Various - Soul Jazz Records Presents Delta Swamp Rock: At The Crossroads Of Rock, Country And Soul 2LP

Long out of print (10 years!) limited-edition vinyl only new edition of Soul Jazz Records' classic Delta Swamp Rock features an all-star line-up of groundbreaking artists who blended rock, soul and country together to create a stunning new sound of southern music in America in the 1970s.

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!

This album comes as one limited-edition gold vinyl double vinyl album complete with extensive sleevenotes, interviews and exclusive photography spread over a 12-page A4 full-size magazine and two Soul Jazz house bag inner sleeves.

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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.

REVIEWS:

"An impeccable collection of Southern Rock" THE GUARDIAN (*****)

"Soul Jazz Records compilations are always worthwhile because of the care and detail they put into these nuggets of musical archaeology. There is not a bad track on Delta Swamp Rock. Southern rock continued the tradition of racial integration through music, that began in Memphis with rock and roll, combining soul, gospel, country and rock to come up with something that was, frequently, groovy in the extreme." THE TIMES

"An ambitious document of the tension between conservative musical aesthetics and breakout rock ’n’ roll styles that characterised the early 1970s inheritance of blues, soul and Country in the post- psychedelic South." THE WIRE