Gregg Allman

Gregg Allman achieved his greatest prominence in rock as the Allman Brothers Band’s lead vocalist, keyboardist, and composer after his brother Duane launched the group in 1969. Although he never overshadowed the family-named ensemble, his separate recordings periodically brought him notice through a markedly more soul-oriented approach that avoided flashy instrumental display.

Allman’s primary instrument became the organ, on which he shone most brightly as a vocalist at his peak. Ironically, he had taken up guitar first, before Duane, yet his sibling mastered the instrument faster and left Gregg behind. Allman instead distinguished himself on keyboards and vocals—a role Duane avoided—within a band celebrated for extended improvisational passages and lengthy performances. In their initial outfits, the Allman Joys and the Hour Glass, the brothers divided attention: Duane delivered extended solos while Gregg sang and supplied keyboard work reminiscent of Booker T. Jones. Liberty Records signed the Hour Glass and attempted to center their late-’60s efforts on Gregg, but the strategy failed to gel.

Once the Allman Brothers Band formed, the virtuosic instrumental highlights belonged to Duane, Dickey Betts, and later Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks, nephew of drummer Butch Trucks. Allman’s own compositions, among them “Whipping Post” and “Midnight Rider,” nevertheless ranked among the ensemble’s key originals from its classic 1969–1972 era. Starting with Brothers and Sisters, Betts’s songwriting and singing gained greater weight.

During the chart reign of Brothers and Sisters, Allman launched his solo career with the well-reviewed and commercially successful Laid Back, which highlighted the gentler, more introspective, soul- and gospel-inflected dimension of his music. A subsequent tour produced a live album that also fared well. This initial solo phase ended amid intertwined professional and private turmoil: the Allman Brothers Band toured relentlessly while seeking a worthy follow-up to Brothers and Sisters, and Allman began a relationship with Cher—former wife and singing partner of Sonny Bono—leading to a stormy marriage. These events unfolded against his widely reported substance issues, which peaked when he testified against a band associate in a federal drug prosecution, triggering the group’s temporary yet prolonged breakup.

Paradoxically, 1977 yielded Playin’ Up a Storm, a pop-soul album that stands among his strongest and best-received solo efforts. His next two releases, I’m No Angel and Just Before the Bullets Fly, arrived at the close of the 1980s only to be overshadowed by the reunited Allman Brothers Band’s renewed stage and studio achievements. The 1997 album Searchin’ for Simplicity and the double-CD collection One More Try lacked the impact of the band’s concurrent work. In 2009 Australia’s Raven Records issued the 19-track compilation The Solo Years 1973–1997: One More Silver Dollar, surveying Allman’s solo output from his Capricorn and Columbia periods. Fourteen years after his previous solo record, he returned in 2011 with the T-Bone Burnett-produced Low Country Blues on Rounder Records.

Allman’s autobiography My Cross to Bear appeared in 2012, initiating a series of reflective projects that largely materialized in 2014. The year began with All My Friends: Celebrating the Songs & Voice of Gregg Allman, a star-studded Atlanta concert later issued as a live DVD and CD. Days afterward he performed in his hometown of Macon, a show released in 2015 as Back to Macon. That autumn the Allman Brothers Band staged farewell concerts at New York’s Beacon Theatre; Allman continued performing with his own group and entered FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to cut Southern Blood with producer Don Was and additional collaborators. Declining health forced cancellation of live dates, yet he finished the album shortly before his death from liver-cancer complications on May 27, 2017. Southern Blood appeared that autumn.