I was checking out Zac Brown Band’s latest CD, “Uncaged,” this summer when I came across the news that Brown had started his own recording label, Southern Ground Artists. One of the label’s bands caught and held my attention — Blackberry Smoke.

If you rolled The Band, Steve Earle, John Hiatt, Hank Williams Jr., Charlie Daniels, The Black Crowes and Lynyrd Skynyrd into one unshaven, long-haired, open flannel, unruly mess, you’d come out with Blackberry Smoke. And this month, Blackberry Smoke came out with its first album on the Southern Ground label, “The Whippoorwill.”

This album carries the tag country on iTunes, but the sound rips through back roads Southern rock in the summer time with a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.

Blackberry Smoke probably won’t ever be known for ground-breaking originality or exquisite musicianship. It’s more like comfort food and backyard barbecue fun. And if that’s what you’re in the mood for as summer continues to rebel against the back-to-school, back-to-woodpile months to come, then let Blackberry Smoke waft through your speakers.

“The Whippoorwill” opens with a foot-stomping romp, “Six Ways to Sunday,” that brings out a boogie piano from Brandon Still reminiscent of Skynyrd’s late Billy Powell. Then it slides into “Pretty Little Lie” and straddles the line between country and rock in Steve Earle-style. Still continues to tease the ivories in “Everybody Knows She’s Mine,” while Smoke’s lead vocal Charlie Starr evokes a little Levon Helm twang.

The next track, “One Horse Town,” is a fine example of the Americana sound and simple lyrics that turn the cliche into a cutting truth musical version of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” The insightful, simple, down-home poetry quietly persists in the album’s final track, “Up the Road,” and in the title track, “The Whippoorwill.”

I’m not sure why the whippoorwill has become the lyrical metaphor of sorrow, but you can’t get any sadder than Hank Williams Sr.’s reference in “Alone & Forsaken.” I’ve always thought of the little bird’s sound as hopeful. Personally, I prefer the coo of a mourning dove for melancholy. Maybe the sadness is in the hope that goes nowhere in the end. Blackberry Smoke makes exactly that point in the lines, “I dreamed I heard that whippoorwill sing, She sang my song and called me by name, I hung my head in shame.”

But “The Whippoorwill” isn’t an album of sadness. It is full of fun living. The song “Ain’t Got the Blues” begins with a gentle refrain with a primitive recording echo before it rolls out into a full, near-gospel chorus, complete with dobro. “I’m gonna shine, a big sparklin’ shine, Everybody that I meet is gonna be a good friend of mine” can’t help but make you smile and cure your blues.

The album’s other tracks, “Sleeping Dogs,” “Shakin’ Hands with the Holy Ghost,” “Leave a Scar,” “Lucky Seven,” “Ain’t Much Left of Me” and “Crimson Moon,” rock out to Southern-style defiance.

If you’re looking for something that unapolegetically celebrates independence with its good times and bad, then fire up some Blackberry Smoke.

Emily Tuttle is a freelance writer living in Minot. Her e-mail address is [email protected].