From “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” to “Ramblin’ Man,” the guitarist, songwriter, and sometime singer’s most memorable moments with the Southern-rock group
After the death of slide-guitar savant Duane Allman in 1971, many expected the Allman Brothers Band to fold up shop and call it quits. But the five remaining members decided to soldier on in the face of incomprehensible tragedy. In Duane’s absence, it fell to the group’s other guitar player, Dickey Betts — a country-loving hothead from West Palm Beach, Florida — to pick up the titanic amounts of slack left by their indelible departed leader. Betts, who died Thursday at 80, responded to the challenge better than anyone could have imagined.
“When my brother died, Dickey really stepped up,” Gregg Allman wrote in his autobiography My Cross to Bear. “He wood-shedded like crazy … every day, he wrote. At three o’clock every afternoon, he’d sit down and write.” Just four months after Duane’s death, the band released Eat a Peach, which remains to this day, their most commercially successful studio album to date. A year later, they would score the highest-selling single of their career, “Ramblin’ Man,” which hit Number Two. The singer and writer behind that particular success? Dickey Betts.
Perhaps because his last name isn’t featured in the literal name of the group he helped make iconic, some of Betts’ contributions to their genre-defining canon have become obscured over the years. But make no mistake, the Allman Brothers Band would never have reached the lofty heights they did — millions of albums sold, private jets, legendary concerts, and eventual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame status — without his pen and his guitar. Here are some of Betts’ best songs.
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“Revival” (1970)
Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images “Revival” is the first song that Betts received a writing credit for as a member of the Allman Brothers Band. Appearing on their second album Idewild South, it’s a funky, uplifting track that the guitarist wrote specifically to counter the generally dour material presented by the group’s lead singer. “I think with my dad being a fiddle player I kind of naturally liked the uplifting aspects of music, but, I was in a band with Gregg Allman, who is basically a melancholy kind of writer,” he told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2014. “I would really make an effort to write more up songs, to balance the band out. That kind of influenced the way I wrote.”
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“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” (1970)
Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” is Betts’ other stunning standout on Idewild South, and marks an interesting step forward for the band sonically speaking. A totally instrumental number, it’s far jazzier in feeling than the group’s generally blues-informed sound, and the way that Betts locks in with Duane Allman, specifically through the song’s signature melody, is absolutely thrilling. As for the title, Betts came up with the name after spying it on a headstone in Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Georgia. “The spot had provided me with so much peace and inspiration that I decided to name the song after her,” Betts remembered in Alan Paul’s oral history of the Allman Brothers Band, One Way Out.
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“Whipping Post” (1971)
Image Credit: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images The true power of the Allman Brothers Band, especially in those formative early years, was the guitar interplay between Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. It’s what set them apart from so many other blues-rock contemporaries in the late Sixties and early Seventies and helped solidify their reputation as a can’t-miss live band. Exhibit A of their otherworld chemistry is the song “Whipping Post,” as captured on the seminal live album At Fillmore East. The way their guitars mingle and cry together just at the apex of the song, right before Gregg screams the final chorus, is utterly breathtaking.
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“Hot ‘Lanta” (1971)
Image Credit: Herb Kossover/Getty Images “Hot ‘Lanta” was a song that the Allman Brothers Band never got around to capturing in the studio, but it became an incendiary highlight of their live shows. The instrumental piece made its debut on At Fillmore East, and captures Duane, Gregg, Betts, and drummer Butch Trucks all showing what they could do with the spotlight firmly on them. It was Betts however, who came up with the song’s jazzy almost prog-like, signature melody.
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“Les Brers in A Minor” (1972)
Image Credit: Rick Diamond/Getty Images “When I wrote ‘Les Brers’ everyone kept saying they had heard it before, but no one could figure out where,” Betts recalled in One Way Out. As it turned out, the melody was a reprise from a solo he took on “Whipping Post” during a concert one night. The title is a “bad French” pseudo-translation of “less brothers,” and is Betts’ instrumental tribute to Duane. As Gregg recalled in his memoir, it took 29 takes before the guitarist was satisfied with it in the studio. “We used the second [take],” he said, seemingly still annoyed decades after the fact.
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“Melissa” (1972)
Image Credit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images Originally written by Gregg Allman all the way back in 1967, the singer kept working at “Melissa,” refining it for years, before finally offering it up to the group to record for Eat a Peach. He played the song at Duane’s funeral, and he would later recall introducing it there as “my brother’s favorite song that I ever wrote.” A tender love ballad, it certainly tugs at the listener’s heartstrings, but it’s the touching slide solo played by Betts on his Les Paul that really drives home the mournful emotions hovering just under the surface.
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“Blue Sky” (1972)
Image Credit: David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images Dickey Betts was inspired to write the song “Blue Sky” by a woman very close to his heart. “I was married to an Indian girl whose last name was Wabegijig, which means clear blue sky,” he explained to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. It was also one of the first songs that Betts took over vocal duties. “I asked Gregg to sing ‘Blue Sky’ and actually the producer, Tom Dowd, he said, ‘No, why don’t you sing it.’” So he did, to tender, beautiful effect.
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“Mountain Jam” (1972)
Image Credit: Steve Morley/Redferns/Getty Images “Mountain Jam” is another towering guitar monolith, stretching out past the 30-minute mark during the band’s iconic stand at the Fillmore East in 1971, and included on Eat a Peach. The song itself is an elongated, electrified riff on Scottish folk singer Donovan’s “There Is a Mountain.” Everyone in the Allmans gets to shine on this recording — wait for Butch Trucks’ epic drum solo in the middle — but again, it’s the interplay between Duane and Dickey that steals the show.
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“Ramblin’ Man” (1973)
Image Credit: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images The highest charting hit of the Allman Brothers Band’s career wasn’t an old blues song. It wasn’t a Duane or Gregg composition either. Hell, Gregg didn’t even sing on it. “Ramblin’ Man” came straight from Dickey, who by 1973 had started to assert more artistic control over the group. Inspired by a 1951 Hank Williams song of the same name, Betts wrote “Ramblin’ Man” in about 20 minutes in bassist Barry Oakley’s kitchen sometime around four in the morning. According to newly hired guitarist Ray Dudek in One Way Out, it was the band’s iconic roadie “Red Dog” who summed up the power of the song probably better than anyone, when after hearing it for the first time he remarked that it was “the best I heard since Duane.”
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“Jessica” (1973)
Image Credit: Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images Named after Betts’ daughter who was only an infant at the time he wrote it, “Jessica” has an upbeat, sunny vibe that’s almost guaranteed to put a smile on your face. It’s not too difficult to understand why. The proud new papa composed the piece while trying to capture the way his bubbly daughter looked while bouncing along to the track’s jaunty rhythm. For the instrumental piece, Betts also drew inspiration from the legendary two-fingered gypsy-jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, trying his best to only use two fingers himself while playing along.
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“Southbound” (1973)
Image Credit: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images All three songs that make up the second side of 1973’s Brothers and Sisters were written by Dickey Betts. Tucked in between the aforementioned “Jessica” and the record closer “Pony Boy” is this classic Seventies blues-rock rave-up titled “Southbound.” It’s got all the tropes you’ve come to love and expect from an Allman Brothers Band song: love, loneliness, travel, a wistful admiration of the American South and one hell of a guitar solo in the middle.
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“Crazy Love” (1979)
Image Credit: Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images Enlightened Rogues was the first album the Allman Brothers produced after a fractious break-up around 1976. Though Betts wasn’t happy about the configuration of the band during this era — “We did not have a slide guitarist, so I had to do it. Not only did I not enjoy this, but it altered the sound of the band, which needs to have my sound and the slide working together,” he complained in One Way Out — it did produce the second-highest-charting single of the Allmans’ career, another Betts-penned track titled “Crazy Love.” As much as he may not have personally loved playing slide, the man had the necessary chops, as you can hear from that low, whining lick at the very top of the track.
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“Seven Turns” (1990)
Image Credit: Fryderyk Gabowicz/picture alliance/Getty Images The Eighties were a rough time for the Allman Brothers Band, but they finally put it all back together again at the tail end of the decade to record a widely acclaimed return-to-form record titled Seven Turns. Betts wrote the album’s title track, which was released as a single that topped out at Number 12 on the rock charts. “Seven Turns” has a distinct California country-rock feel that almost makes it sound like an Eagles song. Betts’ vocals, a little rougher around the edges than they were during the band’s Seventies heyday, are what really give the tune its emotional heft.
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“No One to Run With” (1994)
Image Credit: Rick Diamond/Getty Images The last album Betts recorded with the Allmans was 1994’s Where It All Began. He was shown the door by Gregg and the rest of the band just six years later. “Human nature is you work shoulder to shoulder in a real emotional kind of setting and there are jealousies that come up,” Betts later explained of his departure to the Herald-Tribune. “There’s resentment and resentment turns to just outright bad things.” As far as swan songs go, you could do a lot worse than “No One to Run With.” The song harks back to the jazzy, bluesy lead-guitar lines that made the Allmans stars all those years ago, but it’s tinged with a sweet nostalgia to “do those crazy things we used to do before.”
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“Midnight Rider” (1970)
Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images “Midnight Rider” has gone down as Gregg Allman’s signature tune, and for good reason. It’s a dramatic tale of a man clad in stolen clothes with just one silver dollar clanging around in his pocket, trying to stay one step ahead of some nameless, unrelenting foe. Duane provides the song’s repetitive, acoustic riff while Betts flavors it with some countrified licks just underneath, before exploding to the fore with a sweetly understated solo.
