The story of The Allman Brothers Band

Two brothers, a stolen father and a Hollywood detour

The story of the Allman Brothers Band begins with a loss. Duane Allman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on the twentieth of November 1946, and his brother Gregg followed on the eighth of December 1947. Their father Willis was an Army officer. On the day after Christmas in 1949, while the family was living near Norfolk, Virginia, Willis was shot and killed during a robbery by a man named Michael Robert Green, an Army veteran he had met that day. Duane was three and Gregg was two. Their mother Geraldine never remarried. To support the boys she retrained as an accountant, and while she studied she sent them to Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tennessee. Gregg later said he took it as a sign she did not love him, until he understood she was keeping them out of an orphanage.[1] [2] [3]

In 1959 the family settled in Daytona Beach, Florida, but the boys spent summers with their grandmother in Nashville, and that is where music found them. In 1960 they saw a rhythm and blues bill with Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding and B.B. King, and Duane told his brother they had to get into this. Gregg saved his paper route money and bought a guitar from Sears for twenty one dollars and ninety five cents. Duane, who had just wrecked his little motorcycle, kept grabbing it, and the fights only stopped when he got a guitar of his own. Both boys were left handed but played right handed. Gregg started first, yet Duane practiced obsessively, quit school to do it, and quickly became the better player.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In Daytona the brothers fell in with a young Black musician named Floyd Miles and sat in with his band, the House Rockers, at local rhythm and blues clubs. Gregg studied how Floyd phrased a song, and Miles later said the long haired white kid and the Black kid got along because both knew what it felt like to be looked down on. Playing in a mixed band in the early sixties caused friction at home, and Gregg later admitted their mother took time to come around. The brothers moved through bands called the Y Teens, the Shufflers and the Escorts. When the Vietnam draft came for Gregg, he avoided it by deliberately shooting himself in the foot, after studying a chart of the bones to find the least damaging spot.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After Gregg graduated from Seabreeze High School in 1965, the Escorts became the Allman Joys and hit the road. Their first out of town booking was the Stork Club in Mobile, Alabama, where they ended up playing for twenty two weeks, often six sets a night. They cut a few sides in Nashville, including a version of Spoonful that went nowhere, and a label boss advised them to find day jobs. In 1967, playing in St. Louis, they caught the eye of Bill McEuen, manager of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who talked them into moving to Los Angeles. Gregg had a bad feeling about it. Duane promised him pretty women and fine cars, and the vote was unanimous.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In Los Angeles the band became the Hour Glass and signed with Liberty Records. It was a bad fit. Liberty picked pop songs for them, dressed them in costumes, and allowed them to play live only about once a month so they would not be overexposed. Both albums, Hour Glass in 1967 and Power of Love in 1968, flopped, and the band refused to play the material on stage anyway. They lived in cheap motels, and in one of them Gregg saw his first dead body, a man who had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Duane finally blew up at the label and the band fell apart. Liberty threatened to freeze everyone for seven years, so Gregg stayed behind in California to cut a solo record and settle the debt.[1] [2] [3]

Muscle Shoals, Jacksonville and the birth of the band

Duane, meanwhile, discovered the sound that would define him. On his birthday in 1968 he was laid up with an injured elbow after falling from a horse. Gregg left him two presents on the porch, the debut album by Taj Mahal and a bottle of Coricidin cold pills. Duane poured out the pills, washed off the label, slid the glass bottle onto his finger and started playing along to Statesboro Blues. A couple of hours later he phoned his brother to come over and hear it. Gregg said Duane had never played slide before and was a natural. That little medicine bottle became so famous that guitar makers still sell glass replicas of it today.[1] [2]

By late 1968 Duane had become the hottest session guitarist at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. When Wilson Pickett needed a song, Duane suggested the Beatles' Hey Jude. Pickett at first misheard the title and balked, but once it was cleared up they cut it, and it went to number twenty three. Eric Clapton heard the guitar on his car radio and demanded to know who was playing. Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler bought Duane's contract, and Duane played on sessions for Aretha Franklin, King Curtis, Percy Sledge, Clarence Carter, Boz Scaggs and many more. In January 1969 he watched Johnny Winter at the Fillmore East and told a friend he would be on that stage within a year. He was, by December.[1] [2] [3]

FAME's owner Rick Hall wanted Duane to front a power trio, but Duane had something bigger in mind. He heard a drummer named Jai Johanny Johanson, known as Jaimoe, on a songwriter's demo and asked only one question, who is the drummer. Jaimoe, from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, had toured behind Otis Redding and Sam and Dave, and was about to leave for New York to chase jazz. He met Duane and never left. Frustrated with the band's slow recording methods, Hall sold the tapes and the contract to Phil Walden, Otis Redding's former manager, and to Wexler for ten thousand dollars. Walden planned to build his new label, Capricorn, around Duane. In March 1969 Duane and Jaimoe drove to Jacksonville, Florida.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In Jacksonville Duane held open jam sessions and free shows in Willow Branch Park with whoever turned up. Two players from a local band called the Second Coming stuck: bassist Berry Oakley, a Chicago native, and guitarist Dickey Betts, a West Palm Beach kid who had grown up on bluegrass, ukulele and mandolin. Duane also brought back Butch Trucks, a Jacksonville drummer who had been thinking of going back to school to study mathematics. Duane simply dropped Jaimoe at Butch's door, introduced his old drummer to his new drummer and drove away. The two had no idea what to say to each other, so they set up their kits and played. Duane's plan was unusual, two lead guitarists and two drummers, and when Jaimoe asked why, Duane said because Otis Redding and James Brown had two.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The missing piece was a singer. Reese Wynans of the Second Coming was playing keyboards, and Duane, Oakley and Betts were sharing vocals. Then Duane phoned Gregg in Los Angeles. Gregg was at a low point. In a letter quoted by Rolling Stone in 1973, he said he had been building up the nerve to put a pistol to his head, and he later credited that call with pulling him out. He left a note, headed east as fast as he could, and walked into rehearsal on the twenty sixth of March 1969, just as the band was playing Muddy Waters' Trouble No More. Jaimoe remembered he looked like a television star. Gregg was intimidated by the players, but Duane pushed him to sing his guts out, and that was that.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Macon, the crash pad and two albums nobody bought

Four days later the six of them made their debut at the Jacksonville Armory. Names were floated, including Beelzebub, before they settled on the Allman Brothers Band. It was a striking group for the Deep South in 1969: two white brothers, three more white Southerners, and Jaimoe, a Black drummer who had been the very first man Duane signed on. The styles collided in the best way. Butch brought the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones, Betts brought country and Chuck Berry, and Jaimoe turned everyone on to Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Coltrane's My Favorite Things and Davis's All Blues became the models for the band's long modal jams, and Duane later said he had listened to Kind of Blue almost nonstop for two years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By the first of May 1969 the band had moved to Macon, Georgia, where Phil Walden was building Capricorn Records. They crammed into a two room apartment at 309 College Street, which became known as the Hippie Crash Pad, and Butch Trucks joked that the neighbors did not call the police, they just moved out. A soul food cook named Mama Louise Hudson at the H and H Restaurant fed them on credit. Some white locals disapproved of the long haired boys who always had a Black man with them. The band wrote songs and took psychedelics in nearby Rose Hill Cemetery, and their crew included Red Dog Campbell, a disabled Vietnam veteran who handed his disability checks over to keep the band going.[1] [2] [3]

In August 1969 they drove to New York to make their first album. Producer Tom Dowd was unavailable, so Atlantic's house engineer Adrian Barber recorded them, and the whole record was cut in about six days. The red recording light made Gregg nervous, so he unscrewed it. Gregg wrote most of the songs, including Whipping Post, which came to him late one night in a room where a child was asleep. With no light and no pencil, he burned kitchen matches and wrote the words with the charcoal on an ironing board. Released in November 1969, The Allman Brothers Band sold fewer than thirty five thousand copies. Executives told Walden to move them to New York or Los Angeles. The band refused.[1] [2] [3]

Instead they lived on the road, playing more than three hundred shows in 1970, first in a Ford van and then a Winnebago they nicknamed the Wind Bag. Once they were so broke that they could not pay the toll on the Golden Gate Bridge and had to ask strangers for dimes, promising free tickets to their Fillmore West show. The strain showed. Late in 1970 their road manager Twiggs Lyndon stabbed and killed a concert promoter in a dispute over the band's unpaid fee. He later claimed temporary insanity and spent time in a psychiatric hospital before returning to work for the band. That same year Duane overdosed on opium after a show and survived.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their second album, Idlewild South, was named after a cheap lakeside cabin they rented outside Macon, so busy with comings and goings that it reminded them of New York's Idlewild Airport. Tom Dowd produced it in stages between tour dates in Macon, Miami and New York, and it arrived in September 1970. It held two future standards. Betts wrote In Memory of Elizabeth Reed, his first composition for the band, and named it after a headstone in Rose Hill. Gregg wrote Midnight Rider in about an hour, then broke into the locked Capricorn studio with roadie Kim Payne to cut a demo, with Twiggs Lyndon playing a bass he did not know how to play. The record sold only slightly better than the first.[1] [2] [3]

Layla, the Fillmore and the day Duane died

In the summer of 1970 Tom Dowd was also producing Eric Clapton's new band, Derek and the Dominos, in Miami. On the twenty sixth of August he took them to an Allman Brothers show, and afterward Duane and Clapton jammed until the next afternoon. Duane ended up playing on most of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, including the soaring slide on the title track and its high bird call ending. Clapton called him the musical brother he never had and asked him to join the Dominos. Duane considered it, played a couple of shows with them, and then went home to his own band. Meanwhile Oakley's wife Linda rented a big old house on Vineville Avenue in Macon that the band called the Big House.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band knew their magic happened on stage. Gregg said a lightbulb finally went off, they needed to make a live album. Bill Graham's Fillmore East in New York had become a second home, and on the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth of March 1971 Tom Dowd recorded them there, with the band paid twelve hundred and fifty dollars a show. They were billed below Johnny Winter as the extra added attraction, but by the last night they were closing the show. The first night was scrapped because a guest saxophone player's horn leaked onto every microphone. The final show was delayed by a bomb scare and did not finish until six in the morning. The closing Whipping Post ran more than twenty two minutes.[1] [2] [3]

At Fillmore East came out in July 1971 as a double album priced close to a single one, after Atlantic had doubted anyone wanted all those jams. It climbed the charts within days, reached number thirteen and went gold by October. The cover shows the band grinning in front of their gear in Macon, and the grins are real: Duane had just spotted a dealer friend, run over for a bag of cocaine and sat back down hiding it in his lap. The back cover honors the road crew, with a photo of Twiggs Lyndon added in because he was in jail awaiting his murder trial. Critics now rank it among the greatest live albums ever, and in 2004 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3]

Success made the drugs worse. In October 1971 Duane, Berry Oakley and two roadies checked into a hospital together to try to kick heroin. On the twenty ninth of October, a day after returning to Macon, Duane rode his Harley Davidson to wish Linda Oakley a happy birthday. On Hillcrest Avenue a flatbed truck carrying a lumber crane stopped in the intersection ahead of him. He swerved, struck the truck, and was thrown. The motorcycle came down on top of him and dragged him along the road. He reached the hospital alive but died a few hours later of massive internal injuries. He was twenty four. At Fillmore East had just been certified gold.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The funeral was held at Snow's Memorial Chapel in Macon on the first of November 1971. Jerry Wexler gave the eulogy, and the band played for their leader, closing with Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Gregg sang Melissa, Duane's favorite of his songs. The night Duane died, Gregg, already using heroin, overdosed and had to be revived, according to a 2026 documentary about him, and biographer Alan Paul says Berry Oakley nearly died that night too in a car crash he walked away from. Gregg took to his bed for weeks. He later admitted he was angry at his brother for dying and angry at God. For the rest of his life his house was full of Duane's photos and notes.[1] [2] [3]

Eat a Peach and the second funeral

The survivors talked about quitting and decided they could not. Butch Trucks said Duane had put something in them, like a teacher with his disciples, and they had to play it out. In December 1971 they went back to Criteria Studios in Miami to finish the album they had started with Duane. They added Gregg's Ain't Wastin' Time No More, written for his brother, Betts's instrumental Les Brers in A Minor, and Melissa. Gregg had written Melissa back in 1967 and sold the publishing rights for two hundred and fifty dollars to buy a plane ticket, so Phil Walden had to buy them back. Betts's Blue Sky and Duane's delicate acoustic piece Little Martha, the only song credited to Duane alone, were already on tape.[1] [2] [3]

Eat a Peach was released in February 1972 and reached number four. The title came from something Duane had told an interviewer who asked what he was doing to help the revolution. He answered that every time he was in Georgia he ate a peach for peace. The label had wanted to call it The Kind We Grow in Dixie, and the band said no. The cover shows no title at all, just a peach on a truck. Sides three and four held Mountain Jam, a thirty three minute improvisation built on Donovan's There Is a Mountain, taken from the Fillmore tapes. Rolling Stone's reviewer wrote that even without their leader they were still the best band in the land.[1] [2]

The band toured as a five piece through 1972, refusing to replace Duane, while Betts learned his slide parts. They bought a four hundred and thirty two acre farm in Juliette, Georgia, which fulfilled Berry Oakley's dream of a communal family. But Oakley was falling apart. He drank heavily, took drugs and lost weight, and on some nights he was barely playing. Friends said he had lost all hope after Duane died. On the eleventh of November 1972, excited about leading a jam session that night, he crashed his motorcycle into a city bus just three blocks from where Duane had crashed. He refused treatment and went home, then grew delirious and died in hospital from a fractured skull. He was twenty four, the same age as Duane, and was buried beside him in Rose Hill.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Top of the world, and the fall

Once again the band chose to carry on. Instead of a new guitarist they brought in a young Alabama pianist, Chuck Leavell, who had been playing on Gregg's first solo album, Laid Back. For bass they auditioned several players and chose Lamar Williams, Jaimoe's old friend from Gulfport, Mississippi. Williams had been drafted and sent to Vietnam, and by his own account walked away from his unit and spent months in the countryside before being discharged in 1970. After three songs of his audition Butch Trucks announced that was enough tryout, let's rehearse. With Duane gone, Dickey Betts quietly became the leader, writing more and more of the songs, while Gregg turned his energy toward his solo work after the band brushed off a song he loved.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Brothers and Sisters came out in August 1973 and went gold within forty eight hours. It spent five weeks at number one, and the band was called the most popular in America. Betts's Ramblin' Man, written at four in the morning in Oakley's kitchen at the Big House, was so country that the band nearly passed on it. It reached number two on the Hot 100, held off the top by Cher's Half Breed. Betts's instrumental Jessica, named for his baby daughter who bounced along as he played, became a classic rock staple and, years later, the theme of the BBC motoring show Top Gear. The front cover showed Butch's little son Vaylor, and the back showed Oakley's daughter Brittany.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fame arrived at full speed. In July 1973 the Allmans headlined Summer Jam at Watkins Glen with the Grateful Dead and the Band. About one hundred and fifty thousand tickets were sold, but a crowd of around six hundred thousand turned up. A month earlier a backstage brawl at a Washington stadium show with the Dead had cost three longtime roadies their jobs. By 1974 the band was earning about one hundred thousand dollars a night and flying in the Starship, the customized Boeing jet used by Led Zeppelin. Gregg later said that plane was the beginning of the end. Both Gregg and Betts released top twenty solo albums, and rumors spread that the band was splitting.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1975 Gregg married Cher, four days after her divorce from Sonny Bono was final. Nine days later she filed for divorce over his heroin and alcohol use, though they reconciled and had a son, Elijah Blue, in 1976. The tabloids loved them, and biographer Alan Paul said Gregg became more famous for being famous than for his music. Win, Lose or Draw, made in 1975, was pieced together in sessions where members often did not turn up. Gregg recorded his vocals in Los Angeles. The cover showed a saloon with six empty chairs for the band and two more in the back for Duane and Berry. Butch later said everyone was embarrassed by it, and Gregg called it a perfect reflection of a band that was finished.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was one bright spot. The band played benefit concerts for a little known Georgia governor running for president, Jimmy Carter, and Carter later said Gregg was better known than he was at the time. Then came the break. A federal drug investigation reached Scooter Herring, the band's security man, who was also Gregg's personal valet and drug supplier. Gregg testified against him under immunity, and Herring was convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. His bandmates called Gregg a snitch, he received death threats and needed police protection, and for years crowds shouted narc at him. Betts told Rolling Stone there was no way they could ever work with Gregg again. In 1976 the Allman Brothers Band broke up.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Reunions, bankruptcy and the lost decade

After the split, Leavell, Williams and Jaimoe formed Sea Level, a pun on Chuck Leavell's name, Betts formed Great Southern, and Gregg started the Gregg Allman Band. Gregg and Cher made a duet album, Two the Hard Way, billed as Allman and Woman. It flopped, and their European tour was cancelled after fights broke out between his fans and hers. They divorced by the end of the decade. In 1978 Phil Walden helped broker a truce. Gregg, Betts, Butch and Jaimoe reunited, adding guitarist Dan Toler and bassist David Goldflies from Great Southern, since Leavell and Williams chose to stay with Sea Level. Enlightened Rogues, named after one of Duane's favorite phrases, came out in February 1979, reached the top ten and gave them a hit with Crazy Love.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The comeback ran into money trouble. Capricorn owed PolyGram millions, and the band was not being paid its royalties. Betts sued Walden for unpaid royalties and won, and in October 1979 Capricorn filed for bankruptcy. The band moved to Arista, where label boss Clive Davis pushed them to sound modern. Butch Trucks later said Davis wanted a Southern version of Led Zeppelin and destroyed any hope of making it work. Reach for the Sky in 1980 and Brothers of the Road in 1981 were albums the band itself later called embarrassing. In a painful low, they fired Jaimoe after disputes over his wife and manager, Candace Oakley, Berry's sister. Gregg later called that firing one of the real blights on the band's history.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After Davis rejected every producer they suggested, including Tom Dowd, the band quit. Their last performance of that era was on Saturday Night Live in January 1982, and Betts said they stopped before they ruined what was left of the band's image. The eighties were hard. Lamar Williams was diagnosed with lung cancer that his doctors linked to Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, and he died in Los Angeles on the twenty first of January 1983, a week after his thirty fourth birthday. Gregg drifted around Florida, drinking at least a fifth of vodka a day by his own account, and was arrested for drunk driving. He said his great fear was that everybody would forget about him.[1] [2] [3]

Slowly the pieces came back together. In 1986 Gregg and Betts, both tired of struggling, toured together, each band opening for the other before a joint set, and the old wound over Scooter Herring began to heal. The classic lineup with Leavell and Dan Toler played two one off benefit shows that year. Then in 1987 Gregg released I'm No Angel, his first solo album in about a decade. Its title track became a surprise radio hit, reaching number one on Billboard's rock chart. Classic rock radio was turning the old Allman Brothers songs into staples for a new generation, and in 1989 a four disc box set called Dreams arrived to mark the band's twentieth anniversary.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The rebirth, the Beacon and the break with Dickey

For the 1989 anniversary tour, Gregg, Betts, Butch and a returning Jaimoe recruited two players from Betts's own band, guitarist Warren Haynes from Asheville, North Carolina, and keyboardist Johnny Neel, along with bassist Allen Woody, who won open auditions. Haynes had co-written a song that Garth Brooks would later take to number one on the country chart. The reunion was meant to last one summer, but the chemistry was real. Tom Dowd produced Seven Turns in 1990, hailed as a return to form, and Good Clean Fun went to number one on the rock chart. Percussionist Marc Quinones, a Bronx born salsa veteran who had played with Willie Colon, joined in 1991 after a chance meeting with Butch, and stayed for twenty three years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1989 the band played New York's Beacon Theatre, and from 1992 the spring residency there became a ritual. Biographer Alan Paul called it a New York rite of spring, and a New York Times writer compared it to the return of the robins. Over the years they played the Beacon two hundred and thirty eight times, all sold out by most counts. When the theater's owners planned a renovation, they asked Gregg's advice, and he told them just don't screw it up. The band also headlined the H.O.R.D.E. Festival, winning over young fans of the jam band scene. Shades of Two Worlds in 1991 and Where It All Begins in 1994, recorded live on a soundstage on Burt Reynolds's Florida ranch, kept the new music coming.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The old demons had not gone anywhere. In 1993 Betts was arrested after shoving police officers in Saratoga Springs, New York, and missed shows while guitarists including Zakk Wylde and David Grissom filled in. In January 1995 the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Gregg was so drunk he could barely finish his speech. When he watched the broadcast later he was mortified, and it pushed him into his final, successful attempt to get sober. He hired two nurses who took twelve hour shifts to see him through. In 1996 a live version of Jessica won the Grammy for best rock instrumental performance.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tension between Gregg and Betts nearly broke the band during the 1996 Beacon run, and in 1997 Haynes and Woody left to focus on their side project, Gov't Mule. Oteil Burbridge, a bassist from the Aquarium Rescue Unit who as a teenager had a tiny part in the Peter Sellers film Being There, replaced Woody, and Jack Pearson came in on guitar. Pearson left in 1999 with tinnitus, blaming the crushing stage volume. Butch Trucks called his nephew Derek, a slide guitar prodigy who had bought his first guitar at a yard sale for five dollars at the age of nine. Derek was twenty, younger than any of the founders had been in 1969, and he had grown up hearing At Fillmore East with his father.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By 2000 the others felt the band had become Dickey Betts's backing group. Gregg said everything had to be based around what Dickey was playing, and Butch said Dickey's volume was so high nobody on stage could hear anything else. After a rocky spring tour, Gregg, Butch and Jaimoe sent Betts a letter, reportedly by fax, saying they would tour that summer without him and that he needed to get clean. Betts called it cruel and impersonal, hired a lawyer and sued, and the break became permanent. His last show with the band was in Atlanta on the seventh of May 2000. Then, on the twenty sixth of August, Allen Woody was found dead in a New York hotel room. He had died of a heroin overdose at forty four.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The last great lineup

At a benefit concert for Woody's family, Warren Haynes sat in with the Allman Brothers, and by 2001 he was back for good. The final lineup was set: Gregg, Butch, Jaimoe, Haynes, Derek Trucks, Oteil Burbridge and Marc Quinones. Jaimoe called it the best version of the band since Duane and Berry. Their last studio album, Hittin' the Note, came out in 2003 to strong reviews. Gregg and Haynes wrote much of it together, and Gregg called it his favorite Allman Brothers record since the early days. It was the only studio album without Betts, and its closing track, Old Friend, played only by Haynes and Derek, was the one Allman Brothers recording with no original member on it.[1] [2] [3]

Through the 2000s the band was a top concert draw again, regularly playing to more than twenty thousand people. Haynes and Derek worked as a true partnership, trading slide and lead in the spirit of Duane and Dickey, and Derek sometimes played Duane's own gold top Les Paul. In 2009 the fortieth anniversary run at the Beacon was dedicated to Duane, with guests including Eric Clapton, whom the whole band regarded as the most special guest because of his bond with Duane. Gregg called it the most fun he ever had in that building. Betts was offered a chance to return for a few songs but felt the invitation was halfhearted and did not come. In 2012 the band received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Gregg's body was paying for the hard years. He was diagnosed with hepatitis C, which he blamed on a dirty tattoo needle, and tumors were found on his liver. In 2010 he had a liver transplant after months on a waiting list, and in 2012 he went to rehab again for addiction after his treatments. That year he published his memoir, My Cross to Bear, written with Alan Light and drawn partly from sixty seven pounds of cassette tapes he had recorded over the years. The book was optioned for a film called Midnight Rider, and that led to one of the darkest days connected to his name.[1] [2] [3]

On the twentieth of February 2014, on the first day of filming, the Midnight Rider crew set up a dream sequence with a hospital bed on a live railroad trestle over the Altamaha River in Wayne County, Georgia. The railroad company CSX had denied them permission. A freight train came around the bend, smashed the bed, and killed twenty seven year old camera assistant Sarah Jones. Several others were injured. Gregg asked the producers to abandon the film out of respect for her, and sued to stop it. Director Randall Miller pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespass and served a year in jail. A jury later awarded Jones's family eleven point two million dollars, and her death sparked a push for safer film sets.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2014 Haynes and Derek Trucks announced they would leave at the end of the year, and the band decided to stop with them. Gregg said forty five years was enough. Their final concert was at the Beacon on the twenty eighth of October 2014, three sets of mostly early material with no guests. Near half past one in the morning the band took a bow, and Gregg, in a rare speech, recalled walking into rehearsal on the twenty sixth of March 1969. Then they played the first song they had ever played together, Trouble No More. During the breaks, the screen read that the road goes on forever, so stay calm, eat a peach and carry on.[1] [2] [3]

Losses, sons and the last founder

The musicians scattered to Gov't Mule, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, and for Oteil Burbridge, Dead and Company. Butch Trucks led a new group called Les Brers with Jaimoe, Quinones, Burbridge and Lamar Williams's son. But Derek said his uncle was having second thoughts once the end became real, and Butch had reportedly been struggling with money. On the twenty fourth of January 2017, at his condominium in West Palm Beach, Florida, Butch Trucks died by suicide. He was sixty nine. Gregg said he had lost another brother. Derek later remembered him as the heart of the band's engine, a Duane purist who never gave less than everything on stage.[1] [2] [3]

Gregg's liver cancer had returned, and he kept it private so he could keep playing. His last concert was at his own Laid Back Festival in Atlanta on the twenty ninth of October 2016, forty five years to the day after Duane's death. In his final weeks he spoke with Dickey Betts for the first time in seventeen years. Gregg could only whisper, Betts said, but they worked things out. Gregg Allman died at home in Richmond Hill, near Savannah, Georgia, on the twenty seventh of May 2017, at sixty nine. His last album, Southern Blood, recorded with producer Don Was at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, came out that September.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At his request, mourners wore jeans. Jimmy Carter, Cher, Betts, Jaimoe and Derek Trucks were at the funeral in Macon, and hundreds of fans lined the procession route, some playing Allman Brothers records. Gregg was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery beside Duane and Berry Oakley, the graveyard where the young band had once written songs. Butch Trucks is buried there too. The next generation kept going. In 2018 Gregg's son Devon, Dickey's son Duane and Berry's son Berry Duane Oakley formed the Allman Betts Band. The Big House in Macon, where the band once lived, had already become the Allman Brothers Band Museum, holding the world's largest collection of their memorabilia.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the tenth of March 2020, the surviving members of the final lineup, billed as the Brothers, played a four hour fiftieth anniversary show at Madison Square Garden, with Derek's brother Duane Trucks on his uncle's drums, Reese Wynans on organ and Chuck Leavell sitting in. It was one of the last big concerts before the pandemic shut everything down. Betts was invited but could not travel, and he told Derek to kill it. On the eighteenth of April 2024, Dickey Betts died of cancer and lung disease at his home in Osprey, Florida, at eighty. That left Jaimoe, the first man Duane ever hired, as the last surviving founder. In 2026 a documentary, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, reached cinemas.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The legacy is enormous. The Allman Brothers opened the door for Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band and a whole wave of Southern bands, and turned Capricorn and Macon into a music capital. They disliked the term Southern rock. Gregg said it was like saying rock rock, and Warren Haynes said the band never stood for rebel flags. Rolling Stone called them the first great jam band, and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top said they were a brotherhood that went beyond race and ego. Duane Allman is ranked among the greatest guitarists ever, and At Fillmore East is still named among the finest live albums ever made. In Macon, a stretch of highway is named Duane Allman Boulevard, crossing a bridge named for Berry Oakley.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around The Allman Brothers Band

Duane Allman and Gregg Allman. Duane was the bold, restless older brother and Gregg the shy, sensitive younger one. They fought over one guitar as kids and were apart for the first time only in 1968. Duane pushed Gregg to sing his guts out and teased him for not knowing his own song was in eleven. After Duane's death Gregg carried him everywhere, surrounded by his photos and notes, and ended his memoir imagining Duane greeting him with nice work, little brother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. The twin lead guitars were the heart of the band. Their harmonies were rarely planned. Betts would start a melody and Duane would improvise off it, and they were not afraid of mistakes. Betts gave Duane the Gibson SG he used for slide, and Duane, with typical modesty, said he was the famous guitar player but Dickey was the good one. Their partnership lasted barely two and a half years.[1] [2]

Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts. After Duane died, Betts became the leader and Gregg resented it. They split over the Scooter Herring trial, reunited twice, and fell apart again in 2000 when the band dropped Betts and he sued. They did not speak for seventeen years. In Gregg's final weeks they talked by phone. Gregg could only whisper, but Betts said they worked things out, and Betts attended his funeral.[1] [2] [3]

Gregg Allman and Cher. They met in 1975 and married that June, four days after her divorce from Sonny Bono. She filed for divorce nine days later over his heroin and alcohol use, then took him back. They had a son, Elijah Blue, made the flop duet album Two the Hard Way, and divorced by the end of the decade. Cher said she could not have heroin around her children, but they stayed friends, and she attended his funeral.[1] [2] [3]

Duane Allman and Eric Clapton. Clapton first heard Duane on Wilson Pickett's Hey Jude and was astounded. They met in Miami in August 1970 and jammed until the next afternoon. Duane played on most of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, and Clapton called him the musical brother he never had. Duane turned down a permanent place in the Dominos. Decades later, Clapton was the guest the band cherished most at their 2009 anniversary shows.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Allman Brothers Band and Phil Walden. Otis Redding's former manager built Capricorn Records around Duane and kept faith through the lean years, sinking a fortune into the band while Atlantic said they had no chance. The partnership turned Macon into a music town. It soured over money. Betts sued Walden over unpaid royalties in 1979, and Capricorn went bankrupt that October. Walden later relaunched the label, and he died of cancer in 2006.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Allman Brothers Band and Tom Dowd. The Atlantic engineer, who had once worked on the Manhattan Project, missed their debut but produced Idlewild South, At Fillmore East and Eat a Peach. Hearing them rehearse, he told Walden they did not need rehearsal, they were ready to record. He came back for Enlightened Rogues, Seven Turns and Where It All Begins, and the band later played Layla partly as a tribute to him after his death in 2002.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Butch Trucks and Jaimoe. Duane put them together and drove away, and they never discussed parts. Butch was the freight train power, Jaimoe the jazz color on top. Jaimoe said everything he ever played that people called great was because Butch set him up. They played side by side for most of forty five years, and after the band ended they kept going together in Les Brers until Butch's death in 2017.[1] [2] [3]

Butch Trucks and Derek Trucks. Derek grew up visiting his uncle's house full of gold records. Butch brought him into the band at twenty in 1999 and passed on Duane's creed of never giving less than everything on stage. Derek called him the heart of the band's engine. They grew apart after the band ended, and Butch's suicide in 2017 left Derek searching old interviews for an answer he never found.[1] [2]

The Allman Brothers Band and Jimmy Carter. The band played fundraisers for the little known Georgia governor in 1976, and Carter credited them with helping him reach the White House. He said Gregg was better known than he was at the time. Carter later invited Betts to the White House, presented Gregg with an honorary doctorate at Mercer University in 2016, and attended Gregg's funeral at ninety two.[1] [2] [3]

Warren Haynes and Allen Woody. They joined together in the 1989 reunion, formed Gov't Mule as a side project in 1994 and left the Allmans together in 1997 to focus on it. When Woody died of a heroin overdose in 2000, Haynes organized a benefit that brought the Allman Brothers back into his life, and he rejoined the band soon after.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about The Allman Brothers Band

• Early on, the band was once too broke to pay the Golden Gate Bridge toll. Heading to a Fillmore West show, the band could not scrape together the toll between eleven of them. They parked and asked strangers for dimes, promising free tickets to the show.[1]
• Wilson Pickett first refused to record Hey Jude because he misheard the title. When Duane suggested the Beatles song, Pickett balked at the lyric he thought he heard. Once enlightened, he cut it with Duane on lead guitar, and it became a hit.[1]
• Gregg's first guitar ended up painted black and used as a flower planter. He paid twenty one dollars and ninety five cents at Sears for it. He later gave it to a family friend, and the last time he saw it, it was painted black with gold strings and held two potted plants.[1]
• Gregg dodged the Vietnam draft by shooting himself in the foot on purpose. According to Billboard, he studied a chart of the bones of the foot first to find the spot that would do the least damage.[1] [2]
• Gregg wrote Whipping Post with the charcoal of burnt kitchen matches. A child was sleeping in the room and he could not turn on the light, so he struck two matches, one for light and one to write with, and scribbled the words on an ironing board.[1] [2]
• Gregg did not realize Whipping Post's intro was in eleven until Duane told him. He just felt it as groups of three with a two to jump back in. Duane congratulated him on understanding eleven, and Gregg asked what eleven was.[1] [2]
• On the debut album sessions, Gregg unscrewed the studio's red recording light. The light that came on whenever tape was rolling made him nervous, so he simply removed the bulb.[1]
• The first album's gatefold shows the band naked in a Georgia creek. It was Phil Walden's idea. They tried to hide behind bubbles, which washed away. Butch Trucks, with thirteen stitches in his leg that day, stood behind Berry Oakley.[1]
• Duane saw Johnny Winter at the Fillmore East and vowed to play there within a year. He made the promise in January 1969. The band played the Fillmore that December, and the At Fillmore East shows in 1971 were on a bill with Johnny Winter.[1]
• The Beach Boys threatened to pull out of the Fillmore East closing show unless they headlined. Bill Graham told them the Allman Brothers would close the night and they were free to leave. The Allmans closed the show on the twenty seventh of June 1971.[1]
• Gregg almost called his song Melissa by the name Delilah. The name Melissa came to him late one night at a grocery store while buying milk. He had written about three hundred songs before it that he did not think were good enough.[1]
• Gregg sold the rights to Melissa for two hundred and fifty dollars to buy a plane ticket. Stuck in Los Angeles in 1968, he sold them to producer Steve Alaimo. Phil Walden bought them back so the band could record it for Eat a Peach.[1]
• The roadie who helped write Midnight Rider negotiated five percent of its royalties. Kim Payne supplied lines for the third verse when Gregg got stuck in the middle of the night, then had a contract drawn up through Phil Walden.[1]
• Jessica was written to be playable with just two fingers. Betts wanted to honor Django Reinhardt, the jazz guitarist who played with two fingers of his fretting hand after being badly burned.[1]
• Ramblin' Man was kept from number one by Cher, who would soon marry Gregg. The single stalled at number two behind Cher's Half Breed in 1973. She and Gregg began dating in January 1975.[1] [2]
• The Win, Lose or Draw cover shows six empty chairs and two more in the background. Designed by Twiggs Lyndon, the saloon scene's six chairs stood for the current members, and the two in the back for Duane Allman and Berry Oakley.[1]
• The Enlightened Rogues title comes from a line Duane loved. Duane liked to say the world was made of two great schools, enlightened rogues and religious fools, and the band took the phrase for their 1979 comeback album.[1]
• Duane Allman taught Joe Walsh how to play slide guitar. Walsh said Duane showed him his method when they played shows together. By coincidence, the two guitarists share a birthday, the twentieth of November.[1] [2]
• The slide guitar Betts gave Duane sold at auction in 2019 for five hundred and ninety one thousand dollars. Betts gave Duane a Gibson SG that he used only for slide. It later belonged to Graham Nash before the sale.[1]
• For over a decade, a Mississippi roadside cutting read Remember Duane Allman in giant letters. In 1973 four college students carved the words into an excavated bank beside Interstate 20. Rolling Stone published a photo, and it lasted more than ten years.[1]
• Dickey Betts inspired the rock star Russell Hammond in the film Almost Famous. Cameron Crowe said Billy Crudup's look and much more was a tribute to Dickey. Betts said his first reaction was that the guy looked like him.[1] [2]
• Butch Trucks once promised his parents he would never play anywhere that served liquor. His strict Baptist parents would only buy him a drum kit in eleventh grade on that condition. He also played timpani with the Jacksonville Symphony as a teenager.[1]
• Butch Trucks said he went to college to major in staying out of Vietnam. He lasted one year at Florida State University before being kicked out for poor attendance, and later nearly returned to school to study mathematics.[1]
• Lamar Williams went absent without leave in Vietnam and hid in the countryside for months. By his own account he ran into the jungle on arrival, occasionally joining other units, before an honorable discharge in 1970. He later died of cancer his doctors linked to Agent Orange.[1]
• Chuck Leavell's band Sea Level got its name from a pun on C. Leavell. Leavell later became the Rolling Stones' keyboardist and musical director, and he runs an award winning tree farm near Macon.[1] [2] [3]
• As a teenager, Oteil Burbridge appeared in the Peter Sellers film Being There. He played a street tough named Lolo in one short but famous scene of the 1979 movie.[1]
• Derek Trucks's great uncle Virgil Trucks was a major league pitcher who won 177 games. Derek bought his first guitar at a yard sale for five dollars at nine, and began on slide because his hands were too small for regular playing.[1]
• Warren Haynes co-wrote a number one Garth Brooks hit. Two of a Kind, Workin' on a Full House, written with Dennis Robbins and Bobby Boyd, topped the country chart after Brooks recorded it for No Fences.[1]
• Tom Dowd, who produced At Fillmore East, worked on the Manhattan Project as a young man. His wartime physics work at Columbia University was secret, so the university would not give him credit for it, and he went into recording instead.[1]
• Where It All Begins was recorded on a soundstage at Burt Reynolds's ranch. Tom Dowd set up the band's full concert rig in Jupiter, Florida, so they could record live as a unit, easing Gregg's dislike of studios.[1]
• Gregg's memoir grew out of sixty seven pounds of cassette tapes. For years he met a crew member every Thursday to record his recollections, and kept the tapes until his manager suggested a book.[1]
• When the Beacon Theatre was renovated, its owners asked Gregg for advice. After more than two hundred shows there, he told them simply not to screw it up.[1]
• Old Friend on Hittin' the Note is the only Allman Brothers track with no original member. The acoustic closing song features only Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks.[1]
• Duane was not a Donovan fan, yet Mountain Jam is built on a Donovan song. He simply liked the happy melody of There Is a Mountain as a launching pad for improvising. It was in the band's shows by May 1969.[1]
• The back cover of Brothers and Sisters shows Berry Oakley's young daughter. The front shows Butch Trucks's son Vaylor. The photos were taken at the band's farm in Juliette, Georgia, after Oakley's death.[1]
• Gregg received an honorary doctorate from Mercer University, presented by Jimmy Carter. It happened in Macon in 2016, forty years after the band's concerts helped Carter's presidential campaign.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.