Duane Allman

The Allman Brothers Band, 1969–2014

With the band: 1969–1971
Instruments: Lead and slide guitar

Nashville to Daytona Beach

Howard Duane Allman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on November 20, 1946, a year before his brother Gregg. After their father died, the family eventually settled in Daytona Beach, Florida, and both boys fell hard for rhythm and blues as teenagers. Gregg got a guitar first. Duane borrowed it and hardly ever gave it back.

Through the mid-1960s the two brothers worked the Southern club circuit in bands like the Escorts and the Allman Joys. A move to Los Angeles landed them a record deal as the Hour Glass, but the label kept polishing away everything that made them good. Duane got fed up and headed back east to find something more honest.

The Muscle Shoals Years

In 1968 Duane turned up at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He talked Wilson Pickett into cutting “Hey Jude,” then played the searing guitar that made the record, and suddenly every producer in the South wanted him. Over the next two years he recorded with Aretha Franklin, King Curtis, Boz Scaggs and many others, and rumor has it Wilson gave him the nickname “Skydog.”

Founding the Brotherhood

Duane was on a mission to put together a band of his own. In March 1969, in Jacksonville, Florida, Duane gathered Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley, Butch Trucks and Jaimoe, then called Gregg home from California to sing. The new band moved to Macon, Georgia, and recorded its first album that same year.

Duane and Dickey played twin lead guitar as a conversation, not a contest. They traded harmony lines and call-and-response phrases and stretched out in long improvisations that owed as much to jazz as to the blues. Duane often played slide with a glass Coricidin(tm) medicine bottle on his ring finger, and that sound became the band’s most recognizable voice.

Layla and Fillmore East

In 1970 Duane joined Eric Clapton in the studio for Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, and his slide playing on that record still ranks among the most celebrated in rock. The next March the Allman Brothers Band recorded its shows at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York. The double album that came out of those nights, At Fillmore East, was the band’s breakthrough, and many fans and critics still call it the greatest live record ever made.

A Short Life, A Long Shadow

Duane Allman died after a motorcycle accident in Macon on October 29, 1971. He was 24. The band finished Eat a Peach with the studio and live recordings he had made before his death and released it early in 1972. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him with the band in 1995, and generation after generation of guitarists still learn from him.