I don’t know if a person can play blues if they don’t know from humidity.įrom childhood on, Gregg was required to navigate indescribable loss. I’ve often wondered if this has something to do with Gregg and Duane’s childhood in Daytona Beach-with the particular and inescapable heaviness of north Florida air. Unlike the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin, the Allmans’ mining of American vernacular music seemed to better account for atmosphere. That the Allman Brothers Band started this way feels important to reiterate. The band was instrumental in the engineering of what eventually came to be known as Southern rock, a guitar-driven amalgamation of country, soul, and rhythm and blues, which, fairly or not, eventually came to exist adjacent to some fairly malevolent iconography, including the Confederate flag. Several American school districts were still segregated, yet the members of the Allman Brothers Band were lounging confidently about central Georgia, wearing bell-bottoms and turquoise jewelry, refusing to get haircuts, playing blues records, taking all their meals at a soul-food restaurant, periodically shooting craps in the back of a black barbershop. Johanson is black-I bring this up only because an interracial band existing and thriving in a sleepy Southern town at the end of the nineteen-sixties was an act of remarkable dissent. Gregg and his older brother, Duane, founded the band in Macon, Georgia, in 1969: Gregg was on organ and lead vocals, Berry Oakley was on bass, Duane and Dickey Betts were on guitar, and Butch Trucks and Jaimoe Johanson were on drums.

You got the sense that the Allman Brothers were spiritually indefatigable-that even after they retired from the road, they remained onstage in some alternate dimension, forever several hours into a perfect, spiralling jam. (“Streakin’ at the Beacon,” the T-shirts said.) These late-era performances were often implausibly good-the band sounded honeyed, soulful, strapping. Three years ago, the band played its final concert, at the Beacon Theater in New York, a venue it had periodically occupied for athletic stretches, selling out weeks of shows. He was sixty-nine years old, and, by all accounts, had lived well and hard. On Saturday, Gregg Allman, a founding member of the Allman Brothers Band, died at his home in Savannah, Georgia.

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