One evening not long ago I was backstage at Wetlands, a rock club on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, talking with Mike Farris, the 27-year-old singer for Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies, a band from Tennessee. Standing nearby was Warren Haynes, the North Carolina-born guitarist for Gov’t Mule and a former member of the Allman Brothers Band. Mr. Haynes was chatting with the Allmans’ longtime road manager, Kirk West, who was up from Georgia for a couple of weeks and had decided to check out the Wheelies show. The vibe in that musty, beer-strewn dressing room felt as familiar as a family reunion, and I noticed that my own North Carolina drawl had sneaked right out of me without my having realized it.
This bizarre behavioral reflex happens when Southern transplants feel safe. Back in 1958, another expatriate from Dixie, the historian C. Vann Woodward posed an ominous question: "Has the Southern heritage become an old hunting jacket that one slips on comfortably while at home but discards when he ventures abroad in favor of some more conventional or modish garb?" Sadly, the answer seems to be yes. When I moved to New York in the mid-1980’s, I made a conscious effort to purge the Southern vernacular from my speech. Today, I am not compelled to suppress my identity, and for that I can thank not only the increasing predominance of Southerners in American politics and culture but also bands like the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies.
You see, rock-and-roll may have saved my life but Southern rock made it worth living. This is not just glib regional cheerleading. For white Southerners like me, who began the first grade in the wake of desegregation and came to embrace the rock counterculture as an alternative life style, my declaration of ancestral pride carries a subtext of tremendous emotional weight. If rock-and-roll had initially provided refuge from the South’s legacy of violence and bigotry, Southern rock offered an emotional process by which my generation could leave behind the burdens of guilt and disgrace, and go home again.
The Allman Brothers, formed in Macon, Ga., charted this course back in 1969. But the trail has been advanced by new generations of Dixie rockers who still grapple with that most precious of Southern possessions: cultural identity. The difference is that today’s Southern musicians feel free to tackle issues directly that were once taboo- racial antagonism, expressions of self-respect- rather than dealing with their feelings defensively or addressing them through metaphor. In the song "World of Difference," from Gov’t Mule’s 1995 debut album, Mr. Haynes sings: "Black shoot black, white take all/ Color will be our downfall…I hate you ‘cause you hated my father/ You hate him, his fathers raped your daughters/ Hate breeds fear, fear breeds sin/ Survival is your only friend/ When we die, we’re all the same."
Gov’t Mule, which is based in Georgia, and the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies are but two of a growing number of new bands carrying the Southern rock torch. Others include Widespread Panic (Georgia), Bottle Rockets (Missouri), Hootie and the Blowfish (South Carolina) and the Dave Matthews Band (Virginia). All of these groups put a 90’s spin to a phenomenon that reached its peak of popularity more than two decades ago.
But what gave rise to this recent confluence? Those close to the source - like Phil Walden, the owner of Capricorn Records, the pre-eminent Southern rock label of the 1970’s - point to the music’s no-frills integrity. "There is something satisfying about the way this new music from the South connects with the old music from the South," Mr. Walden said in a telephone conversation from his office in Atlanta. "It’s a very honest, very powerful connection."
Mr. Walden knows what he’s talking about; after all, he is the father of Southern rock. He managed the soul legend Otis Redding in the early 60’s, then went on to start the careers of the Allman Brothers and the Marshall Tucker Band of South Carolina. In 1976, Mr. Walden and his growing stable of Southern rock bands helped elect a Southern President, Jimmy Carter. The Allman Brothers, together with non-Capricorn Dixie rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Charlie Daniels Band, not only helped create a climate that brought the South into vogue in the middle 70’s, but they actually campaigned for Mr. Carter. By the early 80’s, Capricorn was bankrupt and Mr. Walden had burned out on drugs and alcohol. But in 1991, a newly sober Phil Walden restarted his company. Since then, he and his son, Phil Walden Jr., have signed a slew of new artists including the Wheelies, Gov’t Mule and Widespread Panic.
The new Southern rock bands get their boost not from mainstream music critics or MTV, but from dogged touring and a positive buzz among young fans outside the urban centers. At a time when the music industry has focused its attention on more urban flavors - everything from the electronic pop of Prodigy to the rhythm-and blues and hip-hop of Puff Daddy - such fans must look beyond the New York-London-Los Angeles axis for their musical nourishment. The annual Horde festival, a rootsy package tour founded in 1992 by Widespread Panic and the non-Southern band Blues Traveler as an alternative to the alternative-rock Lollapalooza tour, thrives on acts like the Wheelies and Gov’t Mule. But while Lollapalooza, which ignited the careers of Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins, closed up shop this summer because of lack of interest, Horde remains alive and well. What’s more, in a surprising development, the reunited Lynyrd Skynyrd - led by Johnny Van Zant, the brother of the band’s original singer, Ronnie Van Zant, who was killed in 1977 when the group’s plane crashed in Mississippi - is one of the hottest tickets of this summer’s touring season.
Skynyrd’s renewed popularity was spurred in part by VH1’s constant showing of the documentary "Lynyrd Skynyrd: Behind the Music" and the concert film "Freebird: The Movie," but the connection that today’s fans feel to the group’s gutbucket boogie sound had to have already existed for them to respond so strongly to those shows.
At the heart of that connection is the ever-evolving moral quandary in Southern rock. The multiracial Allman Brothers Band, having emerged at the tail-end of the civil rights movement, originated a hypnotic blend of gospel, country, blues, jazz and psychedelic rock, which provided a kind of integration no legislation could achieve. The band’s organist, Gregg Allman, sang with a melancholy that ran deeper than the blackness of a backyard well. One of the finest American blues singers, Mr. Allman has a voice that positively bleed guilt, shame and sorrow. You could hear it in his earliest songs. "I went up on the mountain/ To see what I could see," Mr. Allman, then 22, moaned over the mournful, churchlike organ of "Dreams." "The whole world was falling/ Right down in front of me." When I first heard the Allmans, I was 11 years old and felt as if someone was finally articulating my feelings. I wasn’t the only one. The Allmans’ formidable double-percussion and double-lead-guitar sound galvanized a generation of Southern musicians: the Marshall Tucker Band emerged with a jazzy, flute-fueled variation on that sound; the Charlie Daniels Band, from Tennessee, took a more traditional country approach to it; ZZ Top tromped out of Texas with a meatier, straight-blues strain.
But it was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s interpretation that became the Southern rock archetype. This Florida band took the emotional process that the Allmans had begun to another level, adding a hard-rock wallop and an edgy anger to its bluesy blend of Southern musical traditions. Ronnie Van Zant railed against non-Southerners who painted the entire culture as racist. In 1974, Skynyrd hit the Billboard top 10 with "Sweet Home Alabama," a half-joking rebuttal to the Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young’s "Southern Man," a sweeping indictment of the South. Oddly enough, Mr. Young was among the few non-Southerners to get the joke, and Mr. Van Zant took to wearing a Neil Young T-shirt on stage to show that his scolding of Mr. Young was only a testament to his respect for the singer.
Southern rock had become the national rage. But three years later, around the time that Skynyrd’s plane crashed, the movement was eclipsed by disco and the first rumblings of punk. Lengthy guitar solos and earnest lyrics were out; short songs with ambiguous meanings were in. Where the Allmans had expressed sadness and Skynyrd anger, R.E.M., a five-piece band from the college town of Athens, Ga., took a wildly different approach to their cultural heritage. The band’s rich, multitextured guitar sound was warm and sometimes spooky; it reflected the ambiance, but not so much the emotional anxiety, of Southern life. The singer Michael Stipe’s garbled lyrics painted a more literary picture of the South, as did the cryptic title of R.E.M.’s third album, "Fables of the Reconstruction of the Fables." I asked Mr. Stipe, in 1991, what role his Southernness played in R.E.M.’s music, and his response echoed that of Mr. Walden: "It comes out in a number of ways, some very subtle, some more obvious. More importantly, it all comes down to honesty." For Mr. Stipe, however, honesty means expressing himself theatrically on stage and impressionistically in his lyrics. In one of his more lucid moments on "Fables," he growls: "Take a break, driver 8/ Driver 8, take a break/ We can reach our destination." Then adds, "But it’s still a ways away."
If, indeed, Southern musicians have been on an honest path to self-awareness in the years since desegregation changed our lives, then today’s Southern rock is perhaps the final stage in our emotional catharsis. Melancholy, anger and intellectual detachment are necessary steps in any such process, but acceptance is the ultimate goal. And the current bands seem to be headed in that direction. Both the Dave Matthews Band and Hootie and the Blowfish are racially mixed, though little is made of it. Widespread Panic and Gov’t Mule take their cues from the Allman Brothers - Widespread Panic focuses on their improvisational side and Gov’t Mule cranks out a heavy blues-rock sound colored by Mr. Haynes’s weeping, Duane Allman-style bottleneck slide guitar work - but neither displays the deep sense of grief found in Gregg Allman’s voice.
And the there are the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies, whose sassy rock-and-roll conjures the spirit of Lynyrd Skynyrd. But there’s a big difference between the Wheelies’ Mike Farris and Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant. Mr. Farris replaces anger with resolve. In fact, the Wheelies’ first album contains the most powerful song about Southern pride since "Sweet Home Alabama." But in "Moses Brown," Mr. Farris takes a more spiritual approach than Skynyrd did. Behind gentle acoustic guitar and conga drums, Mr. Farris sings: "Moses Brown told the children to sit down, please/ He noticed that they had lost their identity." By the end it is clear that no less than God himself speaks through the song’s biblically named protagonist. "You must forget about hard times, they have ended," Mr. Farris continues in a soulful rasp inspired by every Southern singer from Otis Redding to Michael Stipe. "And if you ever need me to lean upon, reach to the sky and sing this song." Nearly 30 years after the Allmans, bands like Gov’t Mule and Widespread Panic take an honest look at what it means to be a Southerner.

(Interview by Mark Kemp, New York Times July 5th 1998)