September 27, 2004

From Southern Rock to Hip Hop

Interesting story from music journalist and critic Ron Wynn in today's Nashville City Paper:

Journalist and critic Mark Kemp remembers growing up in the South during the turbulent civil rights era, and witnessing firsthand the turmoil and racial conflict. He found through the music of such groups as The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd inspiration and a new identity that embraced the region's joint musical heritages of blues and country. His new book Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South (Free Press) explores both his youth and the evolution of Southern rock through interviews, narratives, analysis and criticism. Kemp ... views the Allman Brothers as a particularly visionary band.

"They were a Southern band with a racially mixed line-up at a time when that was considered something impossible," Kemp said. "You had on one end the kind of carton images of Southerners on shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and on the other those horrible pictures on the news of police chiefs using fire hoses and guard dogs on children. The Allman Brothers were widely viewed as a novelty in many parts of the country, but they were also an alternative for people like me. Their music was very steeped in the blues, yet also had its own sound and it paved the way for many other groups that followed."

Kemp ... doesn't think Southern rock today can have the same transformative power as it did in its heyday. "The main language of popular music today is hip-hop, and those are the performers who will have that type of impact on a large body across the culture. There will always be Southern rock and boogie bands and performers, but they won't enjoy that same type of influence that the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd did in the late '60s and the '70s."