Duane “Skydog” Allman was a guitar virtuoso, an innovator and an improviser, whose name you’re bound to see on any list of greatest guitarists, as well as in any published piece on the roots of southern rock and on playing slide guitar. He was also the “father” of a family known as The Allman Brothers Band.
Howard Duane Allman was born November 20, 1946 in Nashville, Tennessee. Younger brother Gregg was born a year later. Another two years passed, and their father was murdered the day after Christmas while on leave from the Korean War. Their lives were destined for tragedies to come.
Gregg was the first to get a guitar, but it wasn’t long before he and Duane were fighting over it. So for their next birthdays, they each got one. While Gregg finished high school, Duane quit school to stay home and practice guitar, using a local R&B station, old records and his brother as his teachers, and Chuck Berry, Robert Johnson, the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones as some of his influences. Gregg told Rolling Stone magazine in an interview, “Duane Allman was the best guitar player I ever heard who didn't read a note.”
The brothers played in local bands, put their own bands together, toured the southern club circuit as the Allman Joys, lived out of a van for awhile, and eventually signed a recording contract with Liberty Records as Hour Glass. But the record company took firm control over what they wore, played, and how it was played, which didn’t sit well with the Allmans and it wasn’t long before Duane gave them a piece of his mind and the boys left California and headed to Muscle Shoals, Alabama’s Fame Studios to record the blues music they yearned to play. This B.B. King Medley came from those sessions and is included on Duane Allman: An Anthology.
Gregg eventually was called back to California by Liberty Records with a threat to sue for money owed them by Hour Glass. Duane hung in Jacksonville and jammed with old and new acquaintances, and in November 1968 was invited back to Muscle Shoals to be a session musician for Wilson Pickett. Duane is who convinced Pickett to sing “Hey Jude.” Once it was recorded, Rick Hall, owner of the studios, called Jerry Wexler, record executive at Atlantic Records, and played the recording for him. Wexler immediately decided to release it as a single. Catch what Clapton thought about Duane’s guitar playing in the intro to this video.
Pickett contributed to Duane’s eventual nickname of Skydog. Duane was already called “Dog” due to his long hair and sideburns. After playing together, Pickett dubbed Duane the “Skyman.” The two nicknames in time merged to become Skydog.
After his success with Wilson Pickett, Duane was signed on as lead guitar session musician at Muscle Shoals. During his session days, which extended beyond the birth of the Allman Brothers Band, Duane played for Aretha Franklin, Clarence Carter, King Curtis, Percy Sledge, Boz Scaggs, Herbie Mann and many more great singers. His guitar accompaniment, especially his skill at playing slide guitar, was in high demand.
On January 1, 1969, Duane wrote in his diary:
This year I will be more thoughtful of my fellow man, exert more effort in each of my endeavors professionally as well as personally. Take love wherever I find it, and offer it to everyone who will take it. In this coming year I will seek knowledge from those wiser than me and try to teach those who wish to learn from me. I love being alive and I will be the best man I possibly can.
The sentiment has appeared on many a t-shirt in part or in its entirety since, as well as on Duane’s tombstone.
Duane recorded seven tracks for a solo album in early 1969 while still under contract at Muscle Shoals, but the album was never released. Most of these songs have found their way onto other albums since. “Going Down Slow”, a 1940s St. Louis Jimmy Oden blues song and the only one of the seven tracks Duane cared for, was released on Duane Allman: An Anthology in 1972, and features a rare vocal performance by Duane. His voice isn’t near as strong as Gregg’s, but it fits this song very somberly and effectively.
Also in 1969, Duane’s contract changed hands from Fame Studios to Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler then sold the contract to Phil Walden, also of Atlantic, who was lining up talent for their new custom label, Capricorn Records.
Duane, frustrated with the limits of being a session musician, and with record contract in hand, headed back to Jacksonville to put a new band together. He took along with him Jai Johanny Johanson (“Jaimoe”), a drummer he had made close friends with at Muscle Shoals. He pulled together Butch Trucks, another drummer the brothers had played with from the band the 31st of February, and from the band Second Coming, Dickey Betts, another lead guitarist, and Berry Oakley, bass player. After an unbelievably extraordinary afternoon of jamming for some five hours at Trucks’ house, Duane proclaimed: “Anybody who doesn’t want to be in my band is going to have to fight his way out the door.”
Duane knew only one person who could sing the strong bluesy vocals the two-lead guitar, two-drummer band needed, and that was his brother, Gregg, who could also play keyboard. Duane called Gregg in California and told him about the band, saying, “So why don’t you come on down here and round this thing up and send it somewhere.” Gregg proudly headed to Jacksonville and The Allman Brothers Band (ABB) was born in March 1969.
Duane also celebrated the birth of his and Donna Roosman’s daughter, Galadrielle, in August of this same year.
Their first album, The Allman Brothers Band, released in November 1969, demonstrated the magnitude of talent, innovative improvisation and full-on sound of which the band was capable. Watching and hearing Duane and Betts play dual lead was magical.
ABB defined what came to be known as southern rock: a fusion of blues, soul, jazz, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues. And Duane’s innovative slide technique was a large part of that definition. He played slide using an empty Coricidin bottle on his ring finger, not the finger or the mechanism typically used by other slide players. His sound was loud, smooth, fluid and unique. In a 1976 interview with Guitar Player magazine, Clapton described it as “tak[ing] it to another place. There were very few people playing electric slide that were doing anything new; it was just Elmore James licks, and everyone knows those. No one was opening it up until Duane showed up and played it a completely different way. That sort of made me think about taking it up.”
Duane’s admiration for Clapton was just as avid. Meeting Clapton at an ABB concert led the band to being invited to the studio where Derek and the Dominos were preparing to record their first album. The bands jammed together for 15-18 hours straight.
When Clapton’s band was ready to work on their album, Duane asked if he could stay and watch. Clapton said, "Get your guitar. We got to play!" The resulting album was the famed Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, with Duane playing on several songs, the most notable being “Layla.”
When once asked in a radio interview which parts were played by Duane and which were played by Clapton on the song, Duane answered: “I play the Gibson, Eric plays the Fender all the way through. If you can tell a Gibson from a Fender, you know who’s playing what.…” Duane later describes his part as the high notes.
Clapton asked Duane to become a permanent member of the band, but Duane declined, wanting to stay with the Allman Brothers Band.
ABB put out their second album in September of 1970. Another fan-favorite jam song, this one an instrumental, was found in the Dickey Betts written “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”
The final album Duane would live to see released with the Allman Brothers Band was the highly praised, iconic, double live At Fillmore East, released July of 1971. In 2002, more than 30 years after its release, reviewer Mark Kemp of Rolling Stone magazine called it the “finest live rock performance ever committed to vinyl.”
Duane Allman died from internal injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash on October 29, 1971. He was only 24 years old. The band Lynyrd Skynyrd dedicated the iconic song “Freebird” to his memory.
Duane is currently ranked #9 in Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists, as voted by more than 50 top guitarists, and #15 in Guitar World’s Readers’ Poll of the Greatest Guitarists of All Time. What is most amazing about his fame is that it was achieved in a short, roughly two-year period, but it created for him a legacy of music that still inspires musicians and music lovers today. For those who aren’t aware of just how great his influence is, take a look at his credits that are still accumulating today.
One of Duane’s final gifts to us was a beautiful acoustic piece, “Little Martha,” the only ABB song written solely by Duane, and said to have been referred to by acoustic guitar virtuoso Leo Kottke as the most perfect guitar song ever written. It does have a strange story behind it. It supposedly came to Duane in a dream in which Jimi Hendrix showed him the tune using the sink faucet in a hotel bathroom as a fretboard. It was recorded just a few weeks before his death. The song appears on ABB’s Eat a Peach, released in 1972, performed here by Duane and Betts.
Duane was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, along with the other members of the Allman Brothers Band.
Image: video screenshot