RIP Dickey Betts, a musical giant and guitar genius.

Forrest Richard “Dickey” Betts, December 12, 1943 – April 18, 2024

Word of Dickey Betts’ passing hit me hard this morning. I knew he had been ailing, which removes the shock element, but does nothing to diminish the sadness and pain of the loss. Dickey was an absolutely monster presence in my life, both personal and professional.

His incredible melodic sense, bone-deep playing and fantastic songwriting, including but by no means limited to "Blue Sky," "Jessica,” “Rambling Man” and "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed." His ideas and concepts formed the backbone and musical DNA of the Allman Brothers Band, arguably the greatest American rock band ever. (That's a subjective of course, but it’s what I believe. You have a right to your own opinion, too. For me, the Dead is the only rival and then it's just a matter of taste.)

Dickey's reputation as a hell raiser was well earned and has been estensivley reported, including by me, but sadly obscured the depth, vision and intellectual curiosity at the core of his being. He had a deep love and knowledge about a wide range of music, including jazz, country, Western Swing, acoustic and electric blues and folk.

On a personal level, he was my favorite guitarist and an absolutely essential part of my career. My relationships with him and Warren Haynes led to my friendship with Kirk West, which led me to become more of an ABB insider and it all grew from there. But the reason all that happened at all is I LOVED THE MUSIC. it impacted me in a way nothing else ever has, engaging my heart, body and soul and taking me on emotional and intellectual excursions that both helped form who I am and understand who I am. I know that many of you feel the same.

As we mourn in our own ways, let's think first of his family: Donna, Duane & Lisa, Christy & Frank, Jessica, and Kim. As the ABB said in their official statement, "Play on Brother Dickey, you will be forever remembered and deeply missed."

Share your own thoughts and memories below.

My band Friends of the Brothers, featuring Andy Aledort, who toured with Betts for 10 years, will be paying tribute to Dickey next Saturday 4/27 in Fairfield CT and we will not be tame about it. Tickets here: https://bit.ly/3v7joU0

Enjoy this Spotify Playlist of some of Dickey’s finest moments as you read.

Photo copyright 1991, Kirk West - used on a Gibson strings ad.

From Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, starting with Duane Allman’s formation of the Allman Brothers Band.

Lead guitarists are like fighter pilots, surgeons, samurai warriors, or heavyweight champions—alpha beings who generally do not seek to share the spotlight or be challenged. Duane had a different idea; he wanted to see what he and Betts could do together. The two had been well established for years as the hottest guitarists in a Florida club and frat party scene that included Stephen Stills, Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington and Allen Collins, and future Eagles members Bernie Leadon and Don Felder.

Betts’s distinctive melodic sense led him to consistently come up with memorable lines, which Duane jumped on, using his perfect pitch and technical facility to add harmony and counterpoint on the fly. This sympatico musical relationship helped create and define one of the greatest guitar partnerships in rock and roll history. Their partnership rewrote the book on how two rock guitarists could play together, a dynamic that changed popular music.

While the Second Coming excelled at playing modern, progressive rock by the likes of  Cream and Jefferson Airplane, Betts had a broad musical range that extended in multiple directions. He had a deep affinity and talent for the acoustic blues of Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell and could play urban electric blues with vigor and authenticity. He was also deeply grounded in western swing and jazz, loved country guitarist Roy Clark and jazz pioneers like Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, and had a family background in acoustic string music. He played ukulele and fiddle and was even a member of a banjo group long before he ever picked up an electric guitar.

Like Duane, Dickey did not graduate high school, literally running away to join the circus at age sixteen, playing fifteen thirty-minute shows a day on state fair midways, performing Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs while doing duck walks and splits and sitting atop bandmates’ shoulders. “The barker would introduce us and lure people in by spinning outrageous lies, like we had been on the Ed Sullivan show and were about to be stars,” Betts recalled with a laugh.

Betts’s time in this band helped him hone his chops and paid him an excellent salary of $125 a week. When that gig ended, Betts made his way to Indiana to play with the Jokers, a hot band on the midwestern circuit that Rick Derringer memorialized in “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” (“There was a group called the Jokers, they were layin’ it down”).

Betts’s personality was as complex as his musical background. He was a tightly coiled athlete with a mighty temper as well as a student of Zen Buddhism and karate, which he used to channel and control compulsiveness, anger, and occasional violent urges. More than once, an audience member made the mistake of making sexual advances at Betts’s wife, Dale, the Second Coming’s singer, only to find themselves in a crumpled heap at set break, when Dickey would leap off the stage, pummel the catcaller, and then calmly retreat backstage to relax with a beer. Despite such behavior, he was also a true believer in the hippie ethos of the era and would go on to write some of the most peaceful, joyful songs in the rock canon, including “Revival,” “Blue Sky,” and “Jessica.”

Betts could be quiet and thoughtful, expounding on Zen Buddhism, jazz, architecture, or country music, and he could disappear into his thoughts, vanishing behind a blank gaze that unnerved people.

“Dickey’s a real Charles Bronson type,” Gregg Allman said. “It doesn’t take long after you meet the guy to realize that there are things he knows about himself that you’ll never know, so don’t even get close to his space. Which is fine. He’s a very intricate guy, Dickey Betts.”

Every aspect of Betts’s multifaceted musical background and Jekyll and Hyde personality would eventually be evident in his playing, which formed a large part of what came to be the Allman Brothers Band sound. Betts had a genius for inserting bluegrass-type melody into blues and rock songs. His melodic ideas were also shaped by a strong rhythmic drive. As a kid, he dismantled banjos to create a drum set out of the heads, and he never lost his interest in percussion, practicing drum rudiments for years.

“Dickey was a pretty good drummer,” said Jaimoe. “When he had ideas for drum parts, I’d just ask him to sit down and play it.”

Betts had the ambitious goal of creating a singularly unique voice on the guitar, remaining rooted in the blues without mimicking the masters’ ideas and licks. “I tried to use as much of the instrument’s scope and range that was outside of the blues form and tie it in with the motions and feeling of the blues,” said Betts.

Excerpted from Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, copyright Alan Paul, 2023.

Dickey and Warren By Kirk West. This is my own personal golden era.

Betts’ tenure with the Allman Brothers Band ended in acrimony in 2000, when he split with the band, and never performed wiht them again. That all is pretty thoroughly covered in my earlier book, One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band - and so is the degree to which he was absolutely essential to the revived band, front and center and clearly the onstage leader.

That started with their comeback album, 1990’s Seven Turns, a strong recording that made it clear that this reunion would be different than the 80s efforts. Betts stepped up, writing or co-writing seven of the nine songs, including the title track, which was inspired by the Navajo concept that each person faces seven crucial decisions in life.

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“Seven Turns was a tough album,” Dickey told me. “Because we knew that the critics would use it to determine whether or not we should have remained broken up. We were under pressure to show that we belonged back together. We never doubted it, but the album simply had to prove that.”

Alan Paul’s fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, will be published July 25, 2023, by St. Martin’s Press. His last two books – Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and  One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band  – debuted in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List. His first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about his experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions.  He is also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.

Me and Dickey on his bus, holding the prototypes of Gibson’s signature Les Pauls. Photo by Andy Aledort. I could write a book about this night.