MUSIC

You can call Blackberry Smoke’s music southern rock and you wouldn’t be wrong. Or you could call it country and you wouldn’t be wrong, either. But you would be selling both the band and its legion of fans short by trying to fit them solely into one genre. With influences that run the gamut from country to bluegrass to metal to gospel and yes, southern rock, Blackberry Smoke is more than the sum of its diverse parts.
“None of us have ever said, ‘Let’s be a southern rock band or a bluegrass band or a country band’,” Blackberry Smoke front man Charlie Starr explains. “We all love the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Stones and the Faces and Hank Williams and Bill Monroe. It’s not about what kind of music it is, as long as it’s good and it’s honest. When we get together it just sounds the way it does.”
The group, which is made up of Starr, sibling rhythm section Richard and Brit Turner (bass and drums, respectively) and guitarist Paul Jackson, formed in 2000 and quickly made an impact. Thanks to individual and shared reputations for entertaining, the foursome hit the road hard. “We had gigs right away,” says Richard, who with Brit had been in a popular Atlanta band that opened for national touring acts.
One of the fledgling group’s early supporters was Jesse James Dupree of Jackyl, who invited the group to tour with his band. “He’d heard a demo and thought it was fantastic,” remembers Charlie. “It was trial by fire. We played every scary dive between here and there… and a few real nice ones, too. From that tour we made relationships with club owners, promoters and DJs that we still have today,” says Charlie.
Touring soon became a way of life for the band. Among the many acts the group has shared the stage with are ZZ Top, Montgomery Gentry, The Outlaws, Marshall Tucker Band and Cross Canadian Ragweed.
While the group has deep southern roots—Starr is from Alabama, the Turners are from Georgia and Jackson hails from Florida—it first found success north of the Mason Dixon line. “We got big in Wisconsin and Michigan and worked our way back to Georgia,” Brit says with a smile.
At the end of the day, Blackberry Smoke just wants to do what it has done for the last decade. “There ain’t nothing more fulfilling than making music people like,” says Paul. “The only way for us to promote our records was to tour year-round, 150 dates a year.