Howard Duane Allman (November 20, 1946 – October 29, 1971) was an American guitarist, session musician and the primary co-founder of the southern rock group The Allman Brothers Band. He is best remembered for his brief but influential tenure in that band, his expressive slide guitar playing and improvisational skills.
A sought-after session musician both before and during his tenure with the band, Allman performed with such established stars as King Curtis, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Herbie Mann. He also contributed heavily to the 1970 album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominos.
In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Allman at #2 in their list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, second only to Jimi Hendrix. His tone (achieved with a Gibson Les Paul and two 50-watt bass Marshall amplifiers) was named one of the greatest guitar tones of all time by Guitar Player.
He died in October 1971 in a motorcycle accident. He is still referred to by his nickname "Skydog," which may be a reference to his signature guitar sound and tone. Many consider "Skydog" a variant of the nickname "Skyman" given to him by Wilson Pickett during the recording of Pickett's cover of the Beatles' "Hey Jude." Jim Dickinson was quoted in Keith Richards' autobiography Life as saying he was given the name because he was high much of the time.
Howard Duane Allman was born November 20, 1946 in Nashville, Tennessee. When he was three years old, while he and his family were living near Norfolk, Virginia, his father, Willis Allman, a career United States Army sergeant, was murdered by a hitchhiker and fellow veteran who he picked up a day after returning from a long tour of duty.
Geraldine "Mama A" Allman moved her family back to Nashville. In 1957 they relocated to Daytona Beach, Florida. Duane and his younger brother, Gregg, returned to Nashville to spend summers with their grandmother. Gregg heard her neighbor, Jimmy Bain, playing country standards on a Beltone guitar from his front porch. Mr. Bain let Gregg pick it up one afternoon. Gregg was "really enchanted with this".
When he returned to Daytona Beach, Gregg saved money and bought his first guitar, a Silvertone in 1960. Gregg learned how to play a few chords and licks when Duane asked "What do we have here?", picking the guitar up. Duane and Gregg were both learning guitar, and their mother bought Duane a Gibson Les Paul Junior to keep them from fighting.
Duane learned the guitar quickly.
Gregg stated in an interview that: "It was like seeing Paul Bunyan grind an axe, he passed me up like I was standing still."
Another important event occurred in 1959 [NOTE: inconsistent with 1960 date above] when the boys were in Nashville visiting relatives. They attended a rock 'n' roll concert at which blues legend B. B. King performed.
Both brothers promptly fell under the spell of his music. Gregg Allman recalls that Duane idly and yet sternly turned to him and said, "We got to get into this." After the show, Duane instantly started sewing together his own riffs to the B. B. King songs he'd heard hours before, and by the end of the night had put together his own solos and discovered the blues, all before investing his full potential into the guitar.
Duane's love for the guitar grew even more over the years. Gregg stated that he hardly ever saw Duane out of his room not jamming on the guitar. "His improvisational skills were through the dam," Gregg stated in an interview. "He was never not in his room, soloing for hours on end." Duane first learned the acoustic blues, and over the years molded his guitar playing to his own custom sound, which he is still known for today.
Duane Allman was known for his lean, gangly stature, his beard, and his humble manner while not playing guitar. Dickey Betts stated, "Duane was one of the most down to earth people you could meet, and we all knew he was gonna make a change in this world whether it be on guitar or not."
The two Allman brothers started playing publicly in 1961, joining or forming a number of small, local groups. Shortly thereafter, Duane quit high school to stay home during the day and focus on his guitar playing. Their band the Escorts opened for The Beach Boys in 1965 but disbanded and eventually became the Allman Joys. After Gregg graduated from Seabreeze High School in 1965, the Allman Joys went on the road, performing throughout the Southeast and eventually being based in Nashville and St. Louis, Missouri.
The Allman Joys morphed into another not-completely-successful band, The Hour Glass, which moved to Los Angeles in early 1967. There the Hour Glass produced two albums that left the band unsatisfied. Liberty, their record company, tried to market them as a pop band, completely ignoring the band's desire to play more blues-oriented material.
In 1968, Gregg Allman went to visit Duane on his 22nd birthday. Duane was sick in bed. Gregg brought along a bottle of Coricidin pills for his fever and the debut album by guitarist Taj Mahal as a gift. "About two hours after I left, my phone rang," Gregg states.
"Baby brother, baby brother, get over here now!" When Gregg got there, he found that Duane had poured the pills out of the bottle, washed off the label and was using it as a slide to play "Statesboro Blues," an old Blind Willie McTell song that Taj Mahal covered. "Duane had never played slide before", says Gregg, "he just picked it up and started burnin'. He was a natural."[citation needed] The song would go on to become a part of the Allman Brothers Band's repertoire, and Duane's slide guitar became crucial to their sound.
The Hour Glass broke up in early 1968, and Duane and Gregg Allman went back to Florida, where they played on demo sessions with the 31st of February, a folk rock outfit whose drummer was Butch Trucks. Gregg returned to California to fulfill Hour Glass obligations, while Duane jammed around Florida for months but didn't get another band going.
The limits of full-time session playing frustrated Allman. The few months in Muscle Shoals were by no means a waste, however, because besides meeting the great artists and other industry professionals he was working with, Allman had rented a small, secluded cabin on a lake and spent many solitary hours there refining his playing.
Perhaps most significantly, Allman got together with R&B and jazz drummer Jaimoe Johanson, who came to meet Allman at the urging of the late Otis Redding's manager, Phil Walden, who by now was managing Allman and wanted to build a three-piece band around him.
Allman and Jaimoe got Chicago-born bassist Berry Oakley to come up from Florida and jam as a trio, but Berry was committed to his rock band with guitarist Dickey Betts, the Second Coming, and returned south.
Getting fed up with Muscle Shoals, in March Allman took Jaimoe with him back to Jacksonville, Florida, where they moved in with Butch Trucks. Soon a jam session of these three plus Betts, Oakley, and Reese Wynans took place and forged what all present recognized as a natural, or even magical, bond.
With the addition of brother Gregg, called back from Los Angeles to sing and replace Wynans on keyboards, at the end of March 1969, the Allman Brothers Band was formed. (Wynans became well known over a decade later as organist with Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble.) After a bit of rehearsing and gigging, the sextet moved up to Macon, Georgia, in April to be near Walden and his Capricorn Sound Studios. While living in Macon, Allman met Donna Roosman, who bore his only child, Galadrielle. Despite their child, the relationship quickly ended.
he Allman Brothers Band went on to become one of the most influential rock groups of the 1970s, described by Rolling Stone's George Kimball in 1971 as "the best damn rock and roll band this country has produced in the past five years."
After months of nonstop rehearsing and gigging, including free shows in Macon's Central City Park and Atlanta's Piedmont Park, the group was ready to settle on the Allman Brothers Band name, and to record. Their debut album, The Allman Brothers Band, was recorded in New York in September 1969 and released a few months later. In the midst of intense touring, work began in Macon and Miami (Atlantic South - Criteria Studios), and a little bit in New York, on the ABB's second album, Idlewild South. Produced mostly by Tom Dowd, Idlewild South was released in August 1970 and broke ground for the ABB by quickly hitting the Billboard charts.
A group date in Miami, also that August, gave Allman the chance to participate in Eric Clapton's Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Clapton had long wanted to meet Allman; when he heard that the Allman Brothers were due to play in Miami, where he had just started work on Layla with producer Tom Dowd, he insisted on going to see their concert, where he met Allman.
At one point, Allman cautiously asked Clapton if he could come by the studio to watch. After the show the two bands—the Allman Brothers Band and Derek and the Dominos—returned to Criteria, where Allman and Clapton quickly formed a deep rapport during an all-night jam session.Allman wound up participating on most of the album's tracks, contributing some of his best-known work.
Allman never left the Allman Brothers Band, though, despite being offered a permanent position with Clapton. Allman never toured with Derek and the Dominos, but he did make three appearances with them on December 1, 1970 at the Curtis Hixon Hall (Soulmates LP) and the following day at Onondaga County War Memorial, and one appearance (or possibly just Delaney Bramlett or both Duane and Delaney) November 20, 1970 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Calif.
In an interview, Duane told listeners how to tell who played what: Eric played the Fender parts and Duane played the Gibson parts. He continued by noting that the Fender had a sparklier sound, while the Gibson produced more of a "full-tilt screech."
Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident only months after the release and initial success of At Fillmore East. While in the western part of Macon on October 29, 1971 during a band break from touring and recording, Allman was riding his motorcycle at high speed toward an intersection as a flatbed truck carrying a lumber crane approached. (Allman did not collide with a peach truck as many falsely believe.*) The flatbed truck stopped suddenly in the intersection, forcing Duane to swerve his Harley Davidson Sportster motorcycle sharply to the left to avoid a collision.
As he was doing so, he struck either the back of the truck or the ball on the lumber crane and was immediately thrown from the motorcycle. The motorcycle bounced up in the air and landed on Allman and proceeded to skid another ninety feet with Duane pinned underneath, crushing his internal organs. Though he was still alive when he arrived at the hospital, despite emergency surgery, he died several hours later from massive internal injuries. He was just weeks from his 25th birthday.
After Allman's funeral and some weeks of mourning, the five surviving members of the Allman Brothers Band carried on, resuming live performances and finishing the recording work interrupted by Duane's death.
They named their next album Eat a Peach for Duane's response to an interviewer's question: "How are you helping the revolution?" Allman replied: "There ain't no revolution, only evolution, but every time I'm in Georgia I 'eat a peach' for peace." Released in February, 1972, this double album contains a side of live and studio tracks with Allman, two sides of "Mountain Jam", recorded with Duane at the same At Fillmore East stand in March, and a side of tracks by the surviving five member band.
Bass guitarist Berry Oakley died less than 13 months later in a similar motorcycle crash with a city bus, three blocks from the site of Duane Allman's fatal accident. Oakley's remains were laid to rest beside Duane Allman's in Macon, Georgia's Rose Hill Cemetery.
The variety of Allman's session work and Allman Brothers Band bandleading can be heard to good effect on two posthumous Capricorn releases, An Anthology (1972) and An Anthology Volume II (1974). There are also several archival releases of live Allman Brothers Band performances from what the band calls, "Duane's Era".
Shortly after Duane's death, Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd dedicated the song "Free Bird", to the memory of Duane Allman. Van Zant would sometimes allude to this in concert; in the "Free Bird" performance at Skynyrd's famed 1976 appearance at Knebworth, England, Van Zant says to pianist Billy Powell, "Play it for Duane Allman."
Many people assume the song was written about Duane. However, it had actually been written well before Duane died. (Allen Collins wrote the song after his then girlfriend asked him the question "if I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?")
In 1973, fans carved the very large letters "REMEMBER DUANE ALLMAN" in a dirt embankment along Interstate Highway 20 near Vicksburg, Mississippi. A photograph was published in Rolling Stone magazine and in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll; the carving itself lasted for over ten years.
In 1998 the Georgia State Legislature passed a resolution designating a stretch of State Highway 19, US 41, within Macon as the "Duane Allman Boulevard" in his honor.
Country singer Travis Tritt, in the song "Put Some Drive In Your Country" on his debut album, sings "Now I still love old country/I ain't tryin' to put it down/But lord I miss Duane Allman/I wish he was still around."
