I’m as proud of anyone of Jacksonville’s illustrious musical history, which has been my home since 1968. No one could have worked harder than I to keep this history alive. But I have to take issue with such erroneous claims as Jacksonville’s being “the birthplace of southern rock.” In my 2020 award-winning book, Jacksonville and the Roots of Southern Rock, I go into this nomenclature in great detail. Let me make my case:
First of all, a musical style is not “born”; it evolves slowly, taking shape before there’s even a description—much less a label—for the concept. In retrospect, what we now call “southern rock” appears to have existed well before there was a name for it, which was coined by Atlanta music journalist Mo Slotin in 1972—three years after the birth supposedly took place.
Secondly, even if such an ostensible birth actually had occurred, it didn’t happen in Jacksonville. The most likely spawning grounds for southern rock would have been Memphis, Nashville and—believe it or not—Los Angeles.
It is generally taken as an article of faith that the genre we now call “southern rock” originated in Jacksonville with the forming of the Allman Brothers Band in March of 1969. It didn’t.
Duane and Gregg Allman, from Daytona Beach, had led an earlier, Los Angeles-based band called the Hour Glass and were already performing one or two of the songs that would be included in the Allman Brothers Band’s 1969 debut album. If the Hour Glass’s song “It’s Not My Cross to Bear”—recorded in 1968—doesn’t qualify as “southern rock,” then what does? Also in 1968, Gregg Allman wrote and sang a version of “Melissa” recorded in Hialeah, Fla., for a group called the 31st of February, featuring future ABB drummer Butch Trucks.
A year earlier, Delaney Bramlett had been making records,
supervised by Leon Russell, in L.A. that could be categorized as southern rock. And in Memphis, also in 1967, two groups whose music could be easily be described as southern rock, the Hombres and Knowbody Else (later known as Black Oak Arkansas) were pioneering the style.
And don’t even get me started about how to specifically define the meaning of the term “southern rock”: it simply can’t be done. It is my well-considered opinion that southern rock was basically a harder, bluesier version of country-rock.
One of the pioneers of country-rock had been former Jacksonville prep-school student Gram Parsons, born in Winter Haven, Fla., but raised mostly in Waycross, Ga. Both country-rock and southern rock were part of a broader romantic (i.e., backward-looking, nostalgic) movement in American-inspired music. As former Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer Bob Burns related in a filmed interview, bemused record execs often greeted his group’s demos with, “What is this hillbilly shit?”
My case being made, I will say that Jacksonville was nonetheless clearly the motherlode of southern rock, with a large proportion of famous groups based in Macon (and some in Atlanta) having been assembled here, including:
- The Allman Brothers Band
- Cowboy
- Lynyrd Skynyrd
- Blackfoot
- 38 Special
- Molly Hatchet
- Johnny Van Zant Band
- Rossington Collins Band
- Derek Trucks Band
- Tedeschi Trucks Band
- Mofro
For decades—from 1969 to the present—Jacksonville was truly the home of southern rock—but clearly not its birthplace. Nashville and Muscle Shoals also have solid claims to being spawning grounds for southern rock. But none of these cities produced the quantity if not the quality of southern rockers Jacksonville did.
