Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1969

Southern rock

Emerged 1969 Origin Southern USA Subgenres — Vocals Sung
Heaviness
4
Speed
5
Melody
9

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

Blues rock with a Southern accent: two or three lead guitars, slide playing and songs as long as a Georgia highway.

How it sounds

  • Two or three lead guitars playing harmony at once — the Allman Brothers signature.
  • Slide guitar in open tuning with a Hammond organ underneath everything.
  • Long songs that end in a jam, and lyrics about specific Southern places.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
90-140 bpm
Song length
4-12 min
Tuning
E standard and open E for slide, with two or three guitars playing worked-out harmony parts rather than one lead and one rhythm.
Production
Live and warm, with the band recorded together. The defining record of the genre is a live album, which tells you where the music actually happened.
Written about
The South, defended and criticised, Freedom and the road, Family, Fatalism

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Two and sometimes three leads playing harmonised lines and trading solos, with slide guitar in open tuning as a third voice. The harmony parts are written, not jammed.
  • Bass Melodic and mobile, closer to a jazz player's than to a rock player's, especially on the Allmans' records.
  • Drums Frequently two drummers, playing complementary rather than identical parts — one holding the backbeat while the other fills.
  • Keyboards Hammond organ through a rotating speaker, filling the harmonic space between three guitars and giving the genre its churchy weight.
  • Vocals Sung in a regional accent, high and strained, with the blues phrasing kept intact.

What it isn't

That it is a politically simple genre. The most famous record in it is an argument with Neil Young that is more ambivalent than either side's fans admit, and the Allman Brothers were an integrated band touring the American South in 1970, which was neither safe nor incidental. The Confederate imagery some of these bands used is a real part of the history and so is the rest of it.

Told apart from

  • Blues rock Southern rock keeps the blues and adds country harmony, a second and third lead guitar, and worked-out arrangements where blues rock jams.
  • Country rock Country rock comes from the country side and is gentler and more song-focused. Southern rock is a blues-rock band with country in it, not the reverse.
  • Boogie rock Boogie is the narrower, riff-and-shuffle wing of the same scene, and ZZ Top sit on the border.
  • Hard rock Both are loud guitar bands of the same era. Southern rock swings harder, uses three guitars and takes its harmony from country.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

The Allman Brothers proved at Fillmore East that a blues jam could hold twenty minutes without going stale. Lynyrd Skynyrd added working-class lyrics and a feud with Neil Young that produced Sweet Home Alabama. The 1977 plane crash ended the genre's golden era abruptly.

Descended from

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Emo revival 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
  • Emo 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
  • Post-grunge 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.