Delta Swamp Rock: Sounds from the South Soul Jazz****

When it comes to southern rock, there was something in the water. How else can you explain why a bunch of wide-eyed young musicians in states such as Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida mixed rock, country, blues and soul like it was the most natural thing in the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s? This compilation (and the 68-page book that comes with it) makes a good fist of explaining how casual experimentation in places such as Memphis, Nashville and Muscle Shoals by such acts as Big Star, Dan Penn, Bobbie Gentry, the Allman Brothers, Waylon Jennings and Lynryd Skynryd produced a melting pot of sound. Southern rock may have been born of various rebel musics but, as this impeccably curated set shows, it captured the new, post-civil rights side of the south, too.

See souljazzrecords.co.uk

Download tracks: Bobbie Gentry, Seasons Come Seasons Go; Big Star, Thirteen; Dan Penn, If Love Was Money