The Queen has expressed "deep sympathy" for the families and friends of people killed in the storms that have hit Alabama and the southern United States.

Jason Isbell strides onstage and apologises for the slimmed-down nature of his band, trimmed from five to three for his current tour. "We're not so much the 400 Unit tonight as the Jason Isbell power trio," he admits, but nobody's complaining: Alabama blue-eyed soulster Isbell has the burly, no-nonsense look of someone who can take care of himself pretty well. Besides which, he's one of the few guitarists for whom the phrase "power trio" doesn't portend endless indulgence, but rather an attention to texture and rhythm that plugs any holes in the arrangements.

Thousands of people still reeling from the second-deadliest day of tornadoes in US history surveyed scenes of devastation across the South yesterday as they prepared to mourn the hundreds killed with a day of sombre church services. All told, at least 342 people died across seven states, including 250 in Alabama. Thousands more were injured. Alberta City, a neighbourhood in Tuscaloosa, Alabama was flattened by the tornadoes.

Barack Obama yesterday toured parts of Alabama devastated by a string of tornadoes that have killed nearly 300 people.

President Barack Obama planned today to tour parts of Alabama that were devastated by an outbreak of tornados that killed nearly 300 people in the U.S. South, as survivors tried to recover what was left of their belongings.

Search-and-rescue teams were last night hunting for survivors beneath fallen masonry and tangled joists, power lines and fallen trees in towns and hamlets across seven states in the south-eastern US which were ravaged by the worst outbreak of tornadoes seen in almost four decades. Almost 250 people are known to have died.

Dozens of tornadoes ripped through the US South, flattening homes and businesses and killing at least 248 people in six states in the deadliest outbreak in nearly 40 years.

The White House says President Barack Obama will travel to the state of Alabama on Friday to view damage from the deadliest tornado outbreak in nearly 40 years and meet the families of those affected.

If the country-rock-soul of Alabama has held its place in the hearts of UK music lovers for decades, it is largely thanks to The Old Grey Whistle Test.

"Here we rest" was the original motto of Isbell's home state, Alabama, while the music locates the ex-Drive-By Trucker in a forest of local allusions foliated by the 400 Unit's ability to tinker, nicely but slightly blandly, with Alabama's indigenous musical genres: soul, rock, country, backwoods folk.

Vicious storms hit the Deep South of the United States and toppled trees like dominoes as tornadoes howled through towns. Four deaths were reported yesterday in Alabama, including a man killed when the storm tossed a mobile home nearly a quarter of a mile across a state highway.

Laura and Lydia Rogers are twenty-something sisters from Alabama.

Almost unchallenged, the Louvin Brothers were the greatest brother act in country music and several of their songs, "When I Stop Dreaming", "The Christian Life" and "Cash on the Barrelhead", have been recorded by contemporary acts. "Being brothers really helped our harmonies," Charlie Louvin told me on a UK tour in 1988, "but I doubt if you could think of one brother act that grew old together. It just don't work."