Outline of an Idea Emerges With First Snow of 2025 –

“All of a sudden, there was Southern Rock.”
– Jimmy Johnson, about the day Wilson Pickett covered the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” with Duane Allman on guitar, 1969.

SNOW DAY BHAM – Jan. 10, 2025 – Wishing you beauty, peace, love and smooth sailing in this latest storm of Biblical proportions. All quiet here

Tales from the MoJo Road –
By Glynn “Cowboy” Wilson –

ARGO, Ala. – A rare blanket of snow covers the ground here, around three inches, seeming to quiet the landscape in these foothills of the great mountains of the Southeast. It gets deeper the higher you go north from here up the Appalachians over the Blue Ridges. On occasion it can be great fun, yet always that lurking fear of danger is there, the risk and consequences of a trip, a fall. The older you get the more dangerous it becomes, to play in the snow.

This event occurs on the morning after sleeping on a lede idea born the day before, a culmination of online research. Following the digital breadcrumbs so to speak, as well as in person interviews. More like story telling sessions, really, back and forth. Historic cuts from rock and roll records sometimes playing in the background, a pause to focus on a particular lead guitar part. Even a break for part of a football game is company for a friend.

It feels sort of like Ralph Waldo Emerson in a discussion about the laws of nature and the existence of God in Henry David Thoreau’s little cabin, or John Muir camping out with President Teddy Roosevelt in Yosemite Valley and convincing him to create national parks. Only in this place along the MoJo Road, in this case, I’m embedded as a writer to chronicle the story as best I can of an old and dear friend who was there for the birth of rock and Southern Rock, to get the first hand perspective of David Wayne Perkins and his brother Phillip Dale Perkins.

Wayne also crashed the British Invasion, and was critical in taking Reggie to a mainstream American and European audience. Perkins was not only there as an eye witness. He was a creator on the front lines and often in the room when the magic went down. The kind that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck or cause goose bumps to rise up on your skin. Even the brain knows something special is going on.

Outline: Three Ingredients

In figuring out this mystery of a story, cooking up a coherent narrative for readers who likely know some of the pieces already, it’s like cooking up gumbo for gumbo aficionados. There are three main ingredients to outline today for this sample book chapter, something for prospective publishers to taste and ponder.

The first ingredient, the meat: There’s the story you may know of that now famous day in 1969 when the Muscle Shoals rhyme section players took a lunch break from Fame studios in town. Wilson Pickett and Duane Allman took their lunch in the studio. The locals didn’t take kindly to Negros or Long Hairs in their public establishments. The ’60s came to the South and Bama in the ’70s, and some didn’t like it. Long hair, Levi’s jeans, cowboy boots, wide belts, the new redneck hippie, playing “the Devil’s music” with Black musicians, hanging out with them in motels, hotels, bars, restaurants, pool halls and honky tonks from Jacksonville to Jackson and Little Rock, from New Orleans to Birmingham, Memphis, Nashville and Knoxville to Charlotte and Charlottesville and Underground Atlanta. The art of creating and performing music had its own unique way of transcending skin color, as parts of society resisted and still resist this freedom today.

Wilson Pickett and Duane Allman cooking up the music gumbo of Southern Rock at Fame Studio in 1971: NAJ screen shot

Jesus and Martin Luther King faced the same color line. Even I felt the sting of stares on the road with long-haired bands, into the early 1980s. Over late night breakfasts on the road on several occasions, J.J. Jackson regaled us with stories of traveling the South playing clubs and of those intense stares that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Sometimes even verbal threats, and the disdainful spit onto the sidewalk. Sometimes this happened to us in 1982 even, in popular diners for truckers along the highways – while we were talking about it “back when.”

Once at the Huddle House on First Avenue in Birmingham, the one in Center Point as we finished our meal, paid and headed out, one local addressed me and said, “Hey, hippie kid, maybe one of these days you’ll grow up and get a belt, and a haircut.” I was not so much a redneck hippy all the way, mind you, although I did sport long hair, but often wore the size 29-29 Levi’s so tight they didn’t need a belt. I often wore tennis shoes, not boots, and no cowboy hat.

“Maybe,” I said smiling, shooting him a bird and laughing. “Maybe one of these days you’ll grow a brain, or get laid.”

Alas I suspect it still goes on to this day, maybe in a spot like Velma’s just down the road in Trussville. In our day the men went there to get drunk on Falstaff beer, Jack Daniels whiskey or a little moonshine smuggled in. Lacking for a date, no mind their demeanor or wives back home, they picked fights instead. Great bar brawls by drunken men on a Saturday night. What a tradition and form of entertainment. Thank God for progress and rock and roll.

Ingredient Two

The next ingredients in this gumbo dish for history, the vegetables, involves the reason Allman argued for covering the song. He wanted to play guitar ledes and jam the song out in the end, like those that became so beloved later on Allman Brothers tours and records. It was a hit, the precursor to many more.

Of course that was not the only place Southern Rock was being seeded, hatched, born and cooked up. Down in Jacksonville, Florida, for example, Ronnie Van Zandt had a band that made a significant pass through Muscle Shoals from the swamps of Florida to the Tennessee River in the Quad Cities. Wayne Perkins was eye witness to that as a session player, once summoned out of the river in his swim trunks to help on a session. Those boys came out with a pot of gold down the road, and for a time ruled as the King’s of Southern Rock and rock music period, up there with the Allman Brothers, the Stones, etc.

Ronnie Van Zandt of Lynyrd Skynyrd pointing at Wayne Perkins, fresh from swimming in the Tennessee River to cut guitar parts in a session at Muscle Shoals Sound: NAJ screen shot

Back at the studio, Duane was listening to all the new music coming out and munching with Wilson, then starts jamming on “Hey Jude,” a Beatles mega hit, putting in his own unique side guitar leads and riffs. Rick Hall was skeptical.

“You want to cover the Beatles?” he said. “What?”

But by the the time the other players got back from lunch, he was convinced and the recording session schedule was scrapped.

In an independent documentary on the Shoals music scene released in 2013, Jimmy Johnson utters those immortal words: “All of a sudden, there was Southern Rock,” he says of the version recorded that day Pickett covered the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” with Duane Allman on guitar, 1969.

Listen as the track progresses from a straight cover of the song, then develops into a Southern Rock dance jam. That was Duane Allman.

That’s a well told story. But there’s more.

Percy Sledge

Just down the hill, as they would say in those days, Wayne Perkins was playing bass on Percy Sledge records in the Quinvy studio, they called it, cranking out hits and exploding on the radio airwaves too, many picked up and distributed by Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records in New York.

Slide guitar techniques often came up in between sessions as musicians around town ended up in the same apartment buildings, bars, restaurants and swimming holes, and Duane’s use of a glass pain pill bottle became a fascination. He needed the pills for the pain when he fell off a horse and injured his right elbow. He couldn’t play for six weeks, right before he was planning his move from California to Muscle Shoals.

The infamous pill bottle that Gregg Allman gave to Duane Allman, who turned it into a slide: NAJ screen shot/Gregg Allman’s Facebook: “We are so grateful for” for reposting by thebighousemuseum.

He got motivated to play slide after listening to a Taj Mail record given to him by Gregg along with the pills in the bottle.

At the same time, being raised around tools and helping his dad fix up cars, Perkins adopted a metal Craftsman nine-sixteenth, long-weld socket. Duane played with his on the ring finger of his left hand. Wayne used his pinkie to allow one more finger for chords. Bluesmen then and rockers now prefer a metal slide. If you drop a glass and it breaks, whoops? What then?

Percy Sledge hit Number One on the Billboard charts with “When a Man Loves A Woman” in 1966. It became a Gold Record, so he was back in the studio again working for more. When Quinvy had financial troubles on the verge of closing down, Wayne moved over to Muscle Shoals Sound replacing Eddie Hinton, which is where he met and played with the early Lynyrd Skynyrd and an incredible list of some of America’s top musical talent at the time.

And not just Southern Rock. The British Invasion was on and artists migrated to London and even Germany to spread the Southern Rock guitar style and techniques around the world. Something else uniquely ours, born of the swampy blues of Mississippi and ramped up by rockers with power in the cities and giant amps and speakers, it reverberated around the globe like the Big Band Jazz movement in the generation before, what Tom Brokaw called the “Greatest Generation.”

Sorry, Tom, but I am going to be the first to argue with you about that. As a biased member of the great Baby Boomer Generation, I would like to make the case that we were in many ways the greatest generation. The greatest progress in the arts in human history, an era of individual liberty when the government took a little more responsibility for its citizens, not just the bankers and oilmen. It’s felt like a gradual, cyclical climb down hill since then, like a great ship of a republic going into a spiraling sea.

Perkins would soon be moving on to London with Smith Perkins Smith and then lured down the hall by Chris Blackwell at Island Records into sessions for Bob Marley and the Wailers, and then introduced to the Rolling Stones by Eric Clapton. In 1971, this was the center of the universe for music and culture, up there with New York and Los Angeles.

Watch and hear Wayne Perkins tell the story for a documentary on Bob Marley.

Stir Like Gumbo

The final ingredient in this recipe involves a careful stirring of the thick yet soupy bowl of music with the wand of the written word. It’s a story about a group of musicians who showed up in the right place at the right time and created a new popular music to the beat of the Swampers. They would be responsible for laying down an exciting little groove that seemed to ooze out of the swamps, tease the senses and grab you right by the heart, as if it was whispered by spirts in the trees for “the people” to hear and dance to in the moonlight.

The studio contract players were the day laborers of the music business who helped pioneer this rock and Southern Rock, just as free-lance writers tried to document the history on the run in new ways for free-lance rates. In a way we are all in this together, the mission to keep the arts and artists alive.

Another documentary from CMT also tells the story: