Pictured: The Drive-By Truckers [© Jay Blakesberg]

Whither Southern Rock?

By Geoffrey Himes

Gregg Allman once told me that he hated the term Southern rock. Rock 'n' roll, he pointed out, was created in the American South, so all rock is Southern. To call something Southern rock, he argued, was redundant. "It's like saying, ‘Rock rock.'"

A valid point, perhaps, but not very helpful. For those of us who like to talk about music, the vocabulary of labels and categories is an essential tool. How can we refer to particular sounds shared by certain musicians if we can't use terms such as Northern soul, rockabilly, old school hip hop or Southern rock? Musicians may be allergic to categories because they're afraid to exclude a potential customer, but there's no reason their marketing concerns should spoil our conversations.

For there was an identifiable sound that emerged in the American Southeast in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Charlie Daniels Band the Outlaws, Molly Hatchet, Wet Willie, Blackfoot, Point Blank, Sea Level, the Dixie Dregs and Black Oak Arkansas sounded a whole lot more like each other than they resembled other Southern rock'n'rollers such as Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, Otis Redding, Jesse Winchester, Ann Peebles, R.E.M. or OutKast. If we're going to talk about those similarities, we have to ignore Gregg Allman's reservations and use the term Southern rock.

It's generally acknowledged that the genre's golden era was 1969-1977, from the release of the Allman Brothers Band's first album to the plane crash that killed Ronnie Van Zant, Lynyrd Skynyrd's lead singer. Those two bands dominated the scene with enduring albums such as the Allmans' Eat a Peach and Skynyrd's Second Helping and with epic live shows that still echo in the memory.

Not so widely recognized, however, is that Southern rock is enjoying a second golden era right now. Beginning with the North Mississippi Allstars' 2000 debut, Shake Hands with Shorty, and the Drive-By Truckers' 2001 breakthrough, Southern Rock Opera, the moribund genre has reawakened with a new burst of creativity. Once again Southern bands are using loud guitars and drums, blue-collar attitude, freewheeling solos and obvious roots in blues and country to explore what it means to live in the Old Confederacy.

This new wave of Southern-rock hasn't come close to the first wave's commercial clout, but the newcomers have not only matched their predecessors' artistic achievements but have also deepened and expanded them. Two new albums reinforce that point. The North Mississippi Allstars' Hernando takes the Allman Brothers' excavation of the blues and opens new shafts and reaches new geological strata. The Drive-By Truckers' Brighter Than Creation's Dark takes Lynyrd Skynyrd's examination of Southern working-class life and extends it into darker, creepier corners.

There's another new Southern-rock release worth noting: Lynyrd Skynyrd: Street Survivors--Deluxe Edition 30th Anniversary. In 1977, Skynyrd was coming into its own as a top arena act, thanks in large part to the previous year's platinum double live album, One More from the Road, which not only captured the group's boisterous live show but also functioned as a greatest-hits collection. The band needed a studio follow-up that would push them to the next level, and the first attempt was recorded in April at Miami's Criteria Studio with veteran producer Tom Dowd.

The band was unhappy with the results, however, and re-recorded six of the eight songs at Georgia's Studio One in July, with Rodney Mills and the band producing. Those six songs plus a leftover 1971 track and an old Steve Gaines song were released as Street Survivors on October 14, 1977, just three days before the band's plane crashed into a stand of Mississippi pine. Now, 31 years later, a two-CD box set has been released, with the 1977 album on one disc and a second disc that includes the Criteria Studios sessions plus five live performances from August 24, 1977, in Fresno, California.

Three decades later, it's not so clear that the Studio One tracks are superior to the Criteria originals. Yes, the released versions boast a bigger guitar sound and a fatter bottom, in line with the arena-rock aesthetic of the day. But if you prefer nightclub music to stadium music, you might prefer the subtlety of Dowd's approach. You might also prefer the two dropped songs--the formulaic but catchy "Georgia Peaches" and "Sweet Missy"--to their replacements--the formulaic and uncatchy "One More Time" and "Ain't No Good Life. You might also prefer the version of "Honky Tonky Night Time Man" with Van Zant's replacement lyrics to the released version with Merle Haggard's original lyrics.

The Deluxe Edition contains four versions of "That Smell"--one from Studio One, two from Criteria and one from Fresno. In any version, it was Lynyrd Skynyrd's greatest song. In much the same way that Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." was an acknowledgement that the escapism of "Born To Run" was a young man's illusion, "That Smell" was an admission that the hedonism of "Whiskey Rock-a-Roller" was the same.

Written by Van Zant soon after guitarist Allen Collins, guitarist Gary Rossington and pianist Billy Powell had all been involved in alcohol-fueled car crashes, "That Smell" warns that you can't outrun the consequences of what you do, not even if someone grants your request of "Gimme Three Steps." When Van Zant and the Honkettes warble, "Ooh, ooh, that smell," you can almost sense their noses curling up involuntarily at the odor of spilled motor oil and blood.

It took courage to write such a song, because the band's commercial success was built by selling a fantasy that you could drink hard, drive fast, seduce women, wave the rebel flag and still emerge from every complication and contradiction a "Free Bird." "That Smell" gave the lie to this fantasy. If Lynyrd Skynyrd's airplane hadn't run out of gas over Mississippi, perhaps Van Zant would have pushed further in that direction, revealing the dread not only behind drinking and drugging but also behind romantic relationships, families, work and Southern politics. We'll never know.

Or maybe we do know. Maybe the Drive-By Truckers' entire career is merely a demonstration of what Lynyrd Skynyrd might have done if their plane had made it to Baton Rouge. Using a triple-guitar attack to handle the same mix of country, blues and British hard-rock as Skynyrd, the DBTs have a sure grasp of the Skynyrd sound but use it to plumb the hollowness that follows celebration, inebriation and copulation as surely as Monday morning follows Saturday night. The DBTs' three singer-guitarist-songwriters--Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell--have dug into the shadows that Van Zant was just beginning to scratch when he died.

Some musicians are coy about their influences--they like to pretend that they sprang Jesus-like from a fatherless virgin birth--but not the Drive-By Truckers. They not only acknowledged their debt to Lynyrd Skynyrd on 2001's Southern Rock Opera but strung together 20 songs that investigated what it meant to be a Southern Rocker. What did it mean for Van Zant to attack Neil Young in "Sweet Home Alabama" and then become good friends with his target? What did it mean when the Skynyrd sound degenerated into the likes of Molly Hatchet? What did it mean when Skynyrd played in front of the Stars and Bars, the flag of a nation that split from the United States because many of its white people wanted to continue owning black people? What did it mean when Alabama governor George Wallace stood before that flag? When Alabama football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant did?

Southern Rock Opera wasn't as musically satisfying as the band's soon-to-arrive masterpieces, but it was a bold announcement of big ambitions. This band wasn't going to be satisfied with the familiar fare of pills, bottles, cars, guitars, guns and women, the usual swaggering celebration of being 21 and male. They wanted to make music out of the dread beneath the swagger--and not just with lyrics but also with guitar figures that seemed to call out to something that did not answer. It was obvious that the DBTs loved their native South at least as much as regional jingoists such as Charlie Daniels and Hank Williams Jr. But while the latter evinced an adolescent love for an idealized fantasy of the South, the DBTs pursued an adult love that recognized all the flaws of the region and loved it just the same.

You don't have to travel very far in America to find much to loathe and love, and the DBTs rarely strayed very far from the tri-city area of Florence/Muscle Shoals/Tuscumbia, straddling the Tennessee River in North Alabama. Like an earlier Southern writer, these scruffy musicians found a whole world in their small corner of the map, turning these blue-collar towns into their own Yoknapatawpha County. They conjured up shit-grinning bankers, incestuous siblings, pregnant fiancées, assembly-line workers, moonshine stills, bathroom meth labs, VFW halls, NASA rockets, Confederate cemeteries, big-finned Cadillacs, Mustang engines, winding back roads, the business end of a shotgun and tornadoes as loud as trains.

Three of the best Southern-rock albums ever made came in rapid succession: 2003's Decoration Day, 2004's The Dirty South and 2006's A Blessing and a Curse. Of course, it's easier to churn out three albums in four years when you have three terrific singer-songwriters in your ranks--which is three more than most bands can claim. Produced by David Barbe (ex-member of the spectacular punk trio Sugar), these three albums swelled and contracted in sound as needed, bursting forth with amplifier muscle at times and withdrawing into ghostly guitar figures at others, always allowing the smart lyrics to cut through and holding the whole thing together with bar-band bluster. If at times the seemingly ramshackle arrangements seemed likely to fly apart at any moment, that merely added to the suspense of the recordings.

The Drive-By Truckers were probably the proverbial "world's greatest rock'n'roll band" when they hit the road in 2005. On July 23 the quintet came to Artscape, Baltimore's free outdoor art festival, stood on a riser in the middle of Mount Royal Avenue, and lifted several of their best songs above even their studio versions.

Hood, a tall, rounded bear of a man with a striped shirt, curly beard and gold Les Paul, sang "Puttin' People on the Moon," the snarling complaint of a guy with one job at Wal-Mart and another for the numbers syndicate, a guy with no health insurance and a cancer-ridden wife. It wasn't Hood's autobiography, but it was the biography of who he could have been, of what many of his friends did become. It was a political song, inasmuch as he wondered why the government could afford to put people on the moon but couldn't find a hospital bed for his wife. But it wasn't an outside-looking-in expression of sympathy; it was an inside-looking-out bark of anger. "If I could solve the world's problems," he sang, "I'd probably start with hers and mine."

On "Sink Hole," the blonde-banged bassist Shonna Tucker and drummer Brad Morgan wound up the stuttering beat and the three guitarists played the bouncy hillbilly lick with shimmering overtones. As Hood sang of a family farm besieged by the bank, he declared, "I've always been a religious man" in a way that suggested his patience for such faith was running out. It was Cooley, tall, skinny and unshaven with a cigarette dangling precariously from the side of his mouth, who reminded everyone why the South was still worth loving despite all these problems. He sang "Carl Perkins' Cadillac," a celebration of Southern music, and "Daddy's Cup," a tribute to a racecar-driving father.

It was Jason Isbell, a short, baby-faced kid wearing a green army cap and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, who was able to resolve these contradictory impulses on the song "Outfit." The monologue of an aging father to his musician son, the lyrics acknowledge the injustice of getting stuck in a trailer park and working on wobbly ladders painting other people's houses. But the old man warns his son to never turn his back on his Southern background. "Don't sing with a fake British accent," the father declared to Isbell's lovely ballad melody. "Don't act like your family's a joke."

But what good does it do to be the "world's greatest rock'n'roll band" if you're spending most nights at a Motel 6 and not earning much more than the public-school teachers back home? That kind of dislocation between achievement and reward can tear any business apart, and it eventually fractured the Drive-By Truckers. Last year Isbell left the band to release a solo album, Sirens of the Ditch, that was respectable but far short of what he'd done the four previous years.

The remaining DBTs regrouped by going to ground. Patterson Hood's father was David Hood, the bassist from the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (a.k.a. the Swampers). The band backed everyone from Aretha Franklin to Wilson Pickett and was name-checked by Lynyrd Skynyrd in "Sweet Home Alabama." "Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers," Van Zant sang, "and they've been known to pick a song or two. Lord they get me off so much." Patterson and his friends grew up around R&B and that's where they returned.

Hood, Barbe and Bettye LaVette co-produced LaVette's 2007 album, The Scene of the Crime and used Hood, Cooley, Tucker and Morgan as the backing band. The title refers to Muscle Shoals Sound, the studio where LaVette made her 1972 album, Child of the Seventies, a brilliant record that could have been the Detroit soul singer's breakthrough, but a project that Atlantic Records inexplicably declined to release. LaVette returned, not so much grateful for a second shot as bristling with fury at chances denied.

The DBTs backed her up with a surprisingly lean groove, as muscular and minimalist as the previous generation's Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. More importantly, Hood and his bandmates reinforced the knotty tension of LaVette's songs with chord changes that were reluctant to resolve and guitar fills that lagged deliberately behind the beat till they snapped close again. The result was the best album of LaVette's career.

Those lessons carried over into the DBTs' next album, this year's Brighter Than Creation's Dark. Spooner Oldham, the keyboardist who played on so many classic Muscle Shoals sessions including LaVette's, plays on the new DBTs album too. The stripped-down, country-soul arrangements that had framed LaVette's slicing vocals, dominate the new disc. The shadowy mood of ache and anger transferred as well. It's still Southern-rock, but it's a leaner, meaner version.

How can it not be? When the musicians are in their 40s, and discovering their adventures with women and drink are no longer as carefree as before, how can the songs not be haunted by a sense of narrowing opportunities? In a region where the politics and religion have grown even more reactionary since Ronnie Van Zant died, where the prospects of the wage earner have grown bleaker, where the rewards for the world's greatest Southern-rock band have dwindled away to almost nothing, how can the music not be filled with an awareness of paradise lost?

Paradise is evoked on the opening track, Hood's "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife," a description of heaven as "laying ‘round in bed on a Saturday morning [with] two daughters and a wife." But the music is so slow and sad--especially in the ghostly pedal-steel fills supplied by John Neff, an alumnus of the band and a member again--that it's clear just how far away from Florence, Alabama, heaven really is. On the weary country shuffle of "Perfect Timing," Cooley describes heaven as souls spending "their afterlives trying hard to live the last one down."

Having already tackled many of the great Southern themes--Southern music, Southern politics, Southern history, Southern drinking, Southern back roads--the Drive-By Truckers have now tackled one more: Southern religion. It's a region studded by whitewashed steeples out in cotton or cane fields, surrounded by dented pick-ups and gas guzzlers. Inside on the buttock-worn pews, the women stare straight ahead, deliberately not glancing at the hangover-heavy eyelids of the men beside them. Meanwhile the preacher tries to scare them away from sin and modernity, even as the unbridled music of the wild-ass guitarist beneath the pulpit brings those qualities ever closer.

Southern Protestantism offers such a potent verbal and musical vocabulary that no Southern songwriter, no matter how agnostic, can resist it for long. Still, there's an ambivalence in these songs about Southern religion, capable of such powerful music and emotions but just as capable of so much damage. The DBTs seem as ambivalent as Cooley's character "Bob," who "goes to church every Sunday, every Sunday that the fish ain't biting.... He might kneel, but he never bends over."

In the otherworldly reverie of "The Purgatory Line," Tucker describes a marriage that's better than agony but far short of bliss, too promising to abandon, too flawed to embrace. On the midtempo country-rocker, "A Ghost To Most," Cooley casts a skeptical eye at those who "believe it's God's own hand on the trigger," because it's "easy when it's other people's evil ... you're judging." Much harder it is to judge the evil and frailty inside yourself, but many of the songs on this album do just that.

The album's central song is the twitchy Dylanesque rocker, "The Righteous Path," which begins as a catalogue of Hood's own life: "I've got a brand new car that drinks a bunch of gas; I've got a house in a neighborhood that's fading fast.... I don't know God, but I fear His wrath. I'm trying to keep focused on the righteous path." Finding that path is quite a challenge, though, when even your car and your house contain paradoxes and God Himself is unknowable. The failure of religion to present a plausible righteous path does not lessen our obligation to find one.

As the tension of the unresolved chord changes and Hood's increasingly desperate vocal tautens that tension, the song breaks open halfway through to reach beyond Hood's own personal problems to those of a longtime friend with "kids he don't see and several ex-wives" and a long list of "questions I can't answer." The implication is that we're all in this together; we all confront the same quandary of finding the righteous path with no reliable road signs. The DBTs aren't so foolish as to offer easy answers, but more than anyone else in pop music today, they're asking the right questions.

Brighter Than Creation's Dark may not match the high achievement of the DBTs' 2003-2006 trilogy, but it comes mighty close. Bassist Shonna Tucker's three efforts to fill the songwriting void left by the departure of her ex-husband Isbell are promising, but they're not the equal of "Outfit" or "Easy on Yourself." The album offers a generous portion of 18 songs, but at least four of them could easily have been sacrificed. And the 14 others are too much of the same weary, bleak mood.

But the album does include two terrific Iraq War songs from Hood ("The Man I Shot" and "The Home Front"); two great rock-criticism songs (Cooley's "Self-Destructive Zones" and Hood's "The Opening Act"), a heartbreaking country ballad (Cooley's "Lisa's Birthday") and three scary songs about the dead-end consequences of crime (Cooley's "Checkout Time in Vegas," Hood's "You and Your Crystal Meth" and Hood's "Goode's Field Road"). This may not be the equal of "Decoration Day," but it's still one of the year's best albums.

There's a lot more to be said about this second golden age of Southern-rock. A whole other essay can be written about the way the North Mississippi Allstars have extended the legacy of the Allman Brothers Band as effectively as the Drive-By Truckers have added to Lynyrd Skynyrd's. Another could be written about the way the Bottle Rockets, a band from the border state of Missouri, and their brilliant, Skynyrd-esque 1994 album, The Brooklyn Side, anticipated everything the DBTs would later do. One could call attention to the crucial contributions to the current revival by Jim Mize, Jon Dee Graham, James McMurtry, the Derek Trucks Band, Gov't Mule, Cowboy Mouth and more.

But for now, it's enough to point out that in this decade Southern-rock has not only risen from the dead but has also yielded some of the powerful music of its entire history. It's necessary to call attention, because the big spotlights of TV, radio and mass-circulation press have largely ignored the phenomenon, leaving only the feeble, wobbly flashlights of the nation's rock critics for illumination. If you follow those thin beams, they will lead you to shows like that one at the South by Southwest Music Conference in 2006. As the DBTs played at La Zona Rosa, you could hear something in tangled-up triple guitars, the stuttering beat and the vocals that separated the Truckers from any Southern-rockers before them.

It wasn't just that the lyrics on a song like "Aftermath USA" were dark (the singer wakes up to a home full of "beer bottles in the kitchen ... bad music on the stereo [and] meat in my freezer all thawed"); it was also the hint of irredeemable loss in Hood's voice. This wasn't the triumphalism of "The South's Gonna Do It Again"; this was the admission that things go wrong and someone has to cope with the mess left behind. Someone has to clean up the "crystal meth in the bathtub" and the "blood splattered in the sink"; someone has to take the kids to school.

The three guitars and the rhythm section churned up that swaggering boogie strut, that hot-rodding, back-slapping, beer-guzzling sound of 1973. But the guitars seemed to strangle on their own gestures and the vocals seemed drained of all certainty as if staring at the awkward facts in the morning mirror. It's this gap between swagger and doubt that makes the Drive-By Truckers so exciting. That gap grows larger on each album they release, but their heroic efforts to close it validate every claim ever made for the band.

SOUTHERN ROCK BUYER'S GUIDE

The Allman Brothers Band: Eat a Peach (Capricorn CX4-0102, 1974) Duane Allman died during the making of this album, but his astonishingly eloquent slide guitar can be heard on three studio tracks and three live tracks. These were thus the last recordings by the original group, and you can hear how they could focus on arresting passages in tightly arranged studio efforts and could sustain their musical invention across vast expanses of live improvisation, even on the half-hour version of Donovan's "First There Is a Mountain." But just as Duane disappeared from the group, his baby brother Gregg and guitar foil Dickey Betts stepped forward as major songwriters, especially on the three Duane-less studio tracks. Grade: A

The Allman Brothers Band: Eat a Peach (Deluxe Edition) (Mercury Chronicles B0006795-02, 2006) This reissue squeezes the two LPs from the original album onto one disc and adds a second disc of nine live performances from the June 27, 1971, Fillmore East show--six of them previously unreleased. Grade: A

The Bottle Rockets: The Brooklyn Side (East Side Digital ESD 81002, 1994) Imagine for a moment that the survivors of the 1977 Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash had decided to keep going and had replaced Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines with the Clash's Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. The reborn band would have had it all: redneck country-rock with in-your-face class consciousness and Cockney punk-rock with swing and guitar chops. It would have sounded a lot like this magnificent album, where the country tradition is valorized as "Welfare Music," where the working-class dilemma is crystallized in the dark humor of "1000 Dollar Car" and where guitar-hooks-to-die-for add the ache to the love songs "Gravity Fails" and "I'll Be Comin' Around." Grade: A+

The Drive-By Truckers: Southern Rock Opera (Soul Dump SDR-005, 2001) This may not be the best-ever recording of songs, but it is the best-ever recording of rock criticism. The 20 songs, stretched over two CDs, parse the dialectics between Lynyrd Skynyrd and Neil Young, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet, Lynyrd Skynyrd and George Wallace, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the singer, the singer and his father, the singer and women, the singer and whiskey, the singer and Alabama. The music has a rock'n'roll grandeur befitting its main subject, and the lyrics are as honest as they are smart. The young band wasn't quite ready to execute its big ambitions, and these songs would sound better in later live performances than on this album. Grade: B+

The Drive-By Truckers: Decoration Day (New West NW6047, 2003) Here is further proof that music resonates most universally when it is most rooted in the specifics of the artists' home turf. These songs are snapshots from northern Alabama, stories about the farmer turned down by the bank, about the house painter warning his son against the same fate, about a son laying a stone on his daddy's grave, about a former hell-raiser growing tired of the pills. Because our lives aren't lived in the vague generalities of most pop songs but in eccentric specifics like these, we're more likely to identify with music grounded in the world's particulars, even if they're not our particulars. Of course, it helps that the serious songs are interspersed with funny, irreverent rockers and everything is fueled by chest-pounding rhythms and ear-grabbing tunes. Grade: A+

The Drive-By Truckers: The Dirty South (New West NW6058, 2004) The band has never sounded better than it does on this disc: They match the larger-than-life presence of Lynyrd Skynyrd, while trimming away the self-indulgent excess, and marry it to the purposeful propulsion of Sugar (producer David Barbe's old punk band) without obscuring the lyrics. And those lyrics deserve to be heard, for the DBTs' three songwriters are in top form, singing about moonshiners, tornado victims, laid-off workers, U.S. presidents, assembly-line workers, record-company hustlers, World War II veterans, convicted murderers, crooked cops, race-car drivers and barflies, bringing them all to life with vivid North Alabama detail, memorable tunes and an unerring instinct for paradox. Grade: A+

The Drive-By Truckers: A Blessing and a Curse (New West NW6089, 2006) To make great records without tangible reward is both a blessing and a curse, and that dilemma supplies both the title and the theme for this dark, conflicted, brilliant album. The Drive-By Truckers had made two masterpieces without much payoff, and Patterson Hood's title track asks if someone in that position ends up "as a high-flying flame out ... sucking on the end of a shot gun?" Or do you "think it all through" and "do what you got to do"? Mike Cooley's "Gravity's Gone" asks how far you can fall without hitting bottom? Don't blame the vertigo, he sings, on "the champagne, hand jobs and the kissing ass," because "those little demons ain't the reason for the bruises on your soul." Jason Isbell acknowledges the temptation to give up, not just on the quest but also the ideals that sparked the effort in the first place. But he won't let himself and his bandmates off the hook. Don't be so "Easy on Yourself," he sings. Grade: A-

The Drive-By Truckers: Brighter Than Creation's Dark (New West NW6135, 2008) The darkness of this album's title is far more in evidence on these 18 songs than the brightness. Using the language but not the ideology of Southern Protestantism, but band's three singer-songwriters--Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and Shonna Tucker--examine the origins and consequences of crimes gone wrong, marriages gone wrong, bands gone wrong and even wars gone wrong. The mood is bleak and the sound stripped to the bone, but the effect is still powerful, even if four of the 18 songs could easily have been dropped, even in the album could have used some fast and/or funny mood changers.  Grade: B+

Jason Isbell: Sirens of the Ditch (New West NW6119, 2007) Isbell contributed two or three brilliant songs to each of the three albums he made as a member of the Drive-By Truckers. On his first solo album, Isbell once again comes up with three brilliant songs: the soldier's portrait "Dress Blues," the acoustic lament "In a Razor Town" and the loser's anthem "The Magician." Unfortunately there are no Patterson Hood or Mike Cooley songs to fill up the rest of disc, and Isbell is forced to make up the deficit with songs of his own that lack the captivating melodies and arresting aphorisms of his best work. Moreover, because he played so many of the instruments himself, there's none of the dramatic tension of his interplay with his fellow musicians on those three earlier masterpieces. Nonetheless, "Dress Blues" is one of the best Iraq War songs we have. Grade: B

Bettye LaVette: Child of the Seventies (Rhino Handmade 7899, 2005) Here is a document of what might have been. In 1972, Atlantic Records sent the 26-year-old Detroit singer down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record her first album that wouldn't be a collection of singles. LaVette responded with starkly original vocals that pushed syllables this way and that in attempt to pump up the drama in each song's story. Whether the songs were borrowed from the rock world (Neil Young's "Heart of Gold," David Bowie's "It Ain't Easy"), written by producer Brad Shapiro or taken from obscure soul writers, the drama was irresistible. Inexplicably, Atlantic declined to release the album, and it went unheard until it was released in France in 2000 and by Rhino (with 22 tracks, including several supplementary singles) in 2005. Grade: B+

Bettye LaVette: The Scene of the Crime (Anti- 86873-2, 2007) Pairing a veteran soul singer with a wild and wooly Southern-rock band may seem like folly, but the Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood is the son of Muscle Shoals bassist David Hood and thus steeped in the R&B tradition. As co-producer of this album, Hood got the DBTs to play with muscular minimalism, upping the tension in these songs of loss and frustration. LaVette responds with the best singing of her career, demonstrating how close anger is to despair and despair to resilience. There's just enough country influence--songs associated with George Jones and Willie Nelson--to make the soul Southern. Grade: A-

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Second Helping (MCA MCA413, 1974) It was on this album that the pop craft and Southern storytelling of Lynyrd Skynyrd's songwriting caught up with the biker-bar splendor of their sound. They used their old sound to bite the hand that fed them on "Working for the MCA," to shove back at a closing-in world on "Don't Ask Me No Questions" and to explore the dangers and attractions of "The Needle and the Spoon." But they relied on catchy, precisely repeating riffs for their first and biggest hit single, "Sweet Home Alabama," and on a hillbilly string band for "The Ballad of Curtis Lowe." Even as Lynyrd Skynyrd was creating Southern-rock's formula, the band was subverting it. Grade: A-

Lynyrd Skynyrd: One More from the Road (MCA MCA2-6001, 1976) This is a terrific package for four reasons: 1. It documents just how exciting this band was on stage during the mid-‘70s. 2. It includes almost all of their best pre-1977 songs, allowing it to function as a greatest-hits collection. 3. It includes two cover songs--Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" and Jimmie Rodgers' "T for Texas"--that they never recorded elsewhere and which demonstrate the band's deep roots in the twin Southern traditions of blues and country. 4. The arrangements are looser and freer than in the studio, allowing the group's gifted instrumentalists, especially guitarist Allen Collins and keyboardist Billy Powell, room to stretch out. Grade: A-

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Street Survivors (MCA MCA-3029, 1977) This disc may contain Lynyrd Skynyrd's greatest song, "That Smell," but it is not their best album. The remake of Merle Haggard's "Honky Tonk Night Time Man" does explain a lot about Ronnie Van Zant's songwriting, and "What's Your Name" is a deliciously raucous come-on. New guitarist Steve Gaines did contribute the wound-up-tight boogie of "I Know a Little," but his "You Got That Right" and "Ain't No Good Life" are generic bar-band material. And Skynyrd's studied attempts to imitate the Allman Brothers Band on "One More Time" and "I Never Dreamed" merely prove that they should have stuck to what they did best. Grade: B+

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Lynyrd Skynyrd (MCA MCAD3 10390, 1991) This three-CD, 47-track box set is the best introduction to the band. Though it is baited with rarities (unreleased demos, outtakes, alternate takes and live versions) for the hardcore fan, it does include the most important tracks from the five studio albums, with a justified emphasis on Second Helping. The 64-page booklet includes a history by Ron O'Brien, a strong essay by John Swenson and solid discographical information. Here is the core of one of the great bodies of work in American rock'n'roll. Grade: A+

Lynyrd Skynyrd: One More from the Road (MCA MCA112657, 2001) This CD reissue adds two new songs to the vinyl version plus eight different versions of the same songs from different nights at the Fox Theatre. Grade: A-

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Street Survivors--Deluxe Edition 30th Anniversary (Geffen BO010608-02, 2008) This reissue offers the original album on one disc with a second disc that includes a version of the album recorded three month earlier with three different songs and a different producer, Tom Dowd. The earlier versions are less muscular but more nuanced, and Ronnie Van Zant's rewrite of a Merle Haggard song is fascinating. The second disc also includes five songs from a Fresno concert two months before the album's original release and the plane crash that killed Van Zant. Grade: A-

The North Mississippi Allstars: Shake Hands with Shorty (Tone-Cool TC34047-1177-2, 2000) Luther and Cody Dickinson and Chris Chew didn't write any of the 10 songs on their debut album, drawing instead from the giants of Mississippi Hill Country blues: Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside and Fred McDowell. You can tell, however, that these three youngsters learned this music not from records but from playing alongside Burnside and Othar Turner. Furthermore, you can tell they're not trying to imitate old records but rather to refashion a tradition they love into a music of their own personalities. A song will start with the hypnotic repetition of Hill Country blues--the most African-sounding music left in the U.S. today--and will then shoot off on a tangent into rock'n'roll jamming reminiscent of the Allman Brothers Band. The result is the miraculous resurrection of that popular but artistically moribund genre, blues-rock. Grade A-

The North Mississippi Allstars: Hernando (Songs of the South SOTS-006, 2008) Before they were blues-rockers, Luther and Cody Dickinson were punk-rockers, and that brash irreverence returns to this album, washing out the earnestness of their earlier efforts. No longer are they trying to live up to a tradition; now they're more interested in seducing the woman they're singing to, gyrating the hips of the teenagers before the bandstand and of bonding with the friend passing around the whiskey. The guitars are more distorted, and so are the vocals; the drums and bass punch the gut with more ominous intent. The three band members wrote or co-wrote nine of the 11 songs, but the deep roots are still there. They sound as if they aren't trying to evoke a vanished juke joint so much as they're trying to conquer their neighborhood bar. Grade B+