Blues Progressions

Episode 4 is the legacy episode — the beautiful parts and the complicated parts both. How "classic rock" radio (AOR → tested song libraries c.1980) froze a handful of songs and shrank the genre to a postcard. The "Free Bird" meme and "Sweet Home Alabama" as shorthand. Then the hard center: the Confederate-flag controversy, handled through the host's honest first-person reckoning — wearing one at 12 as "rebel"/love-of-the-music, learning what it carries (the battle flag vs. the CSA flag, the civil-rights-era revival, the 1861 cornerstone statement), and landing on the music, not the symbols. The "long-haired country boy" myth vs. the genre's real diversity (Jaimoe, the Black blues roots). And the bridge forward: Petty, Seger, Americana, modern country — plus Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera and "the duality of the Southern thing" as the master class.

The fuse from Episode 1 catches. How a generation of British kids fell for American blues records and handed the music back louder: Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated as the hub; the underground club scene (the Marquee, Eel Pie Island); the race-and-radio reason it took outsiders; the Rolling Stones as a Chess cover band; the Animals and Them; John Mayall's Bluesbreakers as the guitar-hero factory (Clapton, Green, Mick Taylor); the 1966 "Beano" album and the Les-Paul-into-cranked-Marshall tone that defined rock guitar; the Yardbirds pipeline (Clapton → Beck → Page); Cream and the power trio; Peter Green's blues-band Fleetwood Mac; Led Zeppelin's blues bones — and the honest reckoning about credit and payment owed to the Black originators. Ends with the round-trip: the Stones putting Howlin' Wolf on American TV, and Hendrix flown to London.

The opener of a brand-new six-part series — with a warm welcome back to the Southern Rock (Southbound)

Fresh on the heels of my series on Southern Rock, I am launching the next series on Blues Rock starting July 17!

A band like Blackberry Smoke or the Marcus King Band walks out to a sold-out room tonight — and you can’t quite name what it is. Southern Rock? Blues-rock? Country? Americana? All of it? The finale brings the whole story home: who carries it now, how it evolved, and how a porch sound went global. 

1980: Capricorn Records goes bankrupt and the press writes the obituary — Southern Rock is dead. They got it completely wrong. It didn’t die; it went underground, and the faithful kept the fire lit in the small rooms. The host was one of them — behind the board for a Jersey cover band. 

The same five Southern Rock songs play on every classic rock station, forever — but somebody chose them, and somebody froze this music in

Everybody knows “Free Bird” — it’s a punchline now, the thing people yell as a joke. But that song, and a dozen like it, came out of one white-hot

A grieving manager who’d just buried Otis Redding bets a whole record label on a band with two lead guitarists and two drummers. The town is

Welcome back! After a long absence, I would like to welcome you back to Blues Progressions. With the help of AI, I am now able to keep up with work and my side projects. This is the first of a six parts series of the Sub-Genre: Southern Rock. As a long time fan I am thrilled to have it's histroy presented to you. Look for a weekly episode throughout this series!