While the Allman Brothers Band are retired and Lynyrd Skynyrd are preparing to follow suit, one of their contemporaries continue to stick to their path. As their heart-felt song title insists: Southern Rock Will Never Die, as long as the Outlaws are still standing.

Words: Dave Ling

‘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.”

Contemporaries have passed on, retired or simply faded away, but although Henry Paul turns 71 in August the last remaining original member of the Outlaws remains fiercely committed to keeping southern rock alive.

“I hope that Dixie Highway reinforces the notion that the Outlaws still matter, and that southern rock will always matter,” he says. “It’s a message we’re proud to bring into the twenty-first century.”

As if to underline this statement, the final verse of Southern Rock Will Never Die references songs by the Charlie Daniels Band and those good ol’

Allmans: ‘You might say that this was long ago, and time has passed us by/But the devil’s still down in Georgia, and I still got ramblin’ on my mind.’

Henry Paul joined the Outlaws in 1971 when they were reborn from an earlier incarnation. The band had been formed by Hughie Thomasson and various others including drummer David Dix in Florida four years earlier with the name the Four Letter Words.

As the Outlaws (but without Paul) they recorded an album, which was then mothballed due to a dispute with the producer. Things looked pretty bleak when the exact same thing happened again following a second trip to the studio.