BBQ & Picnic Music Player

Southern rock was invented in a recording studio in Alabama. Muscle Shoals Sound and FAME Studios spent the late sixties cutting soul records with a white house band backing Black artists — Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge — and the guitar players who came out of that scene took the rhythm section thinking with them. The Allman Brothers Band formed in Jacksonville in 1969; Lynyrd Skynyrd came out of the same city a few years later.

Both treated blues, country and soul as one material rather than three separate ones, which is the entire genre in a sentence. Outlaw country happened in parallel and for similar reasons: Willie Nelson left Nashville for Austin in 1972 after the label system rejected the records he wanted to make, and On The Road Again came out of that independence. Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, released in 1977, then invented an entire subgenre of music about doing nothing outdoors, and eventually a restaurant chain.

The backyard playlist is one of the few settings where the sixties, seventies and 2010s coexist without friction. Darius Rucker's Wagon Wheel is a fair summary of how the whole tradition works: Bob Dylan sketched the chorus in 1973 and abandoned it, Old Crow Medicine Show finished the song in 2004, and Rucker took it to number one in 2013. Nothing is really new, everything gets handed on, and the audience does not particularly care who wrote it.

Southern rock stopped being a commercially dominant force decades ago and never stopped being played outdoors on summer afternoons, which is a slower and more durable kind of success than the charts are built to measure. Part of that durability is technical. These records were cut to be played on car radios and porch speakers, so the guitars sit where a human voice sits and the drums are mixed politely rather than aggressively — which means they survive being heard from forty feet away with a lawnmower going somewhere.

Part of it is length. A six-minute Allman Brothers track is not an imposition at a barbecue; it is a convenience, because nobody wants to be the person managing the queue while the food burns. And part of it is simply that the genre never pretended to be current.

Southern rock was already nostalgic in 1974, looking back at blues and country from a distance, which gave it nothing left to date. Music that was never trying to be new cannot really become old. That is the quiet reason these records keep turning up at gatherings where nobody agrees on anything else: they arrived already familiar, and forty years of use has not worn the finish off any of them.