Various Artists - Soul Jazz Records presents Delta Swamp Rock – Sounds From The South: At The Crossroads Of Rock, Country And Soul

Delta Swamp Rock is an interstate southern road-trip through the United States of America where country, rock and soul met at the crossroads - an exploration of the musical and cultural links between the cities of Memphis, Muscle Shoals and Nashville in the 1960s and 70s.

At the start of the 1970s, a new type of music emerged out of the southern states of Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi and Florida. Southern rock, the creation of young blue-collar white Americans, blended rock, soul, country and blues music together to present a new vision of the south – a post-civil rights southern identity complete with a celebration of the regions natural landscape and its way of life.

The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd epitomised the definitive southern rock groups – a mixture of blues-rock and country with a southern rebelliousness and attitude. Unfortunately both The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd were to be struck by tragedy, which would affect the movement’s rise and fall.

The backstory to southern rock is the fact that a number of the people involved in its creation had been central to the production of southern soul music in the 1960s mainly in Memphis, Tennessee, and the small town of Muscle Shoals (population around 10,000) deep within the bible-belt, liquor-free, deeply segregated state of Alabama, creating 100s of R&B hits on an almost daily basis.

Here in Muscle Shoals, with its proximity to Memphis and Nashville, an all-white group of in-house musicians, (famously referred to by Lynyrd Skynyrd in the song ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ as the ‘Swampers’), created countless classic soul records for the likes of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Clarence Carter and more during the 1960s.

This album charts the rise and fall of southern rock from its funky swamp roots in southern soul to its phenomenal success in the first-half of the 1970s, including its influence on Nashville’s ‘outlaw’ country and tracing it right back to the arrival of rock and roll in the 1950s - the first meeting of black and white American music at the crossroads.

Tracklist:

1. Lynyrd Skynyrd – The seasons
2. Barefoot Jerry – Smokies
3. Joe South – Hush
4. Bobbie Gentry – Papa Won't You Let Me Go To Town
5. Area code 615 – Stone Fox chase
6. Duane And Greg Allman – God Rest His Soul
7. Cher – I Walk On Guilded Splinters
8. Cowboy – Please Be With Me
9. The Allman Brothers – Ain't Wasting No Time
10. Link Wray – Be What You Want to
11. Boz Scaggs – I'll Be Long Gone
12. Lynyrd Skynyrd – Comin' Home
13. Bobbie Gentry – Seasons Come, Seasons Go
14. Leon Russell – Out In The Woods
15. Tony Joe White – Polk Salad Annie
16. Barefoot Jerry – Come To Me Tonight
17. Duane And Greg Allman – Morning Dew
18. Dan Penn – If Love Was Money
19. Linda Ronstadt – I Won't Be Hangin' Round
20. Waylon Jennings – Big D
21. Big Star – Thirteen
22. Bobbie Gentry – Mississippi Delta
23. Travis Wammack – I Forgot To Remember To Forget
24. Johnny Cash – If I Were A Carpenter
25. Billy Vera – I'm Leaving Here Tomorrow, Mama