Southern Rock

The Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd helped usher in a new kind of southern music from Jacksonville, Florida. Together, they and fellow bands like Blackfoot, 38 Special, and Molly Hatchet would reset the course of '70s rock. Yet Jacksonville seemed an unlikely hotbed for a new musical movement. Michael FitzGerald blends eyewitness detail with in-depth history to tell the story of how the River City bred this generation of legendary musicians.

Levon is the dazzling, epic biography of Levon Helm - the beloved, legendary drummer and singer of The Band.

In the summer of 1964 Jacksonville, Florida teenager Ronnie Van Zant and some of his friends hatched the idea of forming a band to play covers of the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Yardbirds, and the country and blues-rock music they had grown to love. Naming their band after Leonard Skinner, the gym teacher at Robert E. Lee Senior High School who constantly badgered the long-haired aspiring musicians to get haircuts, they were soon playing gigs at parties, and bars throughout the South.

I love watching chemicals bond, but I avoid the practice myself. When I'm not teaching, I'm hanging out with my cat and putting together puzzles. I shy away from romantic entanglements because I know firsthand the collateral damage they cause. Until I bump into Anton and Sebastian: best friends, business partners, and former wrestling superstars at South Rock High who could barely pass my class. Catching up turns into drinking, which turns into dancing, which turns into them practicing wrestling moves on me, sans clothing.

In one month, I turn thirty-five with my virginity still intact. Is there anything more embarrassing than knowing most of my French students have gotten more action than me? Je suis triste. When I accidentally reveal this secret to my close friend and co-worker Seamus, South Rock's baseball coach, he offers to help me round the bases. It has to be a joke, because Seamus is one million percent straight. There's no way he'd want to fool around with a chubby language nerd like me, even though I've harbored a secret crush on him since the day he first walked into the teachers' lounge.

Former tour manager and plane crash survivor Ron Eckerman reveals the rigors of life on the road as Lynyrd Skynyrd takes the world by storm in 1976, and the ironic turn of events preceding the tragic plane crash in 1977.

The Allman Brothers Band’s Brothers and Sisters was not only the band’s best-selling album at over seven million copies sold, it was also a powerfully influential release, both musically and culturally, one whose influence continues to be profoundly felt.

In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the 21st century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically.

The inspiration for the major motion picture Priscilla directed by Sofia Coppola, this New York Times best seller reveals the intimate story of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, told by the woman who lived it.

At the age of thirty-nine, Alice Chang suddenly finds herself living in the last place she expected: her mother’s house. But in the face of divorce, eviction, and the recent death of her father, she doesn’t have a choice. Watching as her mother thrives in a new job and meets younger men at the local gym, Alice struggles, reflecting on her parents’ marriage, her relationship with each of them, as she adjusts to being single again for the first time in twenty years. Then she finds her father’s old journal...and uncovers a shocking family secret.

I should be a glitter bomb of excitement about my college friends getting married. But all I can think about is running into my uber-successful ex and his new boyfriend at the wedding . . . while I'm flying painfully solo. I need a plus one, stat. Enter Raleigh Marshall. As luck (or misfortune) would have it, a picture of me and South Rock High's too-blessed-to-be-stressed football coach accidentally finds its way on social media, making people believe we're an item. Raleigh is hot, charming, and one of South Rock's most popular teachers. The problem is that he knows it.

A long time ago, in a suburban high school not so far away, a closeted nerd (me) and a closeted soccer star (Hutch) fell in love and planned to make their public debut at prom. Until Hutch bailed at the last minute, leaving me with a broken heart and unworn tuxedo. Tale as old as time, right? I spent the past ten years working to forget Hutch, returning to our old high school to teach and make new memories that could erase ones of him. I thought Hutch was ancient history, off living his professional athlete life.

The Powell brothers - Muir and Moody - are as different as Cain and Abel. Muir is an innocent, a shy young man with big dreams. Moody, the older and wilder brother - embittered by the death of his father, by years of fighting his mother, and by his jealousy of Muir's place in the family - takes to moonshine and gambling and turns his anger on his brother. Muir escapes by wandering, making his way around the country in attempts to find something - an occupation, a calling - to match his ambition.

Released in 1974, Sweet Home Alabama has become synonymous with Southern rock. From its opening guitar riff, it is instantly recognizable, a raucous, irreverent defense of a Deep South state and its segregationist governor against the jabs of Neil Young. But the roots of Lynyrd Skynyrd's best-selling anthem go much deeper than regional pride or resentment of a fellow rocker.

Will the Reverend Shepherd Jackson risk his God-given call for the love of a fallen woman? Veezie Harrington, a backwoodsy young woman with a seedy past, experiences difficulty fitting in to her new way of life after she inherits a wealthy estate in Alabama during the 1930’s. When she falls in love with handsome Shep Jackson, the local pastor, she sets a goal to overcome her redneck ways and become a real lady, worthy of the love of such a fine Christian man. Is the bar too high?Reverend Shepherd Jackson, a forty-year-old widower, causes an uproar in the church when he falls in love with ...

Kings of Rock and Roll is the story of Billy and Eddy King, one white, one black, and both musical prodigies. When joined by brothers Danny and Mickey Prince and drummer Phil Jester, they became Kings Court and became teenage music legends in the Deep South in the 1960s and '70s. Their collective stories weave a tantalizingly accurate picture of life in hundreds of textile towns across the Southeast during the era of civil rights and the Vietnam War.

South Africa is under attack from all sides when Elanza, a politically connected heiress blinded by disease and looking for love before it is too late, meets a naïve English boy. Ralph, 18 and innocent, has accidentally stumbled upon Elanza - and South Africa’s biggest secret. When Ralph disappears into the darkest part of the continent to walk home overland, a Swazi spy, the only black African agent working for the apartheid-era National Intelligence Service, comes into both of their lives.

For millions of kids, high school is a tumultuous time, with social highs and lows, academic pressure, and extracurricular wins and losses, but for the Little Rock Nine, the first African American students to attend a previously segregated high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, those years were nightmarish.