Southern Rock

Gregg Allman once said the moniker Southern rock is, "a bit redundant; it's like calling it 'rock rock'". Regardless, the Allman Brothers Band were the kings of Southern rock, and with their signature country rock ballad "Melissa" they offered a counterpoint to the scene's tough-as-leather, good ole boy bravado. The second of Southern rock's titans, Lynyrd Skynyrd, cranked it up several notches with "Sweet Home Alabama" — a spit n' sawdust masterpiece that takes a pop at Neil Young in the wake of "Southern Man" — while ZZ Top delivered their trademark blend of barrelhouse boogie-blooze and tumbleweed-dry wit in 1973 with "La Grange": their one-chord celebration of an infamous bordello.

Southern Rock creates solid outposts on the post-'70s landscape, in Next Steps.

Donnie Van Zant, brother of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Ronnie, followed his kin into the family business, forming country-fried proto-arena rockers .38 Special, whose power-chord-fuelled "Wild-Eyed Southern Boys" (1981) owes as much to Boston as to any place south of the Mason-Dixon line. A second less-famous brother, Jimmie Vaughn, proved that the Fabulous Thunderbirds, with their chunky, rockin' blues, were "Tuff Enuff" to compete with the '80s headbangers and new-wave mousse abusers. And on "Ronnie and Neil" (2001), Drive-By Truckers singer Patterson Hood's whiskey-and-bleach-chaser voice rages about two of his heroes: Skynyrd's leader and "Southern Man's" Canadian writer.

We dredge up more from Southern Rock's thick swamp, in Deep Cuts.

Like Charlie Daniels had promised, "The South's gonna do it again." While the battle-scarred Allmans and Skynyrd staggered into the '90s as original members wore away like snakeskin, a young breed seized the rebel flag and flew it high. With 2004's "Mojo Box" Carolina's favourite chicken-flinging party band, Southern Culture on the Skids, took surf music, dropped it into the swamp, and gave it a rockabilly-style duck's arse hairdo. Going the other way, with one finger on the Southern Rock rewind button, we get to the roots of the genre with psychedelic blues band the Moving Sidewalks, best known as the outfit in which ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons cut his teeth: check out "You Make Me Shake".

As the Woodstock nation hoofed it on back to its home territories, a sound as Southern as moonshine and hound dogs emerged out of Macon, Georgia, headquarters to Capricorn Records. Named for its founders' zodiac sign, Capricorn hung out the yellow porch light that attracted the Allman Brothers, the Marshall Tucker Band, Elvin Bishop, Wet Willie, the Dixie Dregs, and a double-wide trailerful of others. Along with Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, and a few other scrappy renegades, they defined the gator-hide-tough sound of Southern Rock. Fuzz-wracked guitars snarled over a boogified blues backbeat, as Jack Daniel's-drenched vocalists goaded their audience to revel in their rebel culture the way a hog rolls in mud. These Essentials take you from those beginnings right through to tracks from modern southern-flavoured rockers like My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses and Kings of Leon.