I got a call from an Associated Press reporter shortly before we put this issue to bed on Monday. He wanted to interview me about Phil Walden, the titan of American music who kick-started the careers of several generations of notable Southern artists — Otis Redding to the Allman Brothers Band to Widespread Panic — and founded the ’70s-era Southern rock label Capricorn Records. Walden had died the night before, after a long bout with cancer. He was 66.
For me, the death of Phil Walden is personal. He’s a key character in my book Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South. For all his hucksterism and bombast, Walden was first and foremost a big music fan and an unheralded champion of race relations in the South. His best friend was Redding at a time in Macon, GA, when not only wasn’t it tolerated for white guys and black guys to be best friends but it also was downright dangerous. Walden didn’t give a damn. He was a musical visionary who had a dream — that one day a bunch of young Southern white guys could join instruments with a young Southern black guy and become the biggest touring band in the world: the Allman Brothers Band.
Walden was hated about as much as he was loved. He and the Allmans split ways acrimoniously, the Allmans claiming he’d screwed them over financially. One prominent musician even suggested to me that Walden was responsible for the motorcycle death of guitarist Duane Allman, although there’s not a shred of evidence pointing to such a ludicrous thing.
One thing is for sure: Walden was a passionate man. He loved music, he hated racism. He told me something that really rocked me when I was sitting with him at his home in Atlanta, interviewing him for my book: “Civil rights freed the white Southerner, particularly the young white Southerner. It gave us grace, it gave us an opportunity to escape the racism and politics of the Old South. We forget what a blessing Martin Luther King Jr. was to the South.”
It was the casual confidence with which Walden stated the exact opposite of what we think of when we think of civil rights — that it’s just as freeing to the dominant culture as it is to the minority culture. And that’s true still today. We won’t be free until we extend the same rights to our Latin American brothers and sisters whom so many Americans view simply as “illegals.”
For the music he brought to the world to the passion that’s much rarer in the Internet era, Phil Walden is one record mogul who will be sorely missed. — Mark Kemp
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 2, 2006.
