Gregg Allman

Gregg Allman was referred to as a Southern rock pioneer and received numerous awards, including several Grammys. Following a series of health problems, including hepatitis C and a 2010 liver transplant, Allman died at his home in Richmond Hill, Georgia, on May 27, 2017, due to complications of liver cancer.

Gregory Allman was born in 1947 in Nashville, Tennessee to Geraldine Robbins Allman (1917–2015) and Willis Turner Allman (1918–1949). The couple had met during World War II in Raleigh, North Carolina when Allman was on leave from the U.S. Army, and were later married. Their first child, Duane Allman, was born in Nashville in November 20, 1946. On December 26, 1949, Willis offered a ride home to a hitchhiker, who shot and killed him in Norfolk, Virginia. Geraldine moved to Nashville with her two sons and never remarried.

In his teens Gregg worked as a paper boy to afford a Silvertone guitar, which he purchased at a Sears when he saved up enough funds. Like his brother, he was left-handed but played the guitar right-handed. He and his brother often fought to play the instrument, though there was “no question that music brought” the two together. In Daytona, they joined a YMCA group called the Y Teens, their first experience performing music with others. He and Duane later formed the band, the Misfits.

The brothers later formed their first “real” band, the Escorts, which performed a mix of top 40 and R&B music at clubs around town. Duane, who took the lead vocal role on early demos, encouraged his younger brother to sing instead. The group performed constantly as music became their entire focus; Gregg missed his high school graduation because he was performing that evening. In his autobiography, Gregg recalls listening to Nashville R&B station WLAC at night and discovering artists such as Muddy Waters, who later became central to his musical evolution.[ He avoided being drafted into the Vietnam War by intentionally shooting himself in the foot.

The Escorts evolved into the Allman Joys, the brothers’ first successful band. In June 1967 they began to record an album under the new name the Hour Glass, suggested by their producer, Dallas Smith. The Allman Brothers Band moved to Macon, Georgia, and forged a strong brotherhood, spending countless hours rehearsing, consuming psychedelic drugs, and hanging out in Rose Hill Cemetery, where they would write songs.

In addition to Gregg, the band included Duane, Dickey Betts on guitar, Berry Oakley on bass, and Jaimoe and Butch Trucks on drums. The group remade blues numbers and Gregg, who had struggled to write in the past, became the band’s main songwriter, composing songs such as “Whipping Post” and “Midnight Rider”. The group’s self-titled debut album was released in November 1969 through Atco and Capricorn Records, but suffered from poor sales. The band played continuously in 1970, performing over 300 dates on the road, which contributed to a larger following. Their second record, Idlewild South, was issued in September 1970, and also received a muted commercial response.

The double album Eat A Peach (subtitled Dedicated To A Brother) was released in February 1971 to strong reviews. Charles Shaar Murray wrote in Oz: “The Allman Brothers Band keep right on hittin’ the note.” Rolling Stone tried to earn back the good graces of the band with a review that called them “the best-goddamned band in the land” and the album “a simultaneous sorrowed ending and hopeful beginning”. It was in the US chart by early March and climbed to No 4.

As it turned out, Eat A Peach was a brief respite from more tragedy and trouble. Nearly a year to the day after Duane’s death, bassist Berry Oakley died in a motorcycle accident in Macon. “I don’t think Berry really knew how to exist in a world without Duane,” Trucks says of Oakley’s decline. Later, drugs, drink, ego clashes, label problems and lawsuits would eventually break up the band not once but twice (when Betts was unable to curb his substance abuse, they fired him in 2000). Today, Gregg Allman reflects on what might have been had his brother lived.

Trucks says: “We took it to where Cream and the Grateful Dead took it, then added John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock to the mix and stirred it a bit, and we were up in places that no one else was thinking about. When I hear people describe Eat A Peach as southern rock I get fighting mad.”

Gregg concludes: “One of the hardest parts of doing a record is putting the songs in the right order: you want hills and valleys, and you don’t want the music to get mundane, and it will do that if you put the wrong two songs together. I think Eat A Peach has just the right sequence. I really love the album, and I’m so glad it did come out as a two-record set. That and Fillmore East are definitely the roots of our whole thing as a band.”

“The images on the cover of Eat A Peach are basically found in art,” says designer W David Powell. “They came from postcards that we picked up in a drugstore in Athens, Georgia. The postcards had the trucks with the giant peach and watermelon. I added the lettering with the band name to the trucks, and pasted the cards onto a background, spray-painted pink and blue.”

Powell and his college buddy Jim Holmes launched their company Wonder Graphics in the late 60s and had already done artwork for Capricorn Records band Wet Willie. Though The Allman Brothers assignment was a big opportunity, Powell says they didn’t feel any pressure.

“Everything was pretty loosey-goosey in those days. We took the project and ran with it. We did have one fairly radical idea for the cover: we didn’t want anything but the band name on the truck; no hard sell or titling. Miraculously, the label okayed it.”

When they delivered the artwork to the label there was still no title. Capricorn’s Phil Walden wanted to call it This Is How We Grow ‘Em In Dixie (the inscription on one of the postcards) but the band nixed it. Instead, they remembered something Duane had once told an interviewer: “Whenever I’m in Georgia, I eat a peach for peace.” Forty years on, an urban legend persists about the peach truck, claiming that it was the fatal vehicle in Duane’s death. Not true.

Voted by Rolling Stone as one of the 100 greatest album covers of all time, the Eat A Peach sleeve has reached iconic status. For Powell, now a college professor, its success comes down to one thing: “The whole project was not arrived at through meetings or rational thought. Free association was the modus operandi.”

Allman married Cher in June 1975, and the two lived in Hollywood during their years together as tabloid favourites. Their marriage produced one son, Elijah Blue Allman, who was born in July 1976. He recorded his second solo album, Playin’ Up a Storm, with the Gregg Allman Band, released in May 1977. He also worked on a collaborative album with Cher titled Two the Hard Way, which, upon its release, was a massive failure. The couple divorced in 1978.

Allman struggled with health problems during the last years of his life. He was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2007, which he attributed to a dirty tattoo needle. By the next year, three tumours were discovered within his liver.

Allman’s seventh album, Low Country Blues, was produced by T-Bone Burnett. Upon its release in January 2011, it represented Allman’s highest-ever chart peak in the U.S., debuting at number five. He promoted the album heavily in Europe until he had to cancel the rest of the trip due to an upper respiratory infection. This led to lung surgery later in 2011, and rehab in 2012 for addiction following his treatments. That year, Allman released his memoir, My Cross to Bear, which was 30 years in the making. In 2014, a tribute concert was held celebrating his career; it was later released as All My Friends: Celebrating the Songs & Voice of Gregg Allman.