Remembering Dickey Betts, 1943-2024

Play 'Jessica' one more time for a key component of The Allman Brothers Band

From the start, The Allman Brothers Band were always in their own category. More than just the pinnacle of Southern Rock, theirs was a blend of sweet country, gutbusting blues and stinging R&B with lots of room for jazzy improvisation. 

I was a fan from the start, with their first pair of studio albums a kind of shared secret among fans before the world embraced them on Live at the Fillmore East. 

I first saw them in concert in March 1972, a month after the release of Eat a Peach, and five months after the death of Duane Allman in a motorcycle accident at 24. It was one of their first gigs as a five-piece and they were determined to carry the legacy on. Eight months later, bassist Berry Oakley died in his own motorcycle crash three blocks from the site of Duane’s death.

The band has evolved many time since then, retaining the classic songs and spirit. But it lost its other guitar player Dickey Betts decades later in 2000. Not because of death — Betts was 80 when he died Thursday of cancer, leaving Jaimoe as the only surviving original member. 

No, Betts departed the band he co-founded and loved in 2000 because he was kicked out after 30 years, informed by fax that he “had not been performing well and our shows have been repeatedly disappointing to both us and our fans as a result.” 

“They’re accusing me of being strung out on drugs, which I was not and am not,” a furious Betts told me that year. 

When I spoke to him, it was just weeks after another Allman Brothers tragedy — bassist Allen Woody, who played with the reformed band from 1989 to 1997, had died of a heroin overdose. 

Gregg Allman and Butch Trucks didn’t attend the funeral, Betts said. “That to me was kind of indicative what kind of mess this turned out to be.” (Gregg and Trucks would both die in 2017).

Betts requested a meeting with his former bandmates in 2000 only to find the degree of its enmity. “They were pretty bitter with me. They seemed to think they didn’t need me in the band. They didn’t like was I was playing.” 

Up to then, Betts had been playing opposite Derek Trucks, the young nephew of drummer Butch Trucks, who at 21 suddenly had guitar tenure in the band. 

“I love Derek,” Betts said. “He is the sweetest kid. He’s the Tiger Woods of rock ’n’ roll. He’s young, but put a guitar in his hands and he’s 35 years old.” (Trucks, now 44, of course now leads the popular Tedeschi Trucks Band with his wife Susan Tedeschi). 

“Derek was a lot of fun playing with,” Betts says. “And we were just getting settled in together as players. We were understanding each other.” 

Fans were mad Betts had been ousted, he said. “They’re pretty pissed about these guys messing up their band. I’ve got a lot of support out of this. People realize I didn’t instigate this.”

But, like the protagonist of the Allman Brothers’ biggest hit, which he wrote, Betts was “tryin’ to make a living and doing the best I can.”

Therefore, he put together his own band to tour and record, making sure to include a number of the Allmans classics he wrote were in there, from “Ramblin’ Man” to “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” to “Blue Skies” and the Grammy-winning “Jessica.” 

Betts was used to putting together his own projects in the days when the Allman Brothers were inactive, with under titles like Great Southern and the Dickey Betts Band. He played in another outfit with Jimmy Hall of Wet Willie and former Allman Brothers players Chuck Leavell and Butch Trucks. With a band name — Betts, Hall, Leavell and Trucks — that sounded like a law firm, and an acronym — BHLT — that sounded like a sandwich, they toured a bit but never got a record contract. 

“The Allman Brothers deserved a better ending than this,” Betts told me in 2000. “We’ve all done so many great things, stuck together through all those things.” 

The Allmans kept touring until a decade ago, when Derek Trucks and guitarist Warren Haynes decided to both leave. The deaths three years later of Gregg Allman made it final.

There was still one more hurrah, with five members of the final Allmans lineup performing to mark the 50th anniversary of the band in a show at Madison Square Garden March 10, 2020 — as just about the last concert scheduled before the pandemic shut everything down for more than a year. 

Their music won’t die, though. 

Tedeschi Trucks Band still includes an Eat a Peach classic in their live shows, as recently as earlier this month in Australia.

In 2018, the Allman Betts Band was formed, led by the twin guitars of Devon Allman, son of Gregg Allman, and Duane Betts, son of Dickey Betts. Also in the band:  Berry Duane Oakley, son of Berry Oakley.

It’s like the sons of the Hatfields and McCoys joining hands for a truce. Allman Betts recorded two albums, and has toured extensively, playing sets that often include Allman Brothers gems amid their own originals. 

As Jaimoe once told me, also in 2000, the band can go on long after the originals are gone, just as the Dorsey Brothers Band or the Count Basie Orchestra had. 

“Hey, Duke Ellington’s not alive, but people are listening to his music,” Jaimoe said. “They’re listening to the Charles Mingus Big Band.”