Dickey Betts, guitarist and songwriter with the Allman Brothers – obituary
Dickey Betts, who has died aged 80, was a guitarist, singer and songwriter and linchpin of the Allman Brothers Band, whose music, infused with jazz, blues and country, set the template for Southern Rock and made them one of the most influential outfits of the 1970s; he wrote several of their best-known songs, including Ramblin’ Man, their biggest hit single, as well as Jessica, the instrumental beloved of millions of Top Gear fans.
Ramblin’ Man (1973), inspired by a Hank Williams song of the same name, concerned a wanderer making his way through the southern states, “Tryin’ to make a living and doin’ the best I can.” It was initially rejected by the band as being too countrified and Betts was considering offering it to Johnny Cash. As a favour, the band assembled to demo it, but liked the result so much they kept it for themselves, and it was the stand-out track on their fourth studio album, Brothers and Sisters (1973).
That album also featured Jessica, which Betts wrote for his daughter. “I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t quite find it,” he recalled. “Then my little daughter, Jessica, crawled into the room, and I just started playing to her, trying to capture the feeling of her crawling and smiling.” The tune spent five weeks at No 1 in the US and went on to be used as the theme tune on Top Gear from its inception in 1977.
Forrest Richard Betts was born in West Palm Beach, Florida, on December 12 1943, and brought up in Bradenton on Florida’s west coast. It was a musical family: his father played the fiddle in a bluegrass group, and when the boy was five he was playing ukulele with them.
He progressed to mandolin, banjo, and then – after hearing Chuck Berry’s Maybelline – electric guitar, and when he was 16 he joined a band that played with a travelling circus. At that point he was something of a tearaway, and was on probation for shooting a neighbour’s cow.
He joined a band called the Second Coming, playing alongside the bassist Berry Oakley, and met Gregg and Duane Allman on the circuit, jamming with them in a club in Orlando. Duane Allman had a vision of a group with two drummers and two lead guitars, and subsequently recruited Betts and Oakley. Betts and Allman quickly worked out a modus operandi, sharing solos and working out guitar lines together.
Their first two albums were not bestsellers, but they broke through with their million-selling third, At Fillmore East, a live set. In October 1971 Duane Allman was killed in a motorbike accident (Berry Oakley would die the same way a year later, a few blocks away), but the deaths did not interrupt the band’s rise, with albums like Eat a Peach, Brothers and Sisters (most of which was written by Betts) and Win, Lose or Draw all making the US Top 10 in the mid-1970s.
But the same old rock’n’roll story kicked in, and booze, drugs and rows came to dominate proceedings. Betts and Gregg Allman had never got on, and when the latter testified against the band’s road manager, Scooter Herring, in a drugs case (he served 18 months of a 75-year sentence), the band turned against him and broke up. They reformed a couple of years later, split again in 1982, then reformed again, more enduringly, in 1989.
But in 2000 Betts was shown the door on account of his drinking. In 1996 he had been charged with aggravated domestic assault after pointing a gun at his fifth wife, Donna, but the charges were dropped when he agreed to go into rehab. He went on to tour with his own outfit, as well as playing alongside his son Duane in the band Great Southern.
He stayed on the road into his seventies, but was treated for a brain injury in 2018 following a fall in his garden.
Dickey Betts is survived by Donna and by his four children.
Dickey Betts, born December 12 1943, died April 18 2024
