Before The Allman Brothers Band
Gregg Allman (born 8 December 1947) and his older brother Duane (20 November 1946) were both born in Nashville. In 1949, they moved to Virginia, where their father Willis was killed in a robbery that December. The family returned to Nashville, and from 1955 – with their mother Geraldine studying to qualify as an accountant – the brothers were sent to be educated at Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tennessee: 30 miles east of ‘Music City’. ‘Having my older brother with me was the only thing that saved me’, Gregg wrote in his memoir.
The family moved to 100 Van Avenue, Daytona Beach, Florida in 1959. Geraldine lived there until her death in 2015.
Gregg toldRolling Stone in 1979:
I didn’t start playing music till we moved to Daytona Beach. I started on guitar in the summer of 1960, and Duane picked it up by the fall. I taught him the basics, and he really took a yen to it, quit school… that’s all he ever did … many nights I’d wake up and there he’d be, just pickin’ away. We listened to Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, Ray Charles, B.B. King. I guess Little Milton was about my favourite. We went, let’s just say, across the tracks. Our mother called it somethin’ else. We had to ease over there. and for about 97 cents, you could buy these old albums. I’ve still got a few of ‘em.
Originally, Duane would borrow Gregg’s Silvertone guitar, for which he saved hard, and bought from the local Sears store, as Gregg recalled: ‘He looks at my guitar and says, ‘Now what you got there, baby brother?’. I go, ‘Now all right, Duane, that’s mine’. He would slip into my room and play it. I swear to God, we had more fights over that guitar than you’d believe’.
Soon, Duane had a guitar of his own. He toldCrawdaddy:
The guitar saved me from so much grief. I was a hoodlum ... then that old guitar came along and I had something to do. When I get pissed off, I just sit down and beat the fire out of some old Jimmy Reed shit instead of going out and drinking and fighting and falling down and going crazy. It would take me all the way, man, and put me on a good note.
‘Then not only was there peace in the family’, Gregg wrote, ‘but we started playing together. I had shown him how to play at the beginning, then he started showing me some licks, and we would just help each other out – that’s how we learned’.
Gregg subsequently developed a powerful, distinctive and very soulful singing voice. Their ambitions were heightened during a summer trip back to Nashville to visit their grandparents, as Gregg recalled:
One night, my mother dropped me and my brother off at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, and we spent a buck and a quarter to sit in the cheap seats. Jackie Wilson was the headliner. Cheap seats or no cheap seats, it was amazing. Next
