SOUTHERN HALL OF FAME

Hank Williams: The Hillbilly Shakespeare brought country music into the modern world, and vice versa. Lived fast, loved hard, died young, and left a beautiful memory.

Ku Klux Klan: Formed in Pulaski, Tenn., this is one of America’s truly unique fascist organizations. Now they’re getting a new youth image and proselytizing for eager members with that Lou Reed energy. The newly-elected Grand Wizard is just 19. Sound like Wild in the Streets?

Muscle Shoals: It may be where the soul is, but it’s one lousy little grit center. Best food: catfish. Best entertainment: the K-Mart store down the block from Fame recording studio.

Michael Ochs Archives

Everly Brothers: They come from a country tradition of brother duets (Delmore Brothers, Sam and Kirk McGee, etc.), but since Don and Phil started recording during the mid 50s, they stepped up the beat, sweetened the harmonies, and perfected pop rockabilly.

Allen Toussaint: Another writerproducer, Toussaint had a hand in nearly everything to come out of the golden era of New Orleans rock ‘n’ roll. He has lately begun picking up a lot of similar work from white rockers in search of that second line magic, and he often enlists the aid of an instrumental group called the Meters.

Sweet Daddy Watts: Crowned king of the Southern wrestling circuit, Sweet Daddy usually shows up at matches armed to the teeth with a wicked spear, and dressed like an African tribesman. His gimmick is that he can only speak Ubangi, which usually throws the poolhall crowd into hysterics.

George Wallace: “Lord, lord, they shot George Wallace down!” Every Northerner’s image of the Southern Man, George acts like populism never left.

Jack Daniels: If you don’t know about this, you sure the hell ain’t no drinkin’ man. Distilled in one of the few dry counties in Tennes-

Albert King: Blues Power and all that phoney jive! Albert is far from the best of the modern bluesmen working, but he does seem to be the most influential.

Tony . Joe White: If he was as “sensitive” as Leonard Cohen, they’d have called him a genius a long time ago. Meanwhile, he’ll just mumble and grunt his way into your heart.

Marie Laveau: Voodoo queen of New Orleans, where such things 'are a very serious matter.

Beale Street: She ain’t what she used to be — in fact, she’s been urban renewed out of existence for all practical purposes — but there was a time when this Memphis, street was" the home of the blues and every other known deviant act in the South.

Blind Willie McTell: Ain’t a Southern band working today that doesn’t know his “Statesboro Blues.” Among other country blues artists, try Robert Johnson, Skip James, and Bukka White.

John Fred and His Playboy Band: Archetypal Southern punk rock; his “Judy in Disguise” blew flower power off the car radio in Summer ’67, and he followed that up with an inspired version of “Sweet Soul Music”: “Hats off to Pete Townshend now/Singing ‘Tommy can you hear me’ now.”

Moonshine: When it’s good, there’s not another form of hooch that can compare with it When it’s bad, it can lay low, as many people as Sherman’s march through Georgia. Proceed with caution.

Black Oak Arkansas: Jim Dandy is so obnoxious that he deserves to be punched out. A real hoax.

Jimmy Rodgers: The Singing Brakeman from Mississippi was the first star of country music, and is still revered by cracker and folkie alike. Laid down some avant-garde primal yokels that’d make Leon Thomas curdle in envy,too.

Peachtree Street: Hip heart of Atlanta, Georgia, the most cosmopolitan city in the South. The Electric Ballroom there has recently taken over from Richard’s as the jumpinest joint in the South.

Julian Bond: The former state representative and state senatorelect from Georgia is, along with Georgia governor Jimmy Carter (a former peanut farmer) the epi, tome of the new Southern politician: articulate, modish, radiclib.

Larry Raspberry and the Higifisteppers: Formerly the Gentrys (the ultimate Southern punk rock band), they got transformed into a promotional hype via Don Nix. Larry Raspberry, though, still has the voice to sooth the savage beast.

Rufus Thomas: Mr. Clean wid shiney white spats. Has been known to never stop yakking on his after midnite WDIA radio show, and boy, he shore blows the blooze. The real Godfather of soul, and don’t you forget it.

Box Tops/Big Star; The Box Tops used to be simply Alex Chilton backed by session men (the ole Monkees trick), but they still churned out the hits. Chilton’s new band Big Star, however, are champions at the game with good albums and critical support to boot. They may even be the new Raspberries (ha ha).

Martha Mitchell: The Mouth of file South, though it’s not likely that she’ll rise again.

Gomer and Goober Pyle: From The Real McCoys to The Beverly Hillbillies, TV programmers tried to lure the boobs with the most tasteless cracker stereotypes they could create. But Goober and Gomer of the Andy Griffith Show are the champs hands down. They is to crackers what Amos ‘n’ Andy was to blacks.

Dr. John: New Orleans rock ‘n’ roll lives on in the songs of this fonk vendor. Bayou magic may live on in his jive rap and glittercaked paunch too, though that’s more-debatable.

Fats Domino: All his records may sound the same, but they sure do sound nice. Fats was just the tip of the New Orleans iceberg, which was active right up through the English Invasion, and let’s not forget Lee Dorsey, Ernie K-Doe, Irma Thomas, Benny Spellman, the Showmen, Frankie Ford, Chris Kenner, Professor Longhair, Smiley Lewis, and oh so many more.

William Faulkner: The Southern novelist, and a Nobel Prize to show for it. His books — The Sound & the Fury, Go Down Moses - chronicle with ecstatically prolix anguish the decay of rural innocense.

Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee: The Duane and Gregg of their day. It was great for them while it lasted.

Martin Luther King: Preacher, civil rights leader, Nobel Prize winner, martyr. Humanist hero to a whole generation of pre-violent black and white Movement people, decried as a rabble rouser by J. Edgar Hoover, 'struck down in the volatile spring of ’68 by an escaped con redneck who may or may not have acted alone. And the hits just keep on coming.

Dann Penn/Spooner Oldham: Songwriters and producers extraordinaire. You can find their names somewhere on maybe half the albums to come out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals in the last 10 years.

J.J. Cale: The Southern somnambulist, ol’ J.J. gets so far laid back that it’s usually hard to tell whether he’s coming or going.

Joe South: With “Games People Play,” “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” and others, he took an eclectic form of Southern music and aphorism as far into the American pop mainstream as it could ever hope to get.

Jimmy Dean: Pure pork sausage, lean. “Well, ya know when I get up in the morning I say to Sue, ‘Sue, just fix me a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice.’ And I know it’s wrong. You know it’s wrong. So we recommend that you git a good breakfast (and naturally we hope that you’ll include Jimmy Dean Pure Pork Sausage in that good breakfast).” Best cracker commercial, and best performance by a moron since Minnie Pearl.

Joe Namath: Alabama football cretin moves to the big city, discovers underarm deodorant, hangs out at massage parlors, and finally gets all the girls he wants. Good show, Joe.

Gram Parsons: What happens when a good ol’ boy from the Okefenokee Swamps of Georgia strikes off for Los Angeles via Cambridge in search of fame and fortune as an authentic hippy country and western star? He... slowly... wastes... himself... away...

Bourbon Street: Back in the days of Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory, it was one of the most wide-open districts in any American city, and spawned an appropriate music thereby. Now that it’s been takbn over by Pete Fountain, A1 Hirt, and the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, it’s mostly a tourist trap, but some of that Crescent City spirit lingers in the air.

Buford Pusser: Once a hillbilly hero for knocking off heads and getting his wife shot to death by the hoods (see Joe Don’s amazing performance in Walking Tall), then the bum spent his time in Chevy showrooms signing autographs, hanging out at bars sobbing over his pathetic life story, and things like that. Smacked up his ’Vette and died a couple months ago.

John tee Hooker: Also a highly influential blues guitarist and singer, not only for the current wave of bands, but for the rockabilly maniacs of the 50s. Since the first white boy heard John Lee spitting out “Let that boy boogie woogie,” the white race has never been the same.

Delaney and Bonnie: Perfected L,A.-styled Southern music (called swamp-rock, heavy on the gospel influence), spawned Leon Russell and dozens of others, divorced, faded away.

Booker T and the MGs: An unlikely mixture of hillbilly and black, and the tightest instrumental group ever; house band on all those hot mid 60s Stax hits.

Tennessee Williams: Classic Southern decadence a quarter century before the Allman Brothers sniffed glitter in the wind and retched. Perhaps the rich man’s Lou Reed. In any case, chronicled the mossy rot at the heart of the region’s myth, and survived prodigious dissipation far better than today’s sissified wastedomes.

Sam and Dave: Soul Men of the mid 60s, with hits that wouldn’t quit.

Otis Redding: Arguably the greatest soul singer ever, Redding’s breakthrough to the mass audience coincided with his death in a plane crash.

A1 Green; This smoothie may have been raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but he was born in Arkansas, records in Memphis, and just oozes Uptown black Southern charisma.

Elvis draws paycheck for work completed on first movie. Below: Lewis, Rich, Cash.

Elvis Presley and Sun Records: The Pelvis may have parlayed primal rockabilly into the most enduring career, but when it comes to pure white Southern frenzy, you can’t count out such non-stop boppers as Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison, either.

The Hatfields and the McCoys: Between the Civil War and 1900, these two feuding families on the West Virginia/Kentucky border killed off about 100 of each other. There’s still about 250 Hatfields and McCoys living in that region, but they’re friends now.

Lester Maddox: From the days of the ax handle incident up to right now, Lester has always been considered a tad tacky by his fellow Georgians, but up until recently they’ve always elected him to whatever he’s run for. Oh well, Lester, there’s always the store.

Joe Tex: His fusion of country and rhythm and blues made for some of the most cool, sly soul music to ever emerge from the South.

YOUNG TURKS FROM DOWN HOME: These are the heirs of the Allman renaissance. Though derivative, each is finding its own voice. And a good deal of popularity, in some cases, precisely by being derivative.

Wet Willie: Hot flashing funk in the tradition of James Brown and Paul Butterfield. Harp fit to fry your brains. Hit single “Keep on Smilin’ ” saved their necks and made the nation sigh with joy. Alabama born, Macon bred via Capricorn Ponderosa.

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Bama boys as well, as they sing in their hit. Also known by their taste and expertise in brawling: i.e, when they said “Hope Neil Young will remember/Southern man don’t want him around anyhow,” they meant business. Perhaps closest to Allmans in sound of new wave bands, but blessed with definite slashing edge in rock guitar.

Marshall Tucker Band: Carolina coasts and Blue Ridge mountain skies, a fresher, less gritty country music feel to their branch of those great rolling Allman currents. Toy Caldwell is a hoot of a good ol’ boy who holds his moonshine with the best of ’em.

Cowboy: Also known as Boyer & Talton, also known as the ultralaidback CSNY of the Capricorn empire: “I need time/To find out where I’m goin’,” and where they’re going is “Back to the Land.” And this is one time it don’t hurt at all.

Mose Jones: Like Lynyrd Skynyrd, part of A1 Kooper’s carpetbagging Sounds of the South enterprise, but not nearly as successful, probably because not half as narrowly in the predefined Allmans groove. Still, they’ve got talent, and with proper production and a little more push-cometo-shove on the inside, they could become an important band.