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 on "Ramblin' Man" they tore it up with a country-rock-meets-blues-rock shuffle where the twin guitarists — not the singer — get all the best hooks. The second of Southern rock's Twin Towers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, kicked out arguably the genre's greatest cut: "Free Bird." Its half-ballad, half-boogie split-personality; dreamy, scream-y slide guitar; backwoods snake-handling gospel organ; and philosophical profundity make it the standard against which every other Dixie-fied track - by outfits ranging from the Marshall Tucker Band to the Charlie Daniels Band - will always be compared.

And it would be one of Skynyrd's kin who would lead Southern Rock into the MTV era, as we'll see 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 "If I'd Been the One" owes as much to Boston as to any place south of the Mason-Dixon. A second less-famous brother, Jimmy Vaughn, proved to MTV that the Fabulous Thunderbirds, with their chunky, rockin' blues, were "Tuff Enuff" to compete with the channel's headbangers and new-wave mousse abusers. And ZZ Top, two of whom looked like brothers, toiled in the Texas badlands for years before perfecting their trademark blend of barrelhouse boogie-blooze and tumbleweed-dry wit, as in "Cheap Sunglasses."

Like Charlie Daniels had promised so many years before, "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. In "Ronnie and Neil," Drive-By Truckers singer Patterson Hood's whiskey-and-bleach-chaser voice rages about two of his heroes: Skynyrd's legendary leader and "Southern Man's" Canadian writer. In "Mojo Box," Carolina's favorite chicken-flinging party band, Southern Culture on the Skids, took surf music, dropped it into the swamp, and gave it a rockabilly-style d.a. 'do. And with "Dancefloors," My Morning Jacket rode the Americana highway's high-lonesome whine into the reverb chamber to emerge somewhere between Galaxie 500 and Neil Young.

As the Woodstock nation hoofed it on back to its home territories, a sound as Southern as hooch and hound dogs reemerged, like cicadas after a long slumber, 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, Sea Level, the Dixie Dregs, and a double-wide trailerful of others. Along with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Little Feat, 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 razorback rolls in mud.