For sure, the South is on the rise again—and has obviously changed the sound of American music. In 1954 a white truck driver from Mississippi named Elvis fooled around with an old blues number, and the resultant blend of C&W and blues became one of the dominant sounds of rock and roll. Elvis was just the tip of the iceberg though—Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash all had...

What first made Southern rock & roll interesting to Northernets (this Northerner, anyway, but, hey, my great-grandfather was an artillery captain for General Lee, so I'm saving my Confederate money, boys) was not whether Duane Allman was technically the world's best slide guitarist—it was that he played with the greatest passion. Lynyrd Skynyrd understood this distinction on a gut level when,...

In the eight years since the Allman Brothers pioneered and commercially institutionalized the Southern rock style, a large posse of cowboy-hatted rockers have ridden the same trail to success. Twin guitars and drums weren't always the ticket, and the best of them specialized in various areas of Southern rock's stylistic mixture of rock, country, and rhythm & blues, but the basic assumption of the...