Great stuff ArleneWeiss, & it goes right back to the earliest days -- in fact to their very 1st paid gigs, May 2-3 1969 -- billed on the poster & ticket as "An Experimental Blues Rock Music Feast"

Then it says "These six members comprise the most inventive experimental blues-rock group in existence today. Prepare your mind to be musically educated as you experience the Allman Brothers."

so it corresponds right with what Gregg told you in Jan. 2002 -- a premise they stayed with for 45 years, & which only became "southern rock" because of where they were from, not anything music-related 😮

the term "bluesion" to describe the ABB was coined some years ago, & mentioned again recently -- a very apt term that again goes hand in hand with the spirit of the original poster

[Edited on 7/14/2017 by Stephen]

Here's Dickey's take on the term "southern rock" -- he puts it the same way Gregg did, in this excerpt from an early 90s or-so radio show, "The Allman Brothers Story" with Ed Shockey

"When other bands came along like Skynyrd, the CDB & Marshall Tucker came along, there seemed to be a need to tag it with some kind of name ... I don't see the need for it anymore ... we're just the progressive rock Allman Brothers"

[Edited on 7/15/2017 by Stephen]

Thx for posts on Gregg's and Dickey's thoughts on the Southern Rock label. I always thought of the ABB as rock from the south, "Southern Rock" like the Stones are British Rock. But when the neoconfederate gone with the wind stuff kicked in it changed the meaning of Sothern Rock and I certainly didn't hear any of that in the music of the ABB, never did.

Not sure why this is even a topic - the members of the ABB have all stated they never saw themselves as 'southern rock" if anyone will just read a little bit it's not hard to fine. That's a moniker created by advertisers that sold an image, a bunch of confederate flags, and a lot of albums by people who needed to buy an image.

What is obvious to some isn't always so obvious to others. Right here on this site there seems to be folks who somehow regard the ABB as southern neoconfederate gods, using their ABB family and inner circle connections to back up their views. I'm sure Butch and the band were aware of this aspect of their fan base, and Butch in particular was probably sickened by it.

um yeah, a potsmoking, mushroom tattoo'd band of integrated long hairs preaching love and getting high

SOME people must be getting desperate to pair that with a confederate flag and a bunch of complete ______

But then again, I hadn't noticed a frenzy of confederate flag waving here.

Must not have noticed. I was too busy listening to good music.

Well, you got that right . . . most of us are on that high, and no point in dwelling on the dark side of things.

Sorry to point out something ugly like that. Only time I ever mentioned it, and won't bring it up again.

But it is there, sad to say. I have heard it and seen it here. It is the really sick side of the whole "Southern Rock" thing. The white elephant in the room. Up to the individual how they see it, I guess.

Needed to be said, at least once. I'm on my way out, got nothin to lose or prove.

Peace.

[Edited on 7/16/2017 by BrerRabbit]

Just gonna put this here:

Edited

[Edited on 7/16/2017 by ABBDutchFan]

Just gonna put this here:

"Brothers Of The Road" which I happen to adore, Gregg only had open disdain for, as well as "REach For The Sky", the ABB's only other album released under the auspices of music mogul Clive Davis and Arista Records which Clive ran. I don't want to automatically just "assume" that Clive and/or his more pandering to pop/commercial audience oriented A&R & promotion department at Arista as directed by Clive wrote this or had anything or all to do with the Southern Rock dedication on the album cover/jacket/sleeve, or if the Southern Rock dedication was the idea of Gregg, Dickey and the rest of the ABB band members and if they wrote this. If Gregg and the ABB did write this or ok'd Arista's writing this, did Gregg, Dickey, and the ABB do so

(1.) of their own unbiased and welcoming idea and accord,

***** or 2.) because Clive "twisted" their arms LOL! which Gregg alluded to very much in his memoirs when he said that the cheesy backup singers and keyboards and "pop" commercial direction of the 2 Arista albums were all at Clive Davis's orders and behest and that Gregg wished those 2 albums had never happened. I distinctly remember Gregg stating quote "you won't find copies of those 2 records in this house or the house of any other Allman Brothers Band member.")

[Edited on 7/16/2017 by ArleneWeiss]

Just reading on the net about the upcoming Peacemaker Festival. Festival operator talks about the great bands and musicians coming to perform. When Jeff Gosey highlights Gov't Mule he says " Gov't Mule is one of the best SOUTHERN ROCK bands performing today and Warren Haynes is a beast of a guitar player.

Haynes is interviewed and talks about how hard it was to keep going after Allen Woody died and how hard the deaths of Gregg and Butch were on.him this year saying he was in that for 25 years and traveled the world with Gregg and Butch.

Warren said the most complicated song the Mule does is Kind of Bird " me and Dickey Betts wrote that for the Allman Brothers. At one point the Allman Brothers quit doing it because a couple of members got tired of trying to remember how it goes and having to relearn it."

Remember seeing Gregg solo in summer of 1982 and I ask a roadie why the Allman Brothers broke up a couple months earlier and was told Gregg isn't interested in playing in that band right now so he left and took Danny Toler with him. Said the other guys are still together and added Jimmy Hall and are also doing theaters and clubs. I ask what happened and he said they owe Clive Davis another album but the man want to dictate to them what to write and how to dress. He wants hit singles and gold albums and when Reach for the Sky failed to go gold, rather than backing off, Davis turned up the pressure and made them use a producer on the last one that just ruined what Gregg felt was the legacy of his brother's band and that album sold even less so Gregg isn't having anything to do with the next one so he backed out. Dickey, Butch and Chuck are still together but they feel the same about Clive so for right now the ABB is on the shelf. He said their shows were not selling well of late anyway and they voted Jaimoe out so it was coming apart. I ask about Jaimoe and was told he only played on 3 tracks on Reach For the Sky and was missing sets and sometimes complete shows with a back problem then put his wife up to demanding a money audit of the band so the other 3 sacked him.

I won't mention this roadie's name. And not sure his info is accurate. It wasn't a good period for the band and apparently Gregg jumped ship and took Danny Toler with him.

We all know who our favorite Southern Rock groups are, but nobody ever talks about their favorite Western Rock groups, or Midwestern, Northwestern, Southwestern, Eastern or Northern Rock groups.

And shouldn't Country and Western really be Country and Eastern, or Midwestern anyway? And Southern Rock is really mostly Southeastern, which is just a sub-heading of Eastern Rock.

Like, "Kansas is great Midwestern Rock, man! Think I'll get a shirt with their logo and a Kansas state flag on it,"

or "wow man, Aerosmith is killer Northern Rock, check out my cool t-shirt with a picture of the band in Civil War Union soldier blue uniforms!"

Hahaha, or "whoa, the Grateful Dead is the best Western Rock band, BE PROUD YER A HIPPY CUZ THE WEST GONNA DO IT AGIN !"

can't forget Pearl Jam and Nirvana, the vanguard of Northwestern Rock, let's carve them into Haida totem poles.

And there are Ted Nugent and Bob Seger, NorthernMidWestern Rock.

Those who understood the bands who were from the south would call the sound southern music, because it came out of the south, from musicians who were from the south. The blues originally came from Africa from the slave music, well those slaves were transported to the US and ended up in the south where they worked on the plantations and kept that music alive. So the blues music from the south had it's beginnings from the slave music from Africa. The origins of southern blues music is from African music.

I guess I'm the one who instigated this whole mess. I don't think there is much doubt that the success of the ABB created an appetite for music from the South which paved the way to success for numerous artists from the region. I see it as a collective term for music from Southern artists, but a lot of people use the term as the description for a genre of music. Whatever floats your boat, ok?

I am very proud of my southern heritage. My family's roots go back quite a ways in South Carolina. Maybe some of you don't understand that prior to the emergence of the MTB, there wasn't any kind of a celebrity I can recall from my state. I don't really recall any others from Georgia or North Carolina. The success of these bands and the music from the South was indeed a great source of pride. There wasn't a whole lot of wealth and really not too much economic development up to that time and somehow it seemed to me like the success of those musicians signalled that anything was possible.

I'm hoping that maybe just one or two of you who still thinks everybody down here who loves his southern roots is some beer swilling, confederate flag waving, redneck might actually understand the source of this regional pride....although most of you who think that way are probably more like that than anyone I know or associate with down here. Nevertheless, if Gregg, Dickey, et al, wish to refer to themselves as a progressive blues band, that is fine with me. Whatever label they want to eschew or adapt makes no difference to me. There is good and bad music in every category. Oh, they didn't want to be categorized? I guess they thought they invented music or came up with their own musical scales. How vain is that? Sorry Gregg, every musician since the dawn of time has been mixing around the same 7 notes.

Would any person here object to being a jazz legend, a blues legend, or a southern rock legend? Frankly, I just wish I were any kind of a legend. "Southern Rock Legend" is not accurate enough or maybe not politically correct enough for certain effete high minded intellectual types to describe a guy from the South whose success made success possible for a whole lot of other people in the region which instilled a lot of pride in a whole lot other people in that region. If he's not a Southern Rock Legend to you, he still is to me. It may be "ridiculous", but I like it anyway.

This is actually a real worthwhile topic. I hear you man, no doubt. I was just making some fun.

Local groups make good, that means a lot for sure, especially for a region that had been through so much hell over the years and viewed as a backwater, like here we are now, and we are the hippest thing in the country, which it was in the early 1970s, all the way into deep Yankee burbs. And for us kids it was really rebellious, a real f*ck you to the urban monster system. Closest thing I ever felt to that was when bands took over out of the Pacific Northwest, and I was in one of the forgotten few that were kickin jams in Olympia just before it broke thru, its like alright, take that California and New York and London. Probably way more profound for the SoRock phenomenon though.

When it first hit, with ABB and Skynyrd and MTB, it wasn't so defined for Southern, (although when Skynyrd lowered the Confederate flag as their backdrop at the Academy of Music in 74 all hell broke loose, hahaha, that was a fun near-riot, frekin painful loud show, some of the best rock I ever heard, van zant was brave man, bottles were flying right at him and he just got meaner, actually kind of scared me), it was more about this cool southern vibe, this freeflowing sunshiney easygoing, also *asskicking and blistering rock, for sure you could feel it, a real nice liberation from the commercial rock landscape of ultra cool demonic and threatening hi tech prog and impending disco - but then SoRock it just started to get weird when the civil war stuff came along later, Confederate Railroad (well I guess they're more country) the more extreme Charlie Daniels stuff.

It went from chords to cordite. How about a book "From Chords to Cordite: The Degeneration of Southern Rock"

One thing for sure, southern rock always took itself too darn serious. It's just great music, who cares. Anyway, Southern Rock's really good though, the early stuff, except maybe Black Oak Arkansas, I mean come on, let's face it, they sucked.

For sure the ABB never really had that one "southern anthem" type of song other SoRocker bands had, like "Sweet Home Alabama", or "The South Gonna Do It Again" and so on. But they can't really get out of being the Fathers of Southern Rock. Still they did a good job of dodging the label, they had to be awesome musicians to pull that off. Like Sean Connery trying to make everyone forget he's James Bond.

Seems like Charlie Daniels was the one who kicked the whole thing into overkill, then that "rebel yell" vibe escaped over into modern country music where it now thrives and is mutating into something really bizarro, especially as it combines with more recent pop styles - just strange, man.

"Brothers Of The Road" which I happen to adore

You may be the only one....

For sure the ABB never really had that one "southern anthem" type of song other SoRocker bands had, like "Sweet Home Alabama", or "The South Gonna Do It Again" and so on. But they can't really get out of being the Fathers of Southern Rock.

I wonder if they considered songs like that a cheap way of playing to the crowd. I don't think they would have objected if you said they helped create that style because they know they inspired those other bands. I think they disliked being lumped in with groups who weren't as good. It was the same way with the jamband label. (I used to say that if you want to start a jamband, step one was say you weren't a jamband.) I've stopped objecting to the idea of genre labels as a fan over the years, but as an artist being marketed by a label or a company I can imagine it gets pretty annoying.

Maybe down South, Southern Rock at first was just Rock? And the label came from somewhere else to define it?

Like in Canada, bacon is just bacon, not Canadian Bacon. And Texas Toast is just toast in Texas.

Lynyrd Skynyrd had more to do with British rock, the band Free was huge influence, than it ever got from the Allman Brothers.

Put that together when I heard the song "The Stealer" by Free. I thought, "man that really sounds like a Lynyrd Skynyrd song," then some minutes passed with a bubbling sound and some coughing with speaker cones rippin and flappin and I went on to wonder, "why does that sound like a Lynyrd Skynryd song?", then hypothesized, "I bet Skynrd really likes Free." Then longtime suspicion later confirmed in Al Kooper's account of working with LS, Van Zandt or someone talks about Free being a sound they were after. (in Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, by Al Kooper).

Loved the story of how the Who were blown away when LS backed them up, and the crowd was just as stoked for LS as it was for the Who.

Still that trademark big fat clean lead guitar with the tasty chops, had to have started with the Allman Brothers Band. Rock lead was pretty insane and sloppy before they came along, raised the bar.

(come to think of it. Texas Toast would be a good psychedelic *sskicker Southern Rock band name)

For sure the ABB never really had that one "southern anthem" type of song other SoRocker bands had, like "Sweet Home Alabama", or "The South Gonna Do It Again" and so on. But they can't really get out of being the Fathers of Southern Rock.

I wonder if they considered songs like that a cheap way of playing to the crowd. I don't think they would have objected if you said they helped create that style because they know they inspired those other bands. I think they disliked being lumped in with groups who weren't as good. It was the same way with the jamband label. (I used to say that if you want to start a jamband, step one was say you weren't a jamband.) I've stopped objecting to the idea of genre labels as a fan over the years, but as an artist being marketed by a label or a company I can imagine it gets pretty annoying.

For sure the ABB never really had that one "southern anthem" type of song other SoRocker bands had, like "Sweet Home Alabama", or "The South Gonna Do It Again" and so on.

I'd think Ramblin' Man is about as close to that description as you can get....That's one of the biggest "southern anthems" ever written, especially with the references to Georgia, Highway 41, Nashville and New Orleans. Whether Dickey intended it that way is a different story and he probably didn't. But IMHO it screams "Southern Anthem" if I ever heard one.

And as overplayed and worn out as it is, I STILL love that damn song because every time you hear it, it still puts an instant smile on your face and makes you feel happy and uplifted. The Gospel according to Dickey from the Good Book of "Southern Anthems"!!

[Edited on 7/17/2017 by MACONMUSIC]

[Edited on 7/17/2017 by MACONMUSIC]

 

I am very proud of my southern heritage. My family's roots go back quite a ways in South Carolina. Maybe some of you don't understand that prior to the emergence of the MTB, there wasn't any kind of a celebrity I can recall from my state. I don't really recall any others from Georgia or North Carolina. The success of these bands and the music from the South was indeed a great source of pride. There wasn't a whole lot of wealth and really not too much economic development up to that time and somehow it seemed to me like the success of those musicians signalled that anything was possible.

I'm hoping that maybe just one or two of you who still thinks everybody down here who loves his southern roots is some beer swilling, confederate flag waving, redneck might actually understand the source of this regional pride....although most of you who think that way are probably more like that than anyone I know or associate with down here. Nevertheless, if Gregg, Dickey, et al, wish to refer to themselves as a progressive blues band, that is fine with me. Whatever label they want to eschew or adapt makes no difference to me. There is good and bad music in every category. Oh, they didn't want to be categorized? I guess they thought they invented music or came up with their own musical scales. How vain is that? Sorry Gregg, every musician since the dawn of time has been mixing around the same 7 notes.

Artists hailing from the south who achieved success that predate the MTB

SC: James Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, Eartha Kitt, Chubby Checker.

NC: John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Ronnie Milsap, Earl Scruggs, Nina Simone.

GA: Ray Charles, Jerry Reed, Little Richard, Curtis Mayfield, Otis Redding.

I think Gregg and Dickey probably did feel a source of pride of their roots and both men seem to speak fondly of their family heritage, but being lumped in with the likes of Blackfoot and Molly Hatchet seems to be what they were trying to get away from.

Also, there are more than 7 notes. Western Music has these things called accidentals that make 12 notes. There are also microtones but that's another ball of wax.

Learning is fun sometimes.

The problem with defining the ABB is that they were never the same band after Duane's tragic death. It was his vision they were fulfilling and without his guiding hand on the tiller the ship took a different course. Duane was heavily into the blues and jazz and those were the dominant influences for the original six. Dickey's influences were more towards western swing, bluegrass and country and the music of the ABB after the loss of Duane, although still rooted in the blues, naturally reflected that. IMO, if you are looking for the building blocks of the "southern anthems" you will find them in Blue Sky and Jessica. Like Gregg said like father to son. Just my two cents.

I think Gregg and Dickey probably did feel a source of pride of their roots and both men seem to speak fondly of their family heritage, but being lumped in with the likes of Blackfoot and Molly Hatchet seems to be what they were trying to get away from.

Boom! The term "Southern Rock" is best left for those who have absolutely no idea who wrote "Stormy Monday" or "Done Somebody Wrong"...