, in March 1969 with drummer Jai Johanny Johanson and began holding jam sessions. They recruited guitarist Dickey Betts, bassist Berry Oakley, and drummer Butch Trucks. Gregg joined on vocals and Hammond B-3 organ. The lineup was radical: two lead guitarists, two drummers, no rhythm guitarist. Every instrument led.
Macon, Capricorn, and the Twin-Guitar Sound
Phil Walden had managed R&B acts out of Macon, Georgia, since the early 1960s, including Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Percy Sledge. When Redding died in a plane crash in December 1967, Walden’s vision for an R&B label collapsed. In 1969, he founded Capricorn Records with Frank Fenter, and the Allman Brothers became his first signing. The Marshall Tucker Band, Wet Willie, the Charlie Daniels Band, and Elvin Bishop followed, transforming Macon into a music city filling venues from Grant’s Lounge to the Grand Opera House.
The Allmans’ innovation was structural. Duane and Betts scrapped the rhythm/lead division, playing interlocking harmony lines, trading solos, doubling melodies in thirds or sixths. Betts relied on the major hexatonic scale (later called “the Dickey Betts scale”), producing bright twin leads with no precedent in hard rock. On Blue Sky, the lower guitar carries the melody while the higher harmonizes above. Two drummers locked polyrhythmic patterns against Oakley’s bass, drawing from jazz as much as blues.
At Fillmore East, recorded March 12 and 13, 1971, captured this at full power. Producer Tom Dowd oversaw the sessions; Capricorn released the double album at the price of a single LP. Johanson later called the performances “slightly above average,” which says everything about their nightly standard.
Death on Hillcrest Avenue
On October 29, 1971, Duane was riding his Harley-Davidson Sportster on Hillcrest Avenue in Macon when a flatbed truck stopped at an intersection. He swerved, struck the truck, and was thrown from the bike. No visible injuries, but he died in surgery from massive internal damage. He was twenty-four.
Berry Oakley assumed a larger creative role, but on November 11, 1972, he crashed his motorcycle on Napier Avenue, three blocks from Duane’s accident. He struck a city bus and fractured his skull. He declined treatment at the scene; three hours later he died at the hospital. Also twenty-four.
Betts stepped forward as songwriter. Brothers and Sisters (1973) hit number one on the Billboard 200 for five weeks. His Ramblin’ Man, inspired by a 1951 Hank Williams song, peaked at number two on the Hot 100, the band’s only Top 10 single.
Jacksonville’s Other Sons
Jacksonville produced Southern rock bands at a startling rate. Ronnie Van Zant, Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, and Bob Burns first played together in 1964 as teenagers under the name My Backyard. They renamed themselves in 1969, mocking Leonard Skinner, a gym teacher at Robert E. Lee High School who enforced the hair-length dress code. Skinner later let them photograph his real estate sign for the sleeve of Nuthin’ Fancy (1975).
Skynyrd played tighter and louder than the Allmans, with a three-guitar attack (Rossington, Collins, and later Ed King or Steve Gaines) rooted in blues boogie and British hard rock. Free Bird began when Collins’s girlfriend Kathy asked, “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?” Collins had played those chords for two years; Van Zant dismissed them as too complex. One day he asked to hear them again and wrote the lyrics in four minutes. The extended solo was added so Van Zant could rest during multi-set club nights. Billy Powell, a roadie, had written a piano introduction; when the band heard it, they made him keyboardist.
Sweet Home Alabama (1974) answered Neil Young’s Southern Man and Alabama, but the dispute was affectionate: Van Zant loved Young’s music, and Rossington called the lyric “kind of a joke.” On the cover of Street Survivors, released October 17, 1977, Van Zant wore a Neil Young T-shirt. Three days later, the band’s chartered Convair CV-240 ran out of fuel between Greenville, South Carolina, and Baton Rouge and crashed near Gillsburg, Mississippi. Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, road manager Dean Kilpatrick, and both pilots died. Twenty survived. The original cover, showing the band engulfed in flames, was withdrawn.
The Wider Circle
The Marshall Tucker Band formed in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1972, named after a blind piano tuner whose keychain they found in their rehearsal warehouse. Their 1973 Capricorn debut featured Toy Caldwell’s Can’t You See, blending country, jazz flute (Jerry Eubanks), and blues. From Jacksonville, .38 Special (founded 1975 by Don Barnes and Donnie Van Zant, Ronnie’s brother) pushed the sound toward arena rock with Hold On Loosely (1981) and Caught Up in You (1982). Molly Hatchet, also Jacksonville, formed in 1971 and delivered a heavier triple-guitar variation, going platinum with Flirtin’ with Disaster (1979). The Outlaws, out of Tampa, built their name on the ten-minute workout Green Grass and High Tides from their 1975 Arista debut.
Charlie Daniels bridged Southern rock and country with fiddle-driven arrangements. The Devil Went Down to Georgia (1979) hit number one on the country chart and number three on the Hot 100 because the band realized mid-session that Million Mile Reflections lacked a fiddle showcase; Daniels invented the premise on the spot and shared the writing credit with every member of his band.
Capricorn collapsed in 1979, crushed by debt and a failed renegotiation with PolyGram over a $5 million loan. Walden died of cancer in 2006 at sixty-six. Skynyrd reformed in 1987 with Ronnie’s brother Johnny on vocals. The Allman Brothers played their final shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2014. The genre’s DNA (twin leads, blues phrasing, extended jams, regional identity as content) persists in jam bands, Americana, and roots rock. Southern rock was never a movement. It was a handful of bands in a few Southern cities playing what they knew, on a label whose founder lost his first artist to a plane crash and his company to the economics that swallow everything.
Essential Listening
- The Allman Brothers Band – At Fillmore East (1971)
- The Allman Brothers Band – Brothers and Sisters (1973)
- Lynyrd Skynyrd – (Pronounced ‘Leh-‘Nerd ‘Skin-‘Nerd) (1973)
- Lynyrd Skynyrd – Second Helping (1974)
- The Marshall Tucker Band – The Marshall Tucker Band (1973)
- Wet Willie – Keep On Smilin’ (1974)
- The Charlie Daniels Band – Million Mile Reflections (1979)
- The Outlaws – Outlaws (1975)
- Molly Hatchet – Flirtin’ with Disaster (1979)
- .38 Special – Wild-Eyed Southern Boys (1981)
- Dickey Betts & Great Southern – Dickey Betts & Great Southern (1977)
- Lynyrd Skynyrd – Street Survivors (1977)