Image courtesy Capricorn Records
The musical genre known as the blues originated in the American South between the 1870’s and the turn of the century, and in the early stages it was primarily played by black musicians. As the style grew, elements of the blues came to be found in folk, gospel/spiritual, jazz, and rock music through the 20th Century and up to the present day. In the mid-to-late 60’s British bands such as the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and Cream fused blues with rock. Eric Clapton, who played with all three of these groups at different times, became the most renown guitarist of the blues-rock genre during this period.
On August 26, 1970, Clapton went to a concert in Miami to see the Allman Brothers Band, featuring 23-year-old guitarist Duane Allman, a rising star in the rock music world. Slim-framed, with shoulder-length reddish-brown hair, thick sideburns and adjoining moustache; and dressed in a sleeveless t-shirt and bell-bottom jeans, Duane traded long, improvised, blues-flavored solos with fellow guitarist Dickie Betts. Allman was also becoming known to guitarists as the premiere bottle-neck slide player, a technique used by blues guitar players going back to the 1930’s. Using a Coricidin bottle on his third finger Duane could make his ’58 Les Paul gold-top guitar cry, whine, sting, and scream, sliding glass across the fingerboard. Skydog, as he was nicknamed, was in his artistic element when he played his blues-tinged solos which were tonally and structurally different his guitarist peers. Duane said his guitar licks were strongly influenced by blues harmonica players of the 40’s and 50’s, including Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Clapton was so impressed he invited Duane to Criterion Studios in Miami that evening for the recording of his next album with his group Derek and the Dominoes. When the two met at Criterion they hit it off from the start, and jammed through the early morning hours to the next afternoon. Clapton said Duane was “the musical brother I’ve never had, but wished I did.” When they were not recording or jamming Eric and Duane were listening and talking about their favorite musician’s records, most of them blues artists. Clapton later remarked the two were inseparable during their time at Criterion Studios.
Allman played electric and slide guitar on 11 of the 14 tracks on the album, three of which were straight-ahead blues standards, including “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” made popular by Bessie Smith in 1929, Big Bill Broonzy’s 1941 “Key to the Highway,” and Freddie King’s “Have You ever Loved a Woman” from 1960. Both their guitars were blazing on these blues tunes.
“Layla and Assorted Love Songs” was not an immediate success when it shipped out to stores in November, its highest charting on Billboard was #16. Initially, most critics said they liked the guitar work but not Clapton’s choice of love-song material. However, the album was re-released in 1972, 1974, and 1977, and eventually the RIAA would certify it as a platinum seller. It later came to be recognized as a classic rock album, as well as one of Clapton’s best, if not the best of his recorded works. Layla producer Tom Dowd, who also produced the Allman’s second album and their later live album, said years later the record was undisputably a masterpiece of rock music.
After finishing his gig on the Layla album, Duane returned to the six-man group fronted by his brother Greg on lead vocals and the Hammond organ. The band had recorded two LPs - the first a self-titled album in 1969, and the second “Idlewild South” in 1970 - but sales had been disappointing despite Duane’s rising recognition as an ace guitarist, mainly by other guitar players. What was needed the band members decided was a live album that would better show their energy and spontaneity in feeding off each other in their respective solo improvisations, and their tight-knit double-drummer-driven rhythms, and Greg’s deep, soulful Southern voice on top. The Allman Brothers believed they were performing at their peak, and their “natural fire,” as Greg called their performances, needed to be brought to the music world’s attention in a full-force concert played and recorded in front of a live audience.
“The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East” tracks were set down on March 11, 12, and 13, 1971, and released by their label Capricorn Records in July. The two-record, seven-song album opened up with their version of Blind Willie McTell’s 1928 “Statesboro Blues” and Duane’s slide guitar was talkin’, moanin’, and screechin’. Other blues tunes included Elmore James’ “Must Have Done Somebody Wrong,” and he and Sonny Boy Williamson’s “One Way Out,” as well as the T-Bone Walker’s standard “Stormy Monday.”
Their hard-driving rock classic “Whipping Post,” added more intensity to the record, and there was a change of texture with an extended instrumental of the jazzy, Latin-colored “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” A tune with a jazz feel fit right in their overall tone palette, as Duane and some of the other brothers had been listening to saxophonist John Coltrane and trumpeter Miles Davis’ 1959 record “Kind of Blue.”
“At Fillmore East” became a critical and commercial success, catapulting them to the top of the list of Southern rock bands, the hottest touring band in America, and the best of the blues rock bands worldwide. When musicians and fans called out “Play the blues,” nobody did it better in 1971 than the Allman Brothers Band. They took the blues rock musical form to its pinnacle, and their performances went unsurpassed during this time frame in what Duane and some of his band mates called thier group - “a jammin’ band.”
Along with Skydog’s free-flowing guitar lines on stage and in the studio was a free-living lifestyle. The Allman Brothers Band family members were making their home together in an enormous, wide-spread two-story brick and wood Tudor-style home in Macon called the Big House. Recreational drug use was common, although conducted in strict privacy, by Duane and Greg, other band members, and the roadies as well. Several members including Duane eventually went through a drug re-hab program.
Skydog also enjoyed his spins around the city streets of Macon on his motorcycle. While on a ride on October 29, 1971, his Harley Davidson Sportster slammed into a flatbed truck carrying a crane, which had stopped in the middle of an intersection. Duane was alive when an ambulance picked him up, but he died several hours later of internal injuries in a Macon hospital. Family, friends, and fans were shocked, and no one was more deeply affected than Duane’s immediate family and band mates at the passing of the group’s big brother and preeminent instrumentalist. The brothers and sisters attended and played at his funeral on November 1, 1971 ending the service with the all those present singing the hymn “Will the Circle be Unbroken.”
After long deliberation the Allman Brothers Band members decided to carry on and return to playing their music under the same band name. Of course the group’s sound would never be the same with the inimitable Skydog gone, but playing music was after all their life’s work. There was studio-recorded material in the cans, and an album - with Duane playing his role in the band - titled “Eat a Peach,” which was dedicated to him and released in February 1972.
The blues crossed into many musical forms including rock music in its century of evolution up to the early 70’s. Duane Allman’s electric guitar playing play covered several musical genres, but his style was deeply rooted in the Southern blues, like many rock guitarists of his time. In 1971 the Allman Brothers band recorded a live album that embodied some of the greatest blues playing of all time. This was Duane’s highest achievement and the band’s best execution of the blues rock style of its time. Arguably, it still holds that position as the absolute best - both the individual musician’s and the band’s performance in the musical genre - fifty years later. Thanks Skydog for your contribution to the musical art form we call the blues which still flourishes today.
Kenneth Parsons was born in Ashland, Kentucky. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Kentucky, a Master’s in Journalism from Marshall University, and a MATESL degree from the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign’s Division of English as an International Language program. Since 1990 he has taught English, ESL, and EFL in the U.S., China, Japan, and South Korea. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines including Wind, Silk Road, White Pelican, and Shi Kan (China’s official monthly poetry magazine). He is the author of a chapbook titled Window, Shadow, Mirror (Pudding House Press, Columbus, Ohio, 2007). His novel Our Mad Brother Villon was released by Little Feather Books (New York City) in 2015. A short story, Sharks, appeared in the anthology The Boom Project: Voices of a Generation, featuring select writers of the Ohio River Valley from Pittsburg to Cairo, Illinois, published by Butler Books, Louisville, KY, in 2019. He lives in Goyang City, South Korea, with his wife Song Seon Sook and retired in 2019 as a professor of EFL in Seoul. He is also an avid, passionate amateur guitarist and music lover.