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I remember a line in, I think, the BBC series
_Dancing in the Street_ in which one of the Allman
Brothers (?) said that using the term "southern
rock" is like saying "rock rock." Nice, but this
and the business about whether or not the Eagles
are "southern rock" seem to raise issues of
authenticity that have as much to do with somewhat
familiar notions of southern nativism and autochthony
as they do with style (i.e., do we dismiss the idea
of the Eagles as "southern rock" not just because
their music and its production is seen as watered-down
and air-brushed, but because they are assoc'd
w/ California?).
In the early 1990s, the Scottish band Primal Scream
went to Memphis and made an album called _Give Out,
But Don't Give Up_ produced by George Drakoulias
and Tom Dowd; more than that, they put William
Eggleston's photo "Troubled Waters" (an image of a
neon Confederate flag) on the cover--though a picture
of Parliament's Eddie Hazel is on the back cover
(and George Clinton guests on and co-wrote the
album's title track). In Britain, Primal Scream were
seen to have betrayed their indie-dance fans by
embracing a turgid old 1970s southern rock/wannabe
Rolling Stones image: these fans overlooked the fact
that, before _Screamadelica_ (1991), Primal Scream
had already been thru about three or four stylistic
shape-shiftings, and that _Screamadelica_ itself and
the follow-up _Dixie-Narco_ EP (1992) made their own
gestures to "southern" music.
But to get back to _Give Out, But Don't Give Up_,
I read an interview somewhere around that time with
the Black Crowes, who dismissed Primal Scream with a
jibe something along the lines that "You can't make
southern rock music if you come from Glasgow."
Basically, it wasn't a million miles away from Quentin
Compson's famous lines to the Canadian Shreve in
_Absalom, Absalom!: "You can't understand the South.
You would have to be born there."
So, where Primal Scream's British dance fans saw them
as inauthentic for betraying dance music by embracing
southern rock and the Rolling Stones, the Black Crowes
saw Primal Scream as inauthentic because they weren't
southern--conveniently o/looking the extent to which
their own brand of "southern rock" was indebted to the
Rolling Stones. The point I'm trying to make, I guess,
is that I hope definitions of "southern rock" don't get
mired in (often only implicit or assumed) ideas of
authenticity and nativism that have sometimes marred
other areas of southern studies (i.e., the assumption
that a writer has to be born in the South to be
considered "southern lit"). And I say this while
realising that the lyrics of the "classic" 1970s southern
rock bands _did_ often emphasise southern nativism and
regional difference.
As it happens, probably the best academic essay I've read
on southern rock is by someone from the South--"the South
of England," that is. This little joke is from the second
line of an essay by Paul Wells called "The Last Rebel:
Southern Rock and Nostalgic Continuities", in Richard King
and Helen Taylor, eds., _Dixie Debates: Perspectives on
Southern Culture_ (London: Pluto, 1996-ish). I haven't read
the essay properly in a long time but Wells begins by
recalling a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in
1975 at which, yes, he waved a Confederate flag (there's an
evocative contrast to the Clash's "White Man at Hammersmith
Palais" from the following year somewhere in here...).
Wells goes on to emphasise the importance not only of the musical
forms of "southern rock" but also the cultural history
from which it emerges. For example, he identifies among the
key thematic modes of southern rock "the contemporisation of
a Civil War ethos" and, relatedly, "the defence of a pre-Civil
War ethos in the determination of gender roles." This seems
entirely plausible but could also make the Band, four-fifths
of whom were from the same country as Shreve McCannon, at least
partly "southern rock" ("The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down",
"Rockin' Chair," etc.).
With regard to Emily Toth's pertinent query about white/male
definitions of southern rock, Wells also notes as a key
thematic mode of southern rock "the symbolic potency of 'guitar'
music in the definition of masculinity and the address of
'race' issues." Ted Ownby has also discussed this nexus of racial
issues, masculinity and southern rock in his essay "Freedom,
Manhood, and White Male Tradition in 1970s Southern Rock
Music," in Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan Donaldson, eds.,
_Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts_ (Charlottesville:
U of Va Press, 1997).
More anecdotally, I wonder whether people on the listserv
might indicate what's regarded (either by themselves, the U.S.
media, the southern media, etc.) as contemporary "southern
rock"? I've had some interesting email correspondence recently
w/ a southern, southern-based southernist friend who bemoaned
the British music press' frenzy about the Kings of Leon
(initially billed as, yup, "the southern Strokes" when they
appeared a couple of yrs back) while ignoring more "authentic"
southern bands like North Miss Allstars and Drive By Truckers.
This was in the context of a broader conversation about
British/European exoticisation of the South--of which my friend
could list numerous telling and embarrassing examples--but it also
demo'd how hard it is to shake the tag of "authenticity."
My Morning Jacket are a band who, in Britain, have been embraced
by the "dadrock" music press (Uncut, Mojo) and the younger
indie press (NME) alike--but almost always their southerness is
invoked in some way.
Cheers, Martyn
Dr. Martyn Bone
Assistant Professor of American Literature
Institute for English, German and Romance Studies
Faculty of Humanities
University of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 130
2300 Copenhagen S.
Denmark
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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