COUNTRY ROADS

‘There’s a highway outside our hotel, there’s fresh horses and we’re ready to ride/There’ll be another showdown around sunset, and we’ll be comin’ back dead or alive.’

So begins Southern Rock Will Never Die, the anthemic opening track from Dixie Highway, the eleventh studio album from the Outlaws. That song recycles most clichés propagated by the titular genre – think chain-smoking, card games and guitar gunfights; only hard liquor, loose women and Stetsons are omitted. As far as mission statements go, this one’s pretty hard to beat.

From a band led by Henry Paul, the guitarist, singer and songwriter who has put 47 years of his life into the Outlaws, it seems only good and proper that such a song would name-check the fallen great and good of southern rock – including Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines from Lynyrd Skynyrd, Gregg and Duane Allman and Berry Oakley of the Allman Brothers Band, the Marshall Tucker Band’s Toy and Tommy Caldwell, ‘Taz’ DiGregorio and Tommy ‘TC’ Crain from the Charlie Daniels Band and, closer to home, Billy Jones, Frank O’Keefe and Hughie Thomasson, all three of whom were co-founders of Paul’s own group. “I wrote Southern Rock Will Never Die as reminder that the genre will always be bigger than the personalities that helped to create it,” Paul explains.

If a cynic were to accuse Paul of opportunism, how would he respond?

“Look,” he fires right back. “These were people I knew personally; we shared stages and time together on the bus. I’ve been to their funerals and laid them to rest. There was a mutual respect and appreciation. That’s where I drew my inspiration.”