Capricorn Records and the Birth of Southern Rock

In nineteen sixty-nine, a Macon music manager named Phil Walden and his partner Frank Fenter established Capricorn Records in downtown Macon. Walden had managed Otis Redding and knew the music business from the inside out. He also knew a band called the Allman Brothers that had just relocated to the city and was rehearsing with an intensity that suggested something new was being invented.

Capricorn set up shop in a four-building block on College Street that had previously housed Otis Redding's own music operations. The continuity was not accidental. Walden understood that Macon had something: a city where Black and white musical traditions had coexisted and cross-pollinated for decades, where gospel and blues and country met in the same room without anyone having to call it a movement.

Between nineteen sixty-nine and nineteen seventy-nine, Capricorn produced nine platinum albums and seventeen gold albums. The label's third major release, the Allman Brothers Band's At Fillmore East, recorded over two nights in March of nineteen seventy-one, is considered the record that turned Southern rock from a local sound into a national genre. The Marshall Tucker Band, Wet Willie, the Charlie Daniels Band, and the Dixie Dregs all recorded at Capricorn during this period.

The label went bankrupt in nineteen seventy-nine, a casualty of changing tastes and financial overextension. It was relaunched in Nashville in the nineties before eventually being sold. In twenty nineteen, the original College Street complex was restored and reopened as Mercer Music at Capricorn after a renovation costing about four point three million dollars. The rooms where Southern rock was made are open again.