In the 1980s, .38 Special of Jacksonville, Fla., was one of the biggest rock bands around, scoring Top 10 hits such as "Hold On Loosely" and "Caught Up In You," and touring alongside similar big-hook bands like Survivor and Night Ranger.

In the 21st century, the band is still going strong, still purveying its unique brand of "muscle and melody," but the audience has changed somewhat.

New fans have been introduced to the group through the country records lead singer Donnie Van Zant has recorded with his little brother, Johnny. Next week they head into a Nashville television studio to record an episode of Country Music Television's "Crossroads" with Mr. Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, Trace Adkins.

And as the lines between rock and country continue to blur, the band presently finds itself on the road with the Charlie Daniels Band as part of the country headliner's Volunteer Jam tour, which wraps up Sunday as the finale of the Snowden Grove Music & Bike Rally in Southaven.

"It's like old home week," says .38 Special guitarist and vocalist Don Barnes of the show that recently played to 30,000 in decidedly non-Dixie Des Moines, Iowa. "We come out and do an hour and 15 minutes of everything you'd want to hear through the history of the band. Then Charlie comes out and does his whole thing. Then we come out at the end of his show, and everybody does a big jam on (Daniels') 'South's Gonna Do It Again.'"

For its part, .38 Special has been doing it pretty much nonstop since forming in Jacksonville in 1975. Childhood friends Barnes and Donnie Van Zant had played in more than a dozen bands together before starting .38 Special.

(The band's name comes from an incident when the police raided one of its early practice spots, a deserted warehouse in the country, and threatened to blow the lock off the door with said bullet. "We had a club date come up soon after, and we didn't have a name for the band," remembers Barnes. "We just decided let's call it .38 Special for now, and we'll come up with something better later. But we never did.")

At the time of its forming, the Jacksonville area was home to three Navy bases, creating a lively bar scene that provided a proving ground for a whole vanguard of Southern rock bands, including the Allman Brothers Band, Blackfoot, Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd, featuring Donnie's older brother, Ronnie.

"A lot of people have asked why did all these groups come from Jacksonville," Barnes says. "At 15 years old, you could play the sailors' clubs. You'd play all the hits of the day and make a couple of hundred bucks a week. ... But it also was a training ground. You learned how the elements of songs were put together. You learned what made hits."

At first, .38 Special followed in the footsteps of its peers, especially Skynyrd. Barnes recalls biking over to the home of Skynyrd's Allen Collins, where the guitarist would teach him licks from old blues records.

"We kind of picked up that style, but we realized after a while we'd kind of fallen on our faces, just because there was a lot of that going on at the end of the '70s and Southern Rock had been played out," says Barnes. "First of all, it had already been done by the best, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and we were just being a clone of somebody else. Ronnie was the one that said, 'You've got find your own path, find your own style.'"

For Barnes, who had grown up worshipping Eric Clapton, that meant moving beyond Southern barroom boogie toward a sweeping, radio-friendly sound.

"We realized we were more British invasion, Beatles fans more so than just singing about swamps and alligators," he says "We kept the muscle of the guitars in there, but we wanted to put good melodies on top with good stories that were personal and true."

The re-tooled .38 Special enjoyed huge commercial success with intimate epics like 1981's Wild-Eyed Southern Boys and 1982's Special Forces. But as MTV blossomed and shifted the focus from hooks and chops to appearances, there was less room for the rough-looking .38 Special, who for all its pop savvy, still look like a Jacksonville bar band.

The band has persevered, playing upwards of 100 dates a year, frequently teaming up on the road with Skynyrd, fronted following the death of Ronnie in 1977, by Johnny Van Zant.

And the group has a slew of new projects in the works, including a live DVD, a new studio album and an upcoming acoustic record of their greatest hits.

"We didn't want to do an unplugged thing like you always have where the groups come in and just substitute acoustic guitars but play it exactly like they would electrically. So we took a different avenue. ... Took 'If I'd Been the One' and made it a really beautiful ballad. 'Caught Up In You' was more of a funky thing. So we just changed the beats around, changed the keys to make them more interesting after all these years."