Dixie Lullaby: A Story Of Music, Race, And New Beginnings In A New South

Tracing the roots of Southern music, "Dixie Lullaby" is a brilliantly original look at how the unifying powers of rock music in the 1970s and 1980s helped Southerners to come to terms with their complex racial past. Photos throughout.

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elementary school was integrated in 1968, the year Kemp reached third grade; his aunts, uncles, and grandparents held outdated racist views that were typical of the time; his parents, however, believed blacks should be extended the same treatment as whites, but also counseled their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 suchas 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.