ANNIVERSARY: The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion

The Black Crowes' sophomore effort was released 30 years ago today. Could the album have been a country-rock crossover if the musical landscape were different then? It's a tantalizing question.

I wrote a 30th-anniversary retrospective on The Black Crowes’ sophomore album The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion which you can read here.

I absolutely love writing anniversary/reissue retrospectives. This one was tremendously gratifying because, aside from the fact that several of these songs have meant a lot to me for three decades, proposing it to Holler Country got me looking at the album in a whole new light.

A passage that didn’t make the cut:

Sure, the Crowes’ rendition of R&B/soul giant Otis Redding’s ‘Hard to Handle’ provided much of the rocket fuel for their debut album Shake Your Money Maker’s success, but it didn’t fool anyone — not even the band itself, which had no intention of including the song on the album. Writing about The Black Crowes in Entertainment Weekly, for example, then-contributor Dave Marsh declared that “authentic bluesmen these Crowes will never be.” Ironically enough, Marsh was actually being favorable in his assessment, but he would nevertheless be proven wrong within a year and a half of his forecast. ‘Hard to Handle’ may be the song The Black Crowes are most widely identified with, but it may as well have been an exercise in play-acting compared to the soulfulness the band captured on Southern Harmony.

When I started to listen back, I was struck that a song like ‘Thorn in my Pride’ was, if not a country tune outright, then something damn close. I couldn’t believe how that never registered with me back in ‘92. It got me to thinking: could — and should — this album have been marketed to a country audience? I’m not sure. The band was hitting multi-platinum sales just fine on its own at the time, and the musical climate was, perhaps, more stratified.

But I wonder in hindsight if it was a mistake for the record company not to pursue a more open-minded strategy. I mean, if this album were being put out today, I feel like it’s almost a guarantee that it would be well-received by fans of artists like Lilly Hiatt and her contemporaries. And you could argue that inside the Crowes was a country-rock band straining to get out. Or maybe they didn’t have to strain all that hard because that side of them came through quite a bit, and they would venture even further down a country/roots-rock path on the two albums that followed Southern Harmony.

While writing this piece, it struck me that the haunting pedal-steel twang of ‘Wiser Time’ from 1994’s Amorica doesn’t land all that far from, say, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s 2017 track ‘Tupelo,’ while tunes like ‘Girl from a Pawnshop’ and ‘Better When You’re Not Alone’ from 1996’s Three Snakes and One Charm could, with some tweaking, have sounded right at home on Wilco’s alt-country landmark Being There, which was released the same year.

In 2020, I discovered complete YouTube gigs by each band from shows that took place just 12 days apart. For some reason, I got a really powerful charge out of imagining that they were two parts of the same show, with Wilco opening for the Crowes.

So here you go:

<3 SRK