(Country Rock, Chicago Blues, Soul) VA - Delta Swamp Rock - Sounds From The South (2 CD) - 2011, MP3, 320 kbps

The fear, confronted with a two-CD set celebrating the music of the Deep South in the early 70s, is that most of it will be taken up with guitar solos. Delta Swamp Rock duly features a couple of tracks from Lynyrd Skynyrd and three from the Allman Brothers, but soloing, choogling, boogying and other bearded self-indulgences are banished across 25 songs of soul- and country-inflected rock. Joe South's version of Hush is a dancefloor belter; Cher's foghorn of a voice is oddly suited to Dr John's I Walk on Gilded Splinters; Bobbie Gentry's contributions are a delight. The Skynyrd choices seem a bit odd at first – one is sung by their original drummer, which is a bit like picking a Pete Best number to represent the Beatles on a compilation of British 60s rock – but by being songs rather than instrumental showcases they serve the set far better than, say, Freebird would have. Delta Swamp Rock expertly merges the familiar and the forgotten to wonderful effect.
Monster double CD pack with a whopping 68-page book accompaniment / Two volumes of seriously heavyweight vinyl gatefold and 8page insert.
Featuring The Allman Brothers, Dan Penn, Leon Russell, Tony Joe White, Johnny Cash, Bobbie Gentry, Big Star, Link Wray, Area Code 615 and loads more!
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.