Watermelon Wine

by Frye Gaillard

  There were people around Nashville who grumbled, after that, that Willie had turned his back on country music’s traditional fans, and Roy Acuff even said as much on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. But the theory came tumbling down a few weeks later when Nelson was invited to appear at the Midnight Jamboree at Ernest Tubb Record Shop. As it turned out, it was a performance that underscored as clearly as any other the symbolism of the Texas movement.

  For Ernest Tubb is a funky place. Its Jamborees every Saturday night now draw the stalwarts who have never quite adjusted to the fact that the Grand Ole Opry has gone uptown. They are the hard-core folk who still pour in from the hinterlands in their pickups and workday khakis to revel in the music of white man’s soul.

  But when Nelson appeared on a night in mid-October, the crowd was a little bit different. It contained, in addition to its regulars, a smattering of Nelson’s newer and shaggier fans, and there were discreet murmurs in various parts of the room about why the hippies were there. Some of the murmurs, in fact, were directed toward Nelson himself, as he made his way through the throng, prominently displaying his flaming red beard and a blue-checkered bandanna looped around his shoulder-length hair. But when he finally made it to the stage and began to sing, the audience’s mood changed abruptly: they whooped and screamed and wouldn’t let him leave.

  In the back of the crowd, the whole event was summed up pretty eloquently by an ole boy with close-cropped hair and a round, perpetually flushed face.

  “Yep,” he said, rocking back and forth from heel to toe, as his voice took on an air of authority, “I guess ole Willie’ll be all right.”

  10

  Southern Rock: The New Good Ole Boys

  The South’s gonna do it again.

  —Charlie Daniels

  A late winter’s night in Nashville, and the city auditorium is jammed to the gills. Every high-school and college student within a hundred-mile radius appears to have migrated in for a concert by the Marshall Tucker Band. The atmosphere is giddy, and if it weren’t for the wafting faint smell of burning marijuana, you’d swear the place had the feel of the midnight madness at Ernest Tubb’s.

  Bass player Tommy Caldwell surveys the scene, flashes one of his patented grit-eating grins, and moves toward the microphone with a country boy’s swagger. He still has some of that kick-over-the-barstool stage presence that he and the other Tuckers developed in the sleazy southside clubs of Spartanburg, South Carolina—back in the days before the Tuckers had become, along with the Allman Brothers and The Charlie Daniels Band, the prime practitioners of Southern rock. But the days of dodging beer bottles and eking out a living are behind him now; the crowds are friendly and raucous, and Caldwell knows when he has them in his hand.

  “We gon’ do a song from our first album,” he says, grabbing the mike stand and planting his feet as if he plans to be there awhile. “We got some guy that’s gon’ play fiddle with us from Nashville. Don’t know if ya’ll know who he is, but it looks like ole Charlie to me.”

  As the crowd erupts into war whoops and rebel yells out strolls Charlie Daniels, looking like a friendly, fiddle-playing grizzly bear, only bigger, his cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes and his fiddle bow cocked at the ready. With the amps turned up full blast, he and the Tuckers launch into the hard-rocking, country-flavored beat of “Fire on the Mountain”—the faithful surging toward the stage and crushing together like rebel sardines, the girls, often as not, perched on the shoulders of their shaggy-haired dates, clapping and swaying and calling for more.

  It continues that way for about three hours, which is a pretty standard show these days when groups like the Marshall Tucker Band or Charlie Daniels and company are touring their native Southeast. And although frenzy has been a staple of rock ’n’ roll camp followers ever since the earlydays of Elvis, there is somehow a difference in quality between the chemistry of today’s Southern rockers and, say, the drug-cult, guitar-smashing antics of Kiss or Alice Cooper.

  Southern rock, at its best, is something more than rock that happens to be played in the South, and its fans are reveling in something more than the sound of the music. They may not understand it fully, may not have sorted out all the pieces, but the people on stage understand it very well. They are people like George McCorkle, the affable, slow-talking rhythm guitarist for the Marshall Tucker Band, who finds himself, at the reflective age of thirty, intrigued by the substance of the music he’s been involved in ever since he picked up a guitar.

  “After a while,” he says, sitting backstage before the show, his elbows propped on his knees, “you get older and your music matures. You start playing your roots—country, blues, or whatever. It’s what you grew up with and you can’t escape it.”

  That’s the view of a lot of Southern rockers. They see their craft as a fusion of very old musical forms, with roots running from Smoky Mountain hillbilly pickin’, to the crystal-clear notes of Kentucky bluegrass, to the sleazy blues bars that grew up in Memphis and New Orleans at the turn of the century. It’s logical that it would be that way, for rock ’n’ roll began as a distinctly Southern hybrid—an Elvis Presley/Carl Perkins blend of black man’s blues and white man’s country.

  In the early days, Perkins and Presley managed to hold onto their original audiences, with Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” for example, hitting the top of both country and rhythm and blues charts. Quickly, however, rock began to develop a more youthful audience of its own, and eventually, after a trip across the ocean and back, it struck out in assorted electrified directions that bore little resemblance to the point of origin.

  Today’s Southern rock—at least as practiced by the Marshall Tucker-Charlie Daniels-Allman Brothers clique—is essentially an attempt to recreate and refine some of the original fusions in a modern-day setting, turning loose all the amps and volume of the West Coast heavy metal rockers, but blending in the craftsmanship of old-time blues and country. It is no accident, the Southern rockers say, that all of this is happening at a time of peculiar goings-on in the South. For Southern music—whether blues, country, or barroom boogie—has always been a remarkable barometer of the society in which it thrives. And so it is today, as the South emerges from twenty years of turmoil, and the young people who were estranged from their region and heritage during the years of upheaval begin to realize that once a few key sins are purged, theirs is not, in fact, a place to be ashamed of.

  “Barriers have broken down between groups of people, just like between categories of music,” affirms George McCorkle, making an instinctive, on-target connection between music and sociology. “Kids aren’t ashamed of country anymore, and they’re not ashamed of blues. And when you mix it all together and the music gets to cooking, it’s a pretty damn exciting thing to be around.”

  The philosophizing jogs something in McCorkle’s memory, and he lets loose a country boy’s soliloquy on the early days in Spartanburg, and how even today he loves to go back and play country music or whatever he feels in the beer-spattered clubs where the whole trip began. “It’s all what you grew up with,” he says by way of concluding the conversation. “It’s Southern.”

  With that he excuses himself politely and threads his way to the tuning room where Daniels and the rest of the band are belting out bluegrass harmonies to some straight and unamplified country picking.

  He ducks inside, escaping a backstage chaos that rivals the scene in the auditorium itself. There are dozens of groupies, resplendent in faded jeans and braless T-shirts, including one that proclaims, in big block letters, “Ain’t it Great to be Alive and in Tennessee.” And in a sort of odd and homey counterpoint, there are also a goodly number of wives and children, licking their fingers and munching away on a tableful of barbecued ribs—mingling in the process with reporters and record company people who are putting away awesome quantities of Budweiser beer.

  It’s weird and dizzy, but it has, nevertheless, all the feel and fervor of an
old-time family reunion.

  The family headquarters these days is in the sleepy Southern outpost of Macon, Georgia. The city is, at first glance, the ideal sort of place to be from—a faded childhood memory of fried-chicken picnics and hand-cranked peach ice cream, all on a manicured lawn without ants. The gentility of the Old South rustles up and down the tree-shrouded streets like the first breeze of a July afternoon.

  But the beat of the New South is becoming more and more prevalent, especially in a converted slaughterhouse over on Cotton Avenue. That particular slaughterhouse, along with the brownstone next door and a well-appointed studio just across town, are the home digs of Capricorn Records, one of the largest independent record producers in the world and the prime evangelist of Southern music. From this casual home base have flowed the frenetic, white-boy blues of the Allman Brothers and the down-home country funk of the Marshall Tucker Band, the hard-edged bar boogie of Wet Willie and the sweet Southern soul music of Otis Redding, all to the tune of some twenty-five million record albums in 1976 alone.

  Capricorn Records, headed by a shrewd and chauvinistic Southerner named Phil Walden, has ramrodded the revival of Southern music into something of a national mania, leaving the sleepy streets of Macon littered with a few long-haired millionaires along the way.

  “But this is not a new phenomenon,” Walden insists, as he leans back in his overstuffed chair and surveys his eighteenth century broad-topped desk. “The music has always been here. The phenomenon is that it’s being done down here. People—musicians—are remaining in Southern communities to record and perform. We’ve got a base here now.”

  The base was a long time in coming, for the South has always been slow and cautious in its flirtations with technology. But the music itself, like the other resources springing naturally from the land and its people, has been around for centuries—spreading inexorably from the point of creation to the eager consumers elsewhere in the land.

  Walden maintains, in fact, that almost all of American music is traceable to the South, and he may be pretty close to right. From the simmering poverty of Appalachia came the eloquent statements of hillbilly music, eventually flowing down from the hills into a booming city called Nashville and a collapsing auditorium called the Ryman. From the Carolinas and the scrub palmetto flatlands of Florida, traditional Scotch and Irish folk music mutated (with the help of the Kentucky-bred influence of Bill Monroe, among others) into the mandolin wind known as bluegrass. In the urban melting pots of Memphis and New Orleans a whole new class of citizens—blacks fleeing the farms after the Civil War—found a world even more appalling and gave poignant voice to that world with the blues and, later, jazz.

  Nor were the musical forms content to remain separate. In a society generally painted in hues of black and white, the music knew very little color. Jimmie Rodgers, the first hillbilly superstar, took both his guitar and his singing styles from the black railroad workers in Meridian, Mississippi, and is best remembered today for his yodeling interpretations of the blues. And on the other side of the line, Lillie Mae Glover, who sang the blues as Memphis Ma Rainey along Beale Street in the twenties, remembers that one of her most requested numbers was a hillbilly lament called “Heart Made of Stone.” That song, she says, had soul.

  The blues and hillbilly music came together once and for all one afternoon in 1954, when a small-time Memphis record producer named Sam Phillips, an Alabamian by birth, and an unknown Mississippi singer named Elvis Presley decided to try something a little bit different. What they tried was infusing the black soul of the blues, with its overtly sexual imagery, into a harmless little hillbilly song sung by the former truck driver from Tupelo. What Phillips and Presley and ultimately, the rest of the world got was rock ’n’ roll. The explosion that followed quite literally rocked the world, and Southern music, more than ever before, had gained widespread acceptance.

  But there was more to come. Over in Nashville a couple of Kentucky-bred kids, Don and Phil Everly, came up with a song called “Bye Bye Love,” written by the incredibly successful songwriting team of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. The Bryants had already offered the song to more than thirty artists, including Porter Waggoner, but none had displayed much interest. In the hands of the Everlys, however, “Bye Bye Love” became a watershed hit, quickly soaring to number one on both the pop and country charts.

  Meanwhile, equally potent forces were beginning to stir in slow-moving Macon. Over a sink full of dirty plates at the Greyhound Bus Station, a dishwasher named Little Richard was busy writing a song called “Tutti Frutti” and would soon do a little world-shaking of his own. And while Elvis, Little Richard, and the Everlys got ready to rock through the fifties, another black Macon singer by the name of James Brown was already laying the groundwork for the next great musical step—the modem-era soul music that would soon, ironically, make Detroit a recording center.

  By the end of the musically frenetic decade of the fifties, another Macon figure was beginning to make himself felt, at least in a tentative way. A teenaged Phil Walden had wandered across the railroad tracks separating genteel Macon from the funky black beer clubs and the gritty black soul music and was soon managing a black band of his own.

  But Walden’s band kept being clobbered in local talent contests by yet another Macon soul singer—a fellow by the name of Otis Redding—and Walden, whose opportunistic streak had matured at an early age, decided to shift allegiances. He became Redding’s manager, booking him into clubs and college auditoriums, and the two men were soon riding the crest of a soul music tidal wave. Walden and Associates rapidly attracted other soul acts, including Clarence Carter, Sam and Dave, Arthur Conley, and Percy Sledge, and the Macon offices were no longer quite so quaint or quite so far removed from the mainstream of music.

  And the mainstream was about to take a quantum step closer to Macon. In 1969, Walden went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to hear a sessions musician named Duane Allman. Walden was impressed, and suggested that Allman get together a band and move to Macon. The rest is history. Duane Allman did exactly that, and Southern rock had come of age.

  It’s a sad sort of irony that the Allman Brothers Band developed a Hollywoodish image in the mid-seventies, thanks to the jet-set antics of Gregg Allman—his on-again-off-again marriage to Cher Bono and his prosecution testimony in the cocaine trial of the group’s former manager.

  The Allmans split up in 1976. In the end the pace was just a little too fast, the living just a little too high, for a bunch of Southern kids who stuck it out on the home-front, touring incessantly and turning on the locals with a different kind of music. But nothing could detract from the importance of the music. At the white-hot core of the Allmans’ sound was the vital interplay between blues and country, a musical mirror of the central tension of Southern life, the interaction between black and white. Allman music at its best is a sometimes subtle, sometimes overpowering blend of black urban blues—in the vocals of Gregg Allman—and the bluegrassy strains of old-fashioned country—in the vocal and guitar work of Richard Betts—with just enough jazz and hard-edged rock ’n’ roll to keep the whole mixture cooking.

  Beneath Gregg Allman’s electrified bar blues (and he had one of the finest white blues voices in the country), there’s always the slightest hint of a bluegrass guitar, a tiny reminder that blue skies are just ahead. Beneath even the most folksy of Richard Betts’s country compositions are the underlying pain and loneliness of the blues. And somewhere between the two poles of black and white, urban and rural, blues and country, lies the soul of Southern music.

  There was a time, says Betts, who grew up picking bluegrass and listening to Hank Williams in the sun-blasted heartland of central Florida, when being from the South was anything but an asset to an aspiring rock ’n’ roller. “For so long,” he explains in his easy drawl, “the scene was either in England or in New York or LA. For so long, Southern groups had to copy that sound. The Allman Brothers were the first group
to say, ‘Fuck it, we’re gonna stay in Macon.’

  “It’s really interesting,” he continues. “People are starting to realize that Southern music is something really good that they’ve overlooked for a long time. It’s not anything new. It’s just being discovered. It’s almost like a cultural thing started happening.”

  The cultural thing, he believes, was a Southern coming of age. The central tension may still be around, but there has been a profound, even radical reordering of the interplay between black and white. And it came at a time when the South was being hit with all the other mind-bending, homogenizing, fabric-tearing forces that were being unleashed in the country at large—from the proliferating influence of television to the bloody street battles over Vietnam. Through it all, the South was changed. But it was not changed altogether, and that fact is underscored most graphically in the music and self-conscious Southernness of Tennessee’s Charlie Daniels.

  Daniels is not a Capricorn act (he’s on the Epic label), but he cuts most of his records in Macon, and before a recent session he grabbed a few minutes to talk about his peculiar career. It was morning, which is not exactly his favorite time of day, and he looked a little bleary around the eyes as he ambled into a vacant side office at the Capricorn studios. As he settled himself on the vinyl-covered couch, the belly snap popped on his cowboy shirt, displaying some ample padding about the midsection. He ignored the futile chore of resnapping, leaned back, and occasionally spit excess tobacco juice into a worn-out Styrofoam cup.

  Daniels is widely thought of as the most overtly Southern of all the Southern rockers, and there is very little about his conversation, his music, or his general appearance to belie that impression. All, in fact, seem as homegrown and country as in the days when his affiliation with tobacco was considerably more strenuous than it is today—when he picked it for a living in the sunny flatlands of central North Carolina.