Photo Jerry Moran ©2011

The Royal Southern Brotherhood hatched from a deceptively simple premise: What would the hard-charging Southern rock and blues of The Allman Brothers Band sound like if crossed with the roiling R&B and funky soul of the Neville Brothers?

It sounds a little like a stoner dream at first, but in less than a year’s time, RSB has emerged as one of the most interesting supergroups in ages: a monster front line of Mike Zito, Devon Allman and Cyril Neville sharing guitar, percussion and vocal duties among them, with bassist Charlie Wooton and drummer Yonrico Scott providing the rhythmic chassis.

The link between Zito and Neville is Reuben Williams, the New Orleans-based founder of Thunderbird Management, longtime manager for the likes of Tab Benoit and, formerly, Anders Osborne, and a well-known figure in Southern rock and Crescent City music circles. Williams connected Zito and Neville in 2010 with the thought that the two could do some writing together.

The song they worked on was “Pearl River,” featuring heavier-than-heavy Neville lyrics about the namesake body of water being so dark because of the “dark people” thrown into it.

Zito was tentative at first – “I don’t think Mike knew if he should touch that,” Williams said – but he ended up adding an ominous groove strong enough to carry Neville’s spooky, insistent words, and Neville was so impressed that the two ended up recording. The song became the title track for Zito’s album Pearl River, and won Blues Song of the Year at the 2010 Blues Music Awards in Memphis.

RSB didn’t immediately come next, but they forged the first of several new partnerships.

“I’d never spent much time with Cyril, but after our success with Pearl River, we started to keep in contact and had the opportunity to play a bit more together and write some more songs,” Zito says.

Devon Allman entered the fray around the same time, a new client of Williams’. Allman and Zito had already known each other for years, originally meeting in St. Louis where for a time they were both employees of the local Guitar Center.

“We weren’t best buddies or anything but it was clear we were the real workers among the musicians there,” Allman says. “I think we were the only cats who really had anything going. We went to each others’ gigs half the time and we both knew the other guy really wanted to make something of it.”

At Williams’ urging, Allman and Neville corresponded via e-mail with Neville sending Allman lyrics for what became the first RSB song written for the record, “Gotta Keep Rockin’.” Allman recalls writing the music and then waiting anxiously to see if Neville would approve, then Neville reacting so favorably that the two musicians knew it was time to jam. Appropriately, the first time all of RSB’s principals aired it out was at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2011.

The original rhythm section, Williams recalled, was Radiators’ bassist Reggie Scanlan and Nevilles drummer “Mean” Willie Green, neither of whom could commit given that they were launching The New Orleans Suspects. But the other two pieces fell into place pretty quickly: Wooton had contacted Williams from Atlanta and made his way to New Orleans looking for a new gig, and Scott, who’d recently been laid off along with the rest of the now-defunct Derek Trucks Band, had more free time than he’d enjoyed in at least a decade.

In December 2011, the band entered the studio with Jim Gaines, a Memphis producer whose credits include everyone from Santana and Blues Traveler to Albert Collins, The Radiators and Buddy Guy. And so it went: The Royal Southern Brotherhood’s self-titled record dropped in May and hit No. 1 on the iTunes blues chart and No. 5 on the Billboard blues chart.

Zito and Allman both recollect being initially skeptical of the collaboration, but quickly jumping aboard once it became clear that the group had chemistry.

“I think after like the tenth gig or something, I talked to each guy aside and I asked, how into this are you?” Allman remembers. “Every one of them was like, ‘Oh yeah, man. This is it.’ That’s not to say people are abandoning the stuff they were doing or are going to do, but everyone is ready to commit something to this. What clicked is we put the music first. This came together organically – not in a calculated way.”

Ready to record the band was Thomas Ruf, head of Germany-based blues label Ruf Records, who signed The Royal Southern Brotherhood and also convinced Williams to let him in on solo projects from each of its three frontmen. Neville is at work on several other albums, Zito’s Greyhound came out in 2011 and Allman is planning what he describes as a singer/songwriter-style solo release as well as another Honeytribe album. But all five of RSB’s members are in it to see how far they can take it.

“If you had told me a year ago, ‘Hey, next year you’re going to put your stuff on hold for a while and go play in this band,’ I would have said, ‘Why would I do that?” Zito says. “But I like that this is a big sound. It sounded like a band immediately.”