Happy 30th Anniversary to The Black Crowes’ second studio album The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, originally released May 12, 1992.
I did not like the Black Crowes at first.
My mother is, or at least was, a huge fan. She first heard of them during their storied run with Jimmy Page, in which they played the music of her beloved Led Zeppelin, and the band became a mainstay of my family’s car stereo from that point forward. As a ten-year-old, I was not into it —as my father put it, Chris Robinson’s voice sounded like “a cat in heat,” and I was more into the gentle folk rock stylings of groups like The Jayhawks.
It was not until Warpaint (2008), and specifically the songs “Oh Josephine” and “Whoa Mule,” that I found something that I loved in the Crowes. I adored the easygoing feel of Warpaint, the pastoral sound, the promises of rural simplicity that seemed out of reach for a kid growing up in the New York suburbs. (I should note here that this was the depths of my country rock period, in which I listened to Keith Urban’s greatest hits album on repeat for about two years).
Once I had become Crowes-curious, adoring the 2009 double album Before The Frost… Until The Freeze, the band became standard listening whenever my mom and I were in the car together. They soundtracked our trip to look at colleges, and a lot of trips to see the Mets in the early days of Citi Field, when the team was truly terrible but it didn’t matter, because we were together.
Those were good times, the very end of my childhood, and The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion was in the CD player for most of it. You could make it from our house to the stadium by the end of “Sometimes Salvation,” which meant that the back half of the record would serve as the background for the game postmortem on the way home, in which we assured ourselves that all we needed was one or two good bullpen arms for an outside shot at the Wild Card. (This turned out to be wrong.)
All along the way, Mom would tell me about what she loved about the band: the way “My Morning Song” summons gospel through both its worship-song-adjacent breakdown and the backing vocals of Barbara Mitchell and Taj Artis. The “chunky riffs” in songs like “Sting Me” and “Remedy.” The emotional tenor of Chris Robinson’s voice. And maybe most of all, the thick, drippy guitar tone of Marc Ford, best represented in the solo of “Sometimes Salvation.” “Nobody plays the guitar like him,” she often said, and she was right.
Nowadays, when I listen to Southern Harmony, I associate it with Long Island, my home. This is probably not what the Robinsons et al. were picturing when they threw together the swampy hard rock of something like “No Speak No Slave.”
But at the same time, Southern Harmony is both a love letter to home and a reinvention of it. Not many southern bands rock quite as hard as the Crowes, although many tried, and even though it’s obvious that they are steeped in their Georgian history, the more important story of this record is how you make your past your own. Take the tradition that you’ve grown up in, and do something new with it. These are questions that I don’t know how to answer, but it’s reassuring to hear that the Crowes were able to do it and make it sound this good.
As I look back on Southern Harmony, I find even more riches than I knew existed—my now-favorite song on the record, “Thorn In My Pride,” couldn’t stand up to the hard rock excitement that is found elsewhere on the record, but now I find its lack of bluster appearing somehow self-assured and wiser. (The album’s finest moment is probably when Eddie Harsch pulls the band out of this song’s hard-rocking bridge with a thunking piano riff, as if reminding them that we’re not doing the Whole Big Thing on this one.)
I’m also looking back on those times as more beautiful than I maybe thought they had been when I was experiencing them—waiting to go to college, feeling like the world was waiting for me, when in fact I could have been appreciating all that I had. If the point of The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is that what came before us is waiting for our own interpretation and voice, but that it is also always an indelible part of us, then I’m grateful that it brings me right back home.
Enjoyed this article? Read more about the Black Crowes here:
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