They sold 75 million records, scored more than 40 number one hits, and rewrote the rules of country music — all while critics thrashed them in the press. Alabama, the band of three cousins from Lookout Mountain, became country music's biggest juggernaut by playing traditional songs with the volume and intensity of a southern rock band.

But behind the unified public image was a hidden internal structure that treated one familiar face less like a brother and more like a hired contractor — and it all ended in a bitter lawsuit. This is the story of how country's most dominant group shattered Nashville's rhinestone paradigm and quietly invented the pop-country formula that rules the charts today.

• Alabama sold over six million albums by 1982, just two years after hitting the national radar

• They were the first group e ...