MACON — In the hours after Allman Brothers Band member Dickey Betts died, word of his passing hadn’t yet spread to tourists visiting the Big House, the Tudor-style mansion-turned-museum where the group once lived and, half a century ago, birthed some of its most celebrated music.
As the story goes, Betts, a guitar-playing extraordinaire and Southern Rock pioneer, wrote “Blue Sky” in the living room and, in the kitchen, crafted the band’s biggest commercial hit, “Ramblin’ Man,” late one night. “Or,” as museum director Richard Brent put it, “early one morning.”
On Thursday, as news of Betts’ death emerged, a husband and wife from Texas were standing in front of a painting of the band.
“It’s like some of your childhood going away,” Bill Hardee, 65, of Fort Worth said, recalling how he listened to the band’s music on the school bus radio while living in rural Iowa. “Every time there was a new Allman Brothers song, we’d always sing to it.”
Hardee and his wife got the senior discount at the museum’s front desk. They joked with the attendant how plenty of Allman Brothers fans these days are probably afforded the same. They grow old but the tunes do not.
“It’s pretty significant,” Susan Hardee, 68, said. “Bill and I went to see Gregg Allman and the band before he dispersed it … now they’re just about all dead. It’s funny how you can go see a full band four years ago, five years ago, and now they’re dead.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Brent, the museum director, said he had been aware of Betts’ declining health. Fans of the band have been sending messages and reaching out by phone.
“It’s never easy losing a Brother. This band has lost more than any I can think of. Out of the original band, there’s only one member left and that’s Jaimoe,” Brent said, referring to drummer Jai Johanny Johanson. “We were holding onto Dickey.”
From a guitar strap to amps to a guitar pick with Betts’ name etched on it, mementos from his past are on display throughout the house.
“Dickey Betts was one of the greatest,” Brent said. “The Allman Brothers Band was truly a special band. … They were all so talented. It’s just incredible you had Gregg Allman and Duane Allman and Dickey Betts and Berry Oakley and Jaimoe and Butch Trucks, and they created this magical sound that blossomed into something that ended up changing the culture.”
This Middle Georgia city famous for its music holds dear the stars it has reared. In ways, it is as if the Allman Brothers never departed. Reminders and relics of the band and its members are on street signs, on walls, in the H&H restaurant, where proprietor “Mama” Louise Hudson took a shine to the fledgling rockers and allowed them to pay for their meals when they could.
Brothers Duane and Gregg Allman are buried, alongside Oakley, in Rose Hill Cemetery not far from where the Ocmulgee River wends beneath I-75′s junction with I-16. Fans make pilgrimages to the site.
In 2022, during a performance in the city’s Grand Opera House, former Allman Brothers Band member Chuck Leavell played a show with R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills and renowned violinist Robert McDuffie. The concert featured an unexpected homage to Betts.
McDuffie, a Maconite, brought down the house with an inspired rendition of “Jessica.” The violinist had played Betts’ guitar solo from memory exactly as it was on the album “Brothers and Sisters.”
“I guess the lesson there,” Leavell recalled Thursday, “is don’t mess with perfection.”
Later on Thursday at the Big House, as tourists made their way through the “Ramblin’ Man” kitchen, first-time visitor Wes Odom was shocked to learn that Betts had died.
Odom, of Athens, was raised in Macon and has “read everything there is to read” about the Allman Brothers.
Upon hearing of Betts’ passing, Odom phoned his wife and, of his chance visit, said, “Don’t you think that was meant to be?”
