Dixie Lullaby - Hardcover

Kemp, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743237943 ISBN 13: 9780743237949

Publisher: Free Press, 2004

Synopsis

Rock & roll has transformed American culture more profoundly than any other art form. During the 1960s, it defined a generation of young people as political and social idealists, helped end the Vietnam War, and ushered in the sexual revolution. In Dixie Lullaby, veteran music journalist Mark Kemp shows that rock also renewed the identity of a generation of white southerners who came of age in the decade after segregation -- the heyday of disco, Jimmy Carter, and Saturday Night Live.

Growing up in North Carolina in the 1970s, Kemp experienced pain, confusion, and shame as a result of the South's residual civil rights battles. His elementary school was integrated in 1968, the year Kemp reached third grade; his aunts, uncles, and grandparents held outdated racist views that were typical of the time; his parents, however, believed blacks should be extended the same treatment as whites, but also counseled their children to respect their elder relatives. "I loved the land that surrounded me but hated the history that haunted that land," Kemp writes. When rock music, specifically southern rock, entered his life, he began to see a new way to identify himself, beyond the legacy of racism and stereotypes of southern small-mindedness that had marked his early childhood. Well into adulthood Kemp struggled with the self-loathing familiar to many white southerners. But the seeds of forgiveness were planted in adolescence when he first heard Duane Allman and Ronnie Van Zant pour their feelings into their songs.

In the tradition of music historians such as Nick Tosches and Peter Guralnick, Kemp masterfully blends into his narrative the stories of southern rock bands --from heavy hitters such as the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and R.E.M. to influential but less-known groups such as Drive-By Truckers -- as well as the personal experiences of their fans. In dozens of interviews, he charts the course of southern rock & roll. Before civil rights, the popular music of the South was a small, often racially integrated world, but after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, black musicians struck out on their own. Their white counterparts were left to their own devices, and thus southern rock was born: a mix of popular southern styles that arose when predominantly white rockers combined rural folk, country, and rockabilly with the blues and jazz of African-American culture. This down-home, flannel-wearing, ass-kicking brand of rock took the nation by storm in the 1970s. The music gave southern kids who emulated these musicians a newfound voice. Kemp and his peers now had something they could be proud of: southern rock united them and gave them a new identity that went beyond outside perceptions of the South as one big racist backwater.

Kemp offers a lyrical, thought-provoking, searingly intimate, and utterly original journey through the South of the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, viewed through the prism of rock & roll. With brilliant insight, he reveals the curative and unifying impact of rock on southerners who came of age under its influence in the chaotic years following desegregation. Dixie Lullaby fairly resonates with redemption.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Kemp has been writing about popular music and culture for two decades. He has served as music editor of Rolling Stone and vice president of music editorial for MTV Networks. In 1997 he received a Grammy nomination for his liner notes to the CD Farewells & Fantasies, a retrospective of music by '60s protest singer Phil Ochs. Kemp lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he works as the entertainment editor at The Charlotte Observer.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1: DEATH OF A KING

The studio went silent.

"That assassination changed everything."

The storyteller's warm Alabama drawl softened to a whisper, even though no one was in the room with us.

"We thought it was over," he said. "We really felt like we were done."

He'd been talking about all the great soul singers he played music with in the '60s, when all of a sudden he remembered that dark day, back in April 1968, when news traveled down from nearby Memphis, Tennessee, that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down outside his room at the Lorraine Motel.

"As soon as that happened, whites were immediately shut out of black music," the storyteller said. "And rightfully so, to a certain extent. I mean, I backed them a hundred percent. They needed to take control of their music. But it was a sad time. And we were scared."

The storyteller paused and looked down at his hands, which were clasped together in his lap as if he were about to pray. Then he looked up again, furrowed his brow, and stared into my eyes, as if I might be able to help him in some small way.

"We gave our hearts and souls to those singers," he said.

It was nine o'clock at night and for several hours the storyteller had been taking me on a listening tour of his proudest moments as a recording studio session guitarist. There was that slinky shuffle he played on Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally," his funky rhythm part on Etta James's "Tell Mama," and his subtle embellishments scattered throughout Aretha Franklin's 1967 masterpiece, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. Each time he cued up a different track, the storyteller would stamp his feet to the music and flail his arms about him like a spastic drummer, then bend forward in his chair, curl his fingers, and play air guitar to the scratchy riffs.

"Listen, listen!" he barked during an instrumental break in Franklin's "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" as a blanket of churchlike organ quivered beneath the singer's voice, followed by the sound of piano keys pattering down around us like rain. The storyteller sat up in his chair and pointed his index fingers skyward, as if he were preaching the gospel. "A woman's only human," Aretha sang through a pair of speakers on the shelf behind his head. "You should understand: She's not just a plaything. She's flesh and blood, just like her man."

The storyteller leaned back in his chair again and smiled feverishly, his eyes tightly shut and fists clenched. He looked like a man in the grips of Pentecostal bliss. He was right there, in the moment -- even though that moment had come and gone more than thirty years before.

Jimmy Johnson was telling ghost stories he's told a million times before -- real-life yarns about the spirits that passed through this tiny section of northwestern Alabama long ago, leaving an indelible mark on its landscape. An original member of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, Johnson helped put this river community, which serves as the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Environmental Research Center, on the map. His funky guitar licks appear on so many '60s and '70s rock and soul classics that you can't turn on an oldies radio station without hearing them at least once an hour. By the early '70s, Johnson and his fellow studio musicians had made Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the recording mecca of American popular music.

As it turned out, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. did not presage the end for Johnson and his colleagues. Within three years, a peculiar thing happened. Young white rock stars whose lives had been transformed by the sound of black American music -- Boz Scaggs, Paul Simon, even the Rolling Stones -- descended on Muscle Shoals, hoping to be inspired by the region's rich musical history.

"Man, I remember when Rod Stewart came over here from England to record with us," Johnson said. "He wanted us to make his music sound like all those great soul records. Well, when he got here and saw us -- a bunch of white guys with guitars -- he said, 'What the hell is this? Where's the band?'

"We said, 'We are the band.'

"He said, 'No, I mean the black guys that played on all those great Aretha records, Pickett and all that?'

"We said, 'Well, that's us, but we're not black.'"

Johnson slapped both hands down on his knees and cackled. He was sitting at a sprawling soundboard inside his Swamper Studio, a ranch-style home he's converted into his current recording business. Johnson still works with the occasional big-name musician, but his profile today is much lower than it was in the '60s and '70s. Back then, the nation was in flux, and Jimmy Johnson's Alabama was right smack at the epicenter of change.

It only made sense that Johnson's talk of the golden years of southern soul would trigger thoughts of the King assassination. And when those thoughts came, they stopped him dead in his tracks. He had hit the volume controls on the tape machine, and for whatever reason, he felt it necessary to whisper. Maybe the spirits would hear him.

"During those civil rights years, music changed," he said. "We lived through those changes. We were part of the change. And we felt it."

As Johnson spoke, I checked to make sure the reels on my tape recorder were still rolling. I didn't want to miss this, because what he was talking about was the very genesis of southern rock, the music that, by the 1970s, had given a new identity to my friends and me back in North Carolina. In the early '70s, rock bands such as the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd articulated the confusion that we felt as twelve-year-olds growing up in a world in which black and white, old and young, wealthy and working class, hippie and redneck were becoming increasingly polarized. The South had changed dramatically in the '60s, and those of us who were too young to have experienced those changes with an adult consciousness were forced to find our place amid the fallout of cultural chaos. We were alone. Our parents couldn't help us. They didn't understand.

The white musicians who had worked alongside the South's most famous black singers during the civil rights years did understand. Their music, and the music of those who followed them, would serve as a road map out of the chaos. It wouldn't be an easy journey, but it was a beginning.

That it took the assassination of America's greatest black leader to open the doors for those white southern musicians to step out from the shadows of the soul singers they had worked with, idolized, and emulated was a cruel twist of fate. King's death effectively provided a window of opportunity for young whites to begin expressing, through a new musical language, their own feelings of despair, gratitude, confusion, elation, guilt, and rage. This was not Elvis Presley's rock & roll -- it was a mix and jumble of Elvis and Otis Redding, of Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson, of Johnny Cash and Mississippi John Hurt, of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Leadbelly, of the Beatles, the Stones, Little Richard, and Carl Perkins.

For Jimmy Johnson and the other white musicians who had backed black stars at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, 1968 was a year of soul searching. Rick Hall, the white producer and owner of Fame, looked back on that period in the 1995 PBS series Rock & Roll. "The mood of black music changed from that point on," he said. Suddenly, black singers stopped booking studio time at Fame. The goal of having their music cross over to the white pop charts was no longer important; in fact, it was a liability.

"The black musicians at that time were under a lot of pressure not to record with white people," said David Hood, Johnson's bass-playing partner in the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.

Hood and the other Alabama session players understood the reasoning behind that pressure, but they felt rejected by it nonetheless. After all, if black singers were now looking to record only with black musicians at black-run studios, the white musicians who had been playing with them throughout the '60s (and their youth) would have to find new outlets for their creativity -- and new ways to make the rent.

"Here we were, cutting hit records for them," said Hood, over a plate of fried chicken at a soul food restaurant in nearby Florence, just down the road from the birthplace of blues legend W. C. Handy. "We loved working with them. I learned so much about music from Otis ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743237943
• ISBN 13: 9780743237949
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320