Dickey Betts, who has died aged 80, was a founder member of the Allman Brothers Band, probably the most influential US “southern rock” teams of the Seventies. The hard-living outfit blazed out of Jacksonville, Florida, in 1969 with a mixture of rock, blues, nation and jazz that outlined the style, additionally influencing artists resembling Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Prime, the Black Crowes and Child Rock. They scored a number of platinum and gold albums and had been inducted into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame.
Though the six-piece band was ostensibly led by the blond- haired Allman brothers, Duane and Gregg (guitar and keyboards/vocals respectively), as joint lead guitarist, singer and major songwriter Betts performed a vital function. A bigger than life character along with his cowboy hats, lengthy moustache and gunslinger attractiveness, Betts wrote most of the band’s finest cherished songs, together with Jessica, Blue Sky and the 1973 US No 2 smash Ramblin’ Man, impressed by life on the street.
The signature duelling of Betts’s and Duane Allman’s lead guitars rewrote the rule e-book of how twin guitarists play collectively – beforehand one had performed lead and the opposite rhythm. The band’s large fanbase included President Jimmy Carter, and in 2020 Betts even acquired the uncommon accolade of a point out in a Bob Dylan music, when Homicide Most Foul contained the road “Play Oscar Peterson, play Stan Getz/Play Blue Sky, play Dickey Betts.”
He was additionally the inspiration for the rock star character performed by Billy Crudup within the former rock journalist Cameron Crowe’s movie Nearly Well-known (2000), the director having been drawn to Betts’s aura of “potential hazard and playful recklessness behind his eyes”.
Betts was born in West Palm Seashore, Florida, one of many three youngsters of Harold, a carpenter, and his spouse, Sarah (nee Brinson), who wrote poetry and performed the cornet in a Salvation Military band. Though his father was additionally a eager fiddler, Dickey’s first instrument was the ukelele, which he began enjoying aged 5, later graduating to the mandolin and the banjo.
He was at West Gate elementary college when he wrote his first music, Seven Years With Pamela, about his sister. He then attended varied West Palm Seashore faculties till seventh grade, dropping out of highschool when he was 16, by which era his pursuits included carpentry, looking and listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the household radio.
Listening to Chuck Berry’s Maybellene in his mid-teens prompted one other swap of instrument, as he “began realising that women like guitars”. He dropped out of highschool aged 16 to tour the US with a travelling circus in his first band, the Swinging Saints, however was enjoying in Second Coming with the bassist Berry Oakley when Duane Allman invited each males to hitch his new group.
The lineup was accomplished by the drummer Butch Vehicles and – unusually in white-dominated 60s southern rock – a black second drummer, James Lee Johnson, who had beforehand performed with Otis Redding and Percy Sledge.
Though gross sales of their first two albums had been sluggish, Duane Allman’s look on Eric Clapton’s 1970 album Layla and Different Assorted Love Songs – which included the traditional hit Layla – boosted the heavy-touring Allman Brothers Band’s rising profile. Their 1971 reside album At Fillmore East offered 1m copies.
After Duane Allman and Oakley had been killed in bike accidents in 1971 and 1972 respectively, Betts led a rejigged lineup. The 1973 album Brothers and Sisters – that includes Ramblin’ Man and the instrumental Jessica, later the theme to the tv motoring present Prime Gear – topped the US charts for 5 weeks, whereas 1975’s Win, Lose Or Draw went into the Prime 5. By then the band had been succumbing to a well-recognized music trade cocktail of success, medicine, alcohol and feuding.
Betts and Gregg Allman each made solo albums, earlier than Betts felt betrayed when the latter testified towards the band’s street supervisor in a 1976 medicine case and refused to work with him once more. However, they regrouped in 1978, splitting once more in 1982.
A second comeback in 1989 proved extra enduring, though in 2000 Betts was fired over his ingesting. That third spell within the band had been dogged by alcohol and drug abuse, lawsuits and arrests, and in 1996 he was charged with aggravated home assault after pointing a handgun at his fifth spouse, Donna (nee Stearns), whom he had married in 1989. The costs had been dropped after Betts agreed to enter rehab.
In his later years he returned along with his personal Dickey Betts Band and performed within the band Nice Southern along with his son Duane. True to his ramblin’ man credentials, he remained on the street to the final, even after mind surgical procedure following a 2018 fall at dwelling, and he launched reside albums properly into his 70s.
He’s survived by Donna and his youngsters, Kimberly, Christy, Jessica and Duane.
