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Call it whatever — Southern rock ... alternative-country ... cow-punk ... hell, they all work.

It's hard to pin the music of Caddle down with one particular label. But if you manage to do it, be sure and let band member Phillip Hyde know what you figured out.

"We purposefully tried to find ourselves a niche, but that's a hard question to answer," Hyde told The Daily Times this week. "Where does it fall — in rock? In country? It's kind of stuck out there in nowhere land. It's NASCAR, blue-collar workers and bikers. Those are our target audiences, and we try to go out and reach them, but I think people who work in 9-to-5 offices get it, too. Even those folks in the high rises, they probably got cousins down in Mississippi who live out in the country."

Officially, the boys from Birmingham, Ala., have been described as playing "Dixie-fried roots rock with a dash of punk," but that seems too overly simplistic a description of the band's 2006 album, "Raise 'Em High." Drawing on classic country, bluegrass and Southern rock, the punk comes from the attitude, of which there's certainly plenty. From the sneering bitterness of the main character's disgust over being left a doublewide trailer instead of cash in the opening track, "Mississippi Doublewide" to the murder rocker (as opposed to murder ballad) "Had to Die" — a blistering barn-burner so good it'll make you wear down the heels on your cowboy boots from stomping along to the rhythm so hard — "Raise 'Em High" is both contemporary and traditional.

The record draws on the punk-meets-country influences laid down by Nashville's Jason and the Scorchers, but it borrows heavily from the Southern rock grit honed to perfection by the Drive-By Truckers.

"The Truckers obviously influenced us, and if you listen to us, you can tell there's some of that in there," Hyde said. "I like to think of us as more like they were in their early days, because when they were first starting out 10 years ago, they just played dirty rock 'n' roll and weren't involved in trying to get critical acclaim. That wasn't their goal, and that's the same with us — we just set out to do some music we liked and have a Southern touch to it.

"We're not trying to change anybody's life through our music. We look at it as an escape for us. We've all got day jobs, so it's fun for us to go out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights and tear it up doing what we do."

Caddle first played in East Tennessee last August at the Mucklewain Festival in Harriman. Saturday night, the band will make a trek to The Corner Lounge in Knoxville, on a bill with Nashville rockers Les Honky More Tonkies. Mucklewain was a high point of the band's career, Hyde said, mostly because its emphasis was on Southern music.

"It was basically a bunch of bands at our level that haven't jumped to that next big level, so it was kind of like a reunion or a big family get-together," he said. "It was set out in the country, and everybody just treated you like family. It was one of the best festival experiences I've ever had."

If Mucklewain is revived this year, Caddle certainly wants to be on the bill, Hyde said. Because although the music comes first, the "Southern thing," as lead Trucker Patterson Hood refers to it, is just as much a part of the Caddle appeal as the guitars and attitude.

"There's several things that being Southern strikes in me — obviously first is the whole idea of God, country and family," Hyde said. "It's about politeness and manners, about being hospitable to most folks. I mean, you can obviously find that all over the country, but it's also about a work ethic, and taking care of your family, and going to church two or three times a year and being good to your neighbor.

"I don't know, man. If they do Mucklewain again, we definitely want to be a part of it. In the meantime, we're really trying to push the record as much as we can and play as many shows as we can get out and do. We try to get up to Nashville as much as we can, and we're just knocking on doors, hoping somebody will listen."