How did you first meet your friend Duane Allman?
I met Duane through Jerry Wexler. I had met him before, but we didn’t get to know each other or anything like that. I’d seen him doing sessions with Aretha and stuff. But Jerry told me, “You need to get together with Duane Allman. You two would make some classic records, the way you play guitar and the way he plays. I said yeah, but he’s got a band. Jerry said “It’s worth a try.” So I called him up and asked him what he was doing nd he said nothing. I asked him if he’d play some shows with me, and he said “Yeah! Delaney I’ve always wanted to play with you.” I said, “Well I’ve always loved your playing.” Before I knew it he was at my house. From then on, The Allman Brothers would be on tour and they’d be looking for Duane and he’d be out here on tour with me. (Laughs) He’d call me from the airport and say hey bro, can you come pick me up? I’m here.

Phil Walden, who owned their record company, sued me about seven or eight times for soliciting. Duane would always say “Nope, you can’t sue him. I’m the one who solicited him.” So nothing ever came of it. But we got to be best friends, and if you saw one of us you saw the other. And King Curtis rounded out the trio. I mean, me and Duane and Curtis, we hung together and we made some real good music. You know Duane got little strung out on drugs, and I talked to him and asked him before he got any worse if he’d go to the hospital. He said, “Do you think it would work?” He got to the hospital, and it would have been easy because he wasn’t that bad off, but he was like me and had a bad temper. He told the nurse, “I need a little something to calm me down. I’m kind of hurting.” And the nurse yelled at him, “Oh all you druggie hippie musicians come here for help and just go back out and do it all again!” It made him mad, so he just got up, put his clothes on and got on his motorcycle and took off. And that’s when he hit that peach truck and died.

He was supposed to play with me the next night. We had two shows scheduled. I did the first show, looking for Duane. Then I asked my brother who was my manager at the time if he’d herd from Duane and he said no. Well just as I was getting ready to do my second show, my brother Johnny ran out onstage and told me Duane had been killed. I was stunned. I had to do the second show with that on my mind. It liked to have killed me.

Jerry (Wexler) called me and said everybody wanted me to sing at the funeral. I said, my God Jerry, do you know how hard that’s gonna be? He said yeah, but he’s your best friend. Sure enough it was hard just like I said it was gonna be. And see, just five weeks before that me and Duane had gone to Curtis’ funeral, because he was murdered, you know. Some Puerto Ricans were fighting outside his motel door and he asked them to quiet down because someone was going to call the cops, and he didn’t want to see the cops out there. Well, he turned around and got stabbed in the back. When he said “You hurt me real bad,” the guy stabbed him in the heart. He died on the way to the hospital. Duane and I went to his funeral, and five weeks later I went to Duane’s. The trio was busted up.

That’s awful man. One quote I read some years go came from Wexler, who said he once sat and listed to you and Duane playing acoustic guitars on his porch for hours. Jerry said it was some of the very best music he had ever heard.
Yeah. (Laughs) He said, here I am a recording producer, and you guys spent a week here doing that, and I didn’t record a single note of it. He said “That was the dumbest thing I ever did in my career. Because that was the prettiest music I ever heard.” We would have had enough for ten albums. I guess it wasn’t meant to be.