Southern Gothic meets the Southern counterculture—the Allman Brothers Band

I call this newsletter Conversation from the Crossroads. Crossroads is an intentional turn of phrase, a nod to Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues.”¹ Using the “Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture” motif, gives me a lot of room to interpret the band’s influence and impact.

This is my take on one particular crossroads: the Southern counterculture and the Southern Gothic tradition. I explored this concept for a presentation and adapted it for print here. I’m sharing also video of the session (warts and all) for those who prefer that medium.

Let’s start at the crossroads

The crossroads carries a tremendous amount of symbolism in the American South. Its origins trace to the tales of enslaved Africans.

The crossroads was a sacred space where West Africans journeyed to invoke gods. In America, as these African traditions merged with Christianity, the god of the crossroads became the ultimate trickster: Scratch, Legba, Satan.

It’s at the crossroads Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil, a legend that reverberates in popular imagination today, well beyond blues and roots music.

Salvation in music

The Allman Brothers Band found salvation in music and in the Southern counterculture. Their story is one of resilience: cultural, economic, emotional, spiritual, and existential. The band was a microcosm of the South, its contradictions, its struggles, and its beauty.

Emerging from Macon, Georgia, in 1969 and the years immediately following the 1964 Civil Rights and the 1965 Voting Rights Acts, the Allman Brothers Band were an integrated band that clashed with the expectations of southern society.

They spoke of music in spiritual terms and pursued music with religious fervor. Songs like Gregg Allman’s “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” addressed religious themes.

Their repertoire included “Stormy Monday” (made most famous by Bobby Blue Bland):

“Sunday I go to church, I kneel down to pray.
And this is what I say.
‘Lord have mercy! Lord have mercy on me.’”

At the crossroads, Robert Johnson called out to God:

“I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, ‘Have mercy, now, save poor Bob if you please.’"

Gregg found haunted crossroads in “Melissa”…

“Crossroads, will you ever let him go?
Will you hide the dead man’s ghost?”

…existential crisis in “Dreams”…

“Went up on the hilltop, to see what I could see.
The whole world was falling, right down in front of me.
I’m hung up on dreams I’ll never see.”

…and torture in “Whipping Post”²

“Sometimes I feel, like I’ve been tied to the whipping post!”

A Southern Gothic primer

Rooted in the humid, Spanish moss-draped landscapes of the American South, Southern Gothic literature emerged from the 18th and 19th century (European) Gothic tradition. Instead of castles, the setting is the American South’s crumbling plantations—a Southern society grappling with the specters of slavery, the Civil War, and the Lost Cause.

Southern Gothic confronts the South’s romanticized past with the realities of these unresolved conflicts. It balances darkness with redemption, embracing the complexities of human experience in stories that critique and celebrate southern identity.

To the Allman Brothers Band, these are not abstract ideas; their Southernness is essential. They embody the region’s contradictions—Patterson Hood’s “duality of the southern thing”³— and offer a vision of hope and unity.

Themes of decay, the haunted past, loss, moral ambiguity, cultural tension, alienation, redemption, and resilience resonate throughout their story.

Death hovers like a cloud.

Three of the six members grew up fatherless. As toddlers, Duane and Gregg lost their father, a D-day veteran who was killed in a robbery attempt. Drummer Jaimoe also lost his father as a youth.

Twin tragedies further mark the story: the deaths of Duane Allman and Berry Oakley in consecutive years: 1971 and 1972.

Redemption: Hittin’ the Note