CLEVELAND, Ohio — Amongst a sea of Cavaliers fans, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the birthplace of Drew Carey, a southern accent would be one of the last sounds expected to be heard out of this Ohio metropolitan area. However, music scenes emerge and inspire and rockabilly seems to have raised its flag in the city parks and entertainment districts throughout town.

“You would be surprised how many people are playing around here with a recently acquired southern accent,” said Hank Mallery, front man of Crookneck Chandler and the Tibbee Bottom Boys, a local band that was just nominated for best in the Rockabilly/Garage Band category by the Cleveland Scene.

Since his younger years growing up in Tibbee and Aberdeen, Mallery’s travels have since then taken him to being a worker at the Statue of Liberty, a guide in Kentucky’s Mammoth Caves alongside tenures in Washington, D.C. and greater Boston. Upon settling in Cleveland, Mallery began showcasing local artists through the Cleveland Metroparks and played some of his own music there as well. That’s when different musicians approached him and asked when they could start jamming with him.

“I went from writing my first song lyrically at age 11 to finally being able to play the lead on ‘Smoke on the Water’ by high school. Being a performer was a way for me to find a place to fit in. I was always pretty big and viewed as a football player, but I didn’t like the pain associated with it,” Mallery said.

Acting classes at Aberdeen High School and Itawamba Community College may have been the creative outlets that paved the way for Mallery’s future, but much of the inspiration for Crookneck Chandler and the Tibbee Bottom Boys came from the world outside of the classrooms.

New album

The band’s sophomore album is entitled “Coontail Road,” with the title track being a crowd favorite.

“People around Aberdeen and Tibbee treated each other well and after living several other places, I knew that area was home. Writing about growing up there was a coping mechanism as much as anything else. Coontail Road is a way of life as much as it is a place. I remember beginning my Friday nights meeting up there with my friend Robert Thompson and seeing where the weekend took us,” Mallery said.

Mallery and Thompson would frequent such popular early ‘80s hangouts as Boogey Bottom, the Club, the Sugarplum and the Wal-Mart parking lot in a blue 1973 Ford F-100 — a truck Mallery has since then come to call ‘Old Blue.’

“No roads or soybean fields swore us off in that truck,” Mallery said.

North Mississippi not only influenced the lyrical content of Crookneck’s music, but also the sub-genre it claims.

“People had problems classifying us as folk, rock or bluegrass. I looked at a map to see where this music came from and since Monroe County is on the southern edge of the Appalachian foothills and the northern tip of the Delta blues, I penned the term Appalachian Swamp Rock to describe our sound,” Mallery said.

Influenced by the likes of Bob Dylan, The Band, Tom Petty and Jay Farrar, of Uncle Tupelo and Sun Volt fame, Crookneck Chandler and the Tibbee Bottom Boys’ sound is like an alcohol-fueled jam session with Elvis Presley, George Jones and the Grateful Dead.

“Growing up in Aberdeen, I was convinced that the Grateful Dead was a band of Satan worshipers. I once had a friend in Boston who told me she was going to play a Grateful Dead record and I said okay, but I wasn’t going to pay attention to it. After she put it on, all I could think was how I could have gone this far in my life without listening to them,” Mallery said.

A lot of followers

Though Crookneck hasn’t gotten to the level of having Deadhead-esque fans just yet, it does have a diverse group of followers.

“We get a lot of college kids at our shows, older professionals and the over 60 crowd. Our fan base is anywhere from the person barely old enough to legally drink to the person almost too old to legally drive,” Mallery said.

From playing Cleveland’s Brookstock festival, Crookneck was approached by a promoter from NBC affiliate WKYC about an appearance on the station’s morning news concert series, Live at Lakeside.

“We played the news segments into commercial breaks and performed songs throughout the morning’s broadcast and the promotion was huge for us. We were busier last summer than we wanted to be and had to turn down a few gigs,” Mallery said.

Through the band’s website, www.gohank.com; its pages on Youtube, Myspace and Facebook, and availability on www.cdbaby.com, Crookneck Chandler and the Tibbee Bottom Boys gets its name out to the masses with sales registered as far away as China.

“Our first album, ‘Aw Yeah,’ was a best seller at a local bookstore and [Case Western Reserve University’s] WRUW listed it as one of the top 20 albums of the year based on local and national releases. We’ve learned from ‘Coontail Road,’ more people are purchasing our songs digitally instead of hard copies, but it’s been a really successful album,” Mallery said.

Mallery already has enough material written to record three or four more albums. The band plans on returning to the studio before spring to record its unplugged, acoustic album, ‘Crooknaked.’