Southern Rock Is Rising From the Ashes
The American South is a hot mess of cultural contradictions, and while those contradictions have stoked the dumpster fire of U.S. politics for a couple of centuries, they also happen to be fueling some of the best music being made right now. And to be sure, the story of rock in 2024 is largely a story of Southern rock, in both classic-rock and indie-rock denominations.
On two of the year’s best records, Tigers Blood and Manning Fireworks, Katie “Waxahatchee” Crutchfield (Alabama) and Jake “MJ” Lenderman (North Carolina), respectively, made 21st-century rock music with distinctly Southern sensibilities. So did genre-dodging Prince fans Brittany Howard (Alabama) and Sturgill Simpson (Kentucky). Rosali Middleman (North Carolina), Margo Price (Illinois > Tennessee), Billy Strings (Michigan > Kentucky > Tennessee), and Hurray for the Riff Raff (New York City > New Orleans) — not to mention Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen BFF Zach Bryan, and any number of nominally “country” artists — also furthered the argument that top-tier rock and rock-adjacent music is growing like old-school weed below the Mason-Dixon. Southern rock even got play on the political stage in 2024, by turns thrillingly and appallingly.
What’s going on here? One might point to a few things. As a subgenre/marketing category, “Southern rock” was always an unstable and slightly absurd designation, since rock & roll is Southern music: Ask Little Richard (Georgia), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Arkansas), Tina Turner (Tennessee), Elvis Presley (Mississippi), and Chuck Berry (Missouri, for the sake of argument). Rock & roll migrated up north and out West. It morphed, racially and stylistically; scenes rose and fell. For a hot minute in the Seventies, discerning rock fans coast to coast shelved “Southern rock” classics by the Allman Brothers Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Charlie Daniels Band, the Outlaws, and Lynyrd Skynyrd alongside LPs by Grateful Dead, the Eagles, Poco, Neil Young, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and The Band, not to mention “country soul” records by Arthur Alexander, Swamp Dogg, and Tony Joe White, and “outlaw country” records by Willie, Waylon, and Jessi. All these records drew from the same well, distilling sounds and mythology of the South into music that was simply, at the end of the day, American music.
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The misapprehension of the “rebel flag” as a racially neutral Southern pride emblem by some bands tainted the Southern rock subgenre. But it was complicated; what may have signified a progressive “New South” to some suggested retrogressive if not straight-up racist antebellum nostalgia to others. That was one of many topics addressed on Drive-By Truckers’ 2001 touchstone Southern Rock Opera, which finally got a properly mastered vinyl reissue this year. “It’s actually more timely now than it was when we made it, unfortunately — because of all the racial aspects of where we are politically right now,” Patterson Hood told me earlier this year, before his Alabama-born band began a Southern Rock Opera revival tour.
Jake Lenderman grew up on the Truckers’ sound, and you can hear their influence in his music, alongside Neil Young and the Band — musicians whose Canadian roots further complicated the notion of “Southern rock.” Lenderman’s politics are a bit less overt than the Truckers’, more baked into his storytelling, which echoes regional authors like Larry Brown, channeling dubious characters with deadpan empathy. “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome/And a wristwatch that’s a pocketknife and a megaphone” he sings on “Wristwatch,” conjuring dipshit braggart machismo with perhaps a winking nod to South Carolina’s land-locked Hippodrome Horse Complex, magnet for suburban cowboy wannabes. In the title track of Manning Fireworks, a Bible-waver is told ruefully: “One of these days you’ll kill a man/For asking a question you don’t understand.”
Patterson Hood is a big fan of Lenderman, and of Wednesday, Lenderman’s band with singer-songwriter Karly Hartzman, the crew who made last year’s Southern rock gem Rat Saw God. The other great 2023 Southern rock album was Weathervanes by Jason Isbell, who got his start in the Truckers. It’s telling he was invited to play at the Democratic National Convention this year. He sang “Something More Than Free,” his unsatisfied workingman’s anthem of a laborer being bled so dry he’s too exhausted to attend church on Sunday, backdropped by the image of a giant flag hung on a barn. Hood and the Truckers, meanwhile, played a delegate party hosted by Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords. Naturally, conservatives wanted Southern rock signifying, too. At the RNC, Michigan carpetbagger Kid Rock shouted out Hank Williams Jr. and Run-D.M.C. in between cheerleading Trump chants, while Nashville’s Sixwire covered the Allmans’ “Midnight Rider” alongside Merle Haggard’s “America First.” A recent Trump ad shilling $100 “silver” coins adorned with his image had a distinctly barnyard-scented Southern rock soundtrack.
Of course, “Southern rock” has also been about bands like the B-52’s and R.E.M., as unashamedly progressive as Southern in their sound and presentation, which rarely involved Stetsons and Tony Lamas. Not to mention forbears like Big Star (Memphis) and the recently reunited dBs (North Carolina > New York City), whose two seminal early-Eighties LPs were reissued this year, and singer-songwriters like Lucinda Williams. These histories underlie the new Southern rock, too. So it was fitting to hear Michael Stipe and Jason Isbell playing R.E.M. songs at a Harris/Walz rally in Pittsburgh in October, hoping to swing things in a positive direction. They also sang Isbell’s precisely on-point “Hope the High Road,” a prayer for a new sort of reconstruction and “a world you want to live in.” It was in some ways a more convincing performance of the United States than any politician managed this year. Here’s hoping we can heed the sentiment.