August 14, 1973: The Birth of Southern Rock

The Allman Brothers Band's Brothers and Sisters and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Pronounced both hit the streets on the same day

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Why is August 14, 1973 the birth of Southern rock?

Only yesterday did I realize that two of the most important albums of the Southern Rock era hit the marketplace on the same date 50 years ago: the Allman Brothers Band’s Brothers and Sisters and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s debut, Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd.

The success of these records led record labels and the music industry to adopt the term “Southern rock” for bands that hailed from the South and played rock music.

• Brothers and Sisters was the ABB’s much-anticipated fifth record. It shipped gold (500,000 copies sold), hit #13 August 25 and was #1 by September 1.

• Pronounced was Skynyrd’s first album. It debuted at #165 September 22 and remained on the charts for 79 weeks, peaking at #27 by February 1974.¹

Neither record was hailed as “Southern rock” upon their release. The term simply wasn’t en vogue. Billboard called Brothers and Sisters “a fine blues-rock set,” the ABB the nation’s “top commercial blues band.” Skynyrd’s album was “a new entry to the list of strong, clean-lined Southern rock 'n' roll groups.” (Not Southern rock, Southern rock ‘n’ roll.)

When I researched Play All Night, I found no reference to the Allman Brothers Band as “southern rock” in Duane Allman’s lifetime. The first use I uncovered was from southern writer/musician Robert Palmer² in 1969 describing southern musicians, not their music. That same year, British critic Nik Cohn called rock ’n’ roll pioneers Little Richard, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and Fats Domino “southern rockers [who played] a mix-up of Black and white music. . . . Southern rock is hard rock.”³

Al Kooper (foreground) with Gary Rossington and Ronnie Van Zant repping the Swampers.

So where does the term “Southern rock” come from?

At least referring to the “genre,” the best I can tell is that it was the brainchild of either Al Kooper’s Sounds of the South label or MCA, its national distributor. Perhaps both.

MCA ads referencing Southern rock May, August, November 1973

The first time I found “southern rock” in Billboard is May 19, 1973, in an MCA advertisement. #3 on the list (above left) is Get Right by Mose Jones:

Al Kooper's Sounds of the South bows with this creation by the music professionals of Southern Rock—a combination of r & b, soul, jazz, and blues—yet true to its straight forward Southern foundations.

An August ad used “Southern rock” in relation only to the label—despite including Skynyrd’s Pronounced in the ad (middle ad, top right, the open cigarette pack—a much less well-known version of the album cover)

“hot southern rock from Al Kooper’s Sounds of the South label”

Finally, a November MCA ad included this promotion for the band Elijah:

“For Elijah’s Fanfare, Kooper heard them in L.A., he took them to Atlanta, and now they've gone national, thanks to their exciting first album, hot Southern rock.”⁴

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Southern rock over the years

By 1974, the term was in regular use across the music industry.

The definitions were always vague, but here’s what I came up for Play All Night.

Scott Bomar defines the Southern rock genre as music “rooted in a specific time, belonged to a particular place, created by musicians with similar formative and cultural experiences, [that] served as a key expression of a uniquely countercultural movement of the South.”⁵

Southern rock began in 1973 and lasted through the early 1980s, when a new southern rock sound, more punk- than country-influenced, emerged in Athens, Georgia, with R.E.M., Pylon, and the B-52s.

Three things are important to this definition (one I’ll never be 100% satisfied with).

1. The musicians stayed in the South. This is why Delaney and Bonnie and, later, Tom Petty, are not Southern rock.

2. The timing is a bit amorphous, mostly having to do with the emergence of MTV.

3. The change from a blues/country influence to punk. This is why the Athens bands aren’t Southern rock.⁶

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The ABB and Southern rock

Here’s what I wrote in Play All Night:

Defining “Southern rock” is difficult in part because the influences that converged into rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s were all southern to begin with. Subsequent generations of southerners, Black and white, adopted, adapted, and expanded these forms.

Far from the first southerners to play rock, the Allman Brothers were just the first southern band to do so successfully from the South in the rock era. Their success opened the floodgates of opportunity for southern musicians of the rock idiom.

“Southern rock” as a musical genre rather than descriptive term emerged around 1973. Prior to the invention of the term, the Allman Brothers Band were simply a rock band from the South. That they were also among the first to be marketed as “Southern rock” complicates matters. The band members themselves disliked the term, yet it became part of their legacy.⁷

The first time I find the ABB called “Southern rock” is in Billboard on December 29, 1973. The publication lauded the Allman Brothers Band as one of 15 recipients of its “Trendsetter Awards” for “focusing attention on southern rock music as America's super hard rock band.”⁸

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Thou shalt not call the Allman Brothers Band “Southern rock.”

One of the earliest commandments I learned in my ABB fandom is that fans want to disassociate the Allman Brothers Band from the genre.

There are a zillion reasons for this, most of them boiling down to a version of either:

1. “How can you POSSIBLY compare the ABB’s superior music to [insert Southern rock band here]?!” (Often Skynyrd)

MY QUICK TAKE: True, the ABB were musician’s musicians. But it’s the general audience that defines a genre, not hardcore fans.

2. “The ABB weren’t Southern rock, they hated the term” along with some version of this quote from Gregg that I included in Play All Night!

   “All rock ’n’ roll came from the South, it is southern by definition. You might as well call it Rock rock.” Gregg Allman

MY QUICK TAKE: Gregg’s right, but nearly every musician disavows genre, the ABB included. And like point 1 above, as much as they want to, musicians don’t define genre—particularly one created as a marketing term.

3. A disavowal of the racist undertones of Southern rock’s embrace of Confederate imagery: “How could they be racist, they were an integrated band?! And they never used the rebel flag!”

MY QUICK TAKE: The ABB did use Confederate imagery in the Brothers and Sisters era.⁹ Second, touring with two Black musicians, Jaimoe and Lamar Williams, and playing Black-influenced music did not make the ABB immune to the forces of racism that permeated Southern culture throughout the 1970s.

It’s a complex topic, and something I talked about a bit in Play All Night and at greater length in the 2023 Byington Lecture on the Contemporary South, “Lessons from Duane Allman’s Journey to Fillmore East,” which I presented at Mercer University this year.¹⁰

But no matter which way you look at it, the ABB are a Southern rock band.

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What does all this have to do with today’s anniversary?

Brothers and Sisters, the record the ABB released August 14, 1973, is the ABB’s first record of the Southern rock era.¹¹

The album redefined the band’s sound from the trademark twin lead guitars of the Duane era to a single guitar (Dickey Betts) with piano providing a second lead instrument (Chuck Leavell).

This is also the period when Betts led the ABB creatively. Though the group remained solidly grounded in jazz and blues, its original music took a slightly more country bent in some places. Brothers and Sisters definitely has a heavy Western Swing influence (“Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica” in particular).¹²

August 14 is also the release date of one of Southern rock’s most enduring album’s Skynyrd’s Pronounced, a record that defines the Southern rock sound for many, including yours truly.

The album is a banger from front-to-back. Skynyrd was a super-tight band clearly ready for their opportunity in the studio. Every song is deeply imprinted in my soul. I listened to “Simple Man” on the way to my wedding in 1996, play a version of “Tuesday’s Gone” with my band to this day, and have put “Freebird” on a jukebox in a packed bar at least a half-dozen times over the years to watch folks go apeshit during the guitar outro.

Fellow Floridians a few years Duane and Gregg’s junior, the Skynyrd boys looked up to the Allmans, who first recorded in 1966, years before Skynyrd first laid down demos for Jimmy Johnson in Muscle Shoals.

The groups remain inextricably linked by chronology, geography, and culture.¹³ They are two bedrock Southern rock bands for sure.

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Some final thoughts:

1. I don’t often compare Skynyrd and the ABB, but when I think about them from a musical perspective, I realize how much the guitar playing on Pronounced opened me to the supreme artistry that was Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. The Allman Brothers Band were a step above, for sure. As Skynyrd’s Ed King acknowledged, “They were virtuosos. We were not.”¹⁴

2. There’s a little confusion on the release dates of both of these records. There is no “official” documented release date for Brothers and Sisters. Here’s how I came up with August 14:¹⁵

   Records were always released on Tuesdays to give a release more time to to hit the charts. (Here’s why.) Brothers & Sisters debuted at #13 on 8/25. August 14 is the Tuesday a week previous. (Remember, Brothers and Sisters shipped gold, meaning it hit the charts immediately upon release).

3. There’s something about the piano that defines the early Southern rock sound to me. Both the ABB’s and Skynyrd’s records feature the piano prominently, as did the Marshall Tucker’s Band’s debut, released earlier in 1973. This would change as by the later 70’s, many Southern rock bands, including the Allman Brothers Band, favored a hard-driving boogie blues sound.

Thanks for reading y’all. If you enjoyed it, there’s much more of this to come. Say tuned.

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A langiappe

Resharing this documentary American Revolutions: Southern Rock as it helps define the emergence of the era very well.

1. Nearly 6 months longeron the chart than Brothers & Sisters!

2. Palmer is a touchstone for me and I included him on my list of the best books at the crossroads of music, culture, history, and place.

3. The only other mention I found before 1973 was reviewer of At Fillmore East who called the band “a funky bunch of southern blues rockers.”

4. Via Southern California I guess.

5. Scott B. Bomar, Southbound: An Illustrated History of Southern Rock. San Francisco: Backbeat, 2014.

6. Timing is also why Drive-By Truckers or Widespread Panic aren’t Southern rock. The term was simply out of use when they emerged on the scene.

7. Whenever I capitalize “Southern rock,” I am referring to the record-industry term that came of age in 1973.

8. I recognize Billboard isn’t the be-all, end-all, but it was the industry bible for years (may still be). If you’ve spent time with the Creem or Hit Parader or Crawdaddy archives, please let me know.

9. The latter was a bit of selective memory. Capricorn definitely used Confederate imagery to promote the band after 1974 or so.

10. I genuinely hope you’ll check out the video. I’m pretty proud of this presentation.

11. Which I will later argue extends from 1973’s Brothers and Sisters to 1990’s Seven Turns.

12. I’ve always seen “Blue Sky” from Eat a Peach as a precursor to this sound.

13. And, sadly, tragedy.

14. From Gone with the Wind: The Remarkable Rise and Tragic Fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd (2015).

15. I saw some posts saying August 13 as the release date for Pronounced. August 13 was a Monday.