Delta Swamp Rock

Soul Jazz Records' new 'Delta Swamp Rock' is a definitive guide to the music of the southern states of USA created between 1968-1975 where country, rock and soul met. Accompanying the deluxe double CD is a weighty 52-page book with loads of exclusive sleevenotes, photographs and biographies.

At the heart of this story lies the small town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, (population around 10,000) which was central to the production of southern soul music produced in the United States in the second-half of the 1960s.

A triangle drawn between Memphis, Nashville and Muscle Shoals explains the town's unique musical sound, an emotive mixture of soul and driving rhythm and blues with elements of country music created by a group of mainly white musicians, famously referred to by Lynyrd Skynyrd in the song 'Sweet Home Alabama' as the 'Swampers'. These in-house session musicians helped sell millions of records playing on countless classic soul records cut at Muscle Shoals in the 1960s by visiting artists such as Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Clarence Carter and more.

As the start of the 1970s approached, a new type of music emerged out of the southern states of Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida. Southern rock was the creation of blue-collar white Americans who blended rock, country and blues music together in a unique fashion, presenting to America a newly discovered pride in southern values, the regions natural landscape and a way of life.

The undisputed leaders of this movement were The Allman Brothers, based around the talented, charismatic guitarist Duane Allman and his brother, vocalist and keyboardist Gregg Allman. While the Allman Brothers pioneered a unique fusion of rock, country and even jazz music, the more down-to-earth Lynyrd Skynyrd epitomised the definitive southern rock group - a mixture of blues-rock with southern rebelliousness and attitude. Unfortunately both The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd were to be struck by tragedy, which would ultimately dovetail the movement's rise and fall.

The back-story to southern rock was the fact that a number of the people involved in the creation of this new musical movement had in fact also been connected to the production of southern soul music that had earlier come out of Memphis, Tennessee, and nearby Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Southern rock's evolution was a continuance of the meeting between rhythm and blues and country music first explored by the first generation of rock and roll artists that came out of Sam Phillips' Sun studio in Memphis way back in the 1950s.