Rest in Peace, Sidney Smith. Sidney was a friend, and he was very generous with use of his great photographs in my books Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band, which contain dozens of his images. He had uniquely inside access to the band from about 1972-74, as explained below. While I always paid him a fair price, he was never too concerned about maximizing income over sharing the work he was rightfully proud of.
From his official obituary: SIDNEY HOFFMAN SMITH, a New Orleans entrepreneur, businessman and nationally renowned rock photographer whose work formerly graced the pages of Rolling Stone, Cream, Circus and Hit Parader magazines and whose images are enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, passed away on Friday, September 5, 2025, after a protracted battle with cancer at age 71.
The excellent music writer Keith Spera wrote a beautiful, in-depth pre-obituary about Sidney for the New Orleans Time Picayune, which I highly recommend. You can read it here.
I’ve shared some of my favorites of his shots throughout this tribute.
Sidney became a part of the Allman Brothers Band’s story, moving to Macon and serving as a veritable house photographer. He shot family portraits for Butch Trucks and Dickey Betts and Sandy Blue Sky’s wedding. He is the reason we know what the farm and life on it looked like. And sometimes the band members would ask him to do some odd jobs.
From Brothers and Sisters:
Sidney Smith was a young photographer who had gotten to know the band while shooting them in his hometown of New Orleans. Trucks and Betts encouraged him to move to Macon, where he became something of a house photographer for the group. He took family portraits for Butch, captured life on the farm, and shot the pictures at Betts and Sandy Blue Sky’s 1974 wedding.
Gregg also had some special assignments for him. Once, he gave Smith a hundred dollars and his grandmother’s address in Nashville and asked him to send her photographs. He did, and Gregg was pleased, and soon had another job in mind. “Gregg called me over to his house one day,” Smith recalled. “It was just the two of us sitting in his little living room shooting the shit, and he said, ‘Listen, man, I’m gonna be on the road and I need you to hide out in the bushes or a tree and take pictures of everyone who walks in the front door of my house. My wife’s fucking somebody and I need to know who it is.’”
Smith immediately knew he was not going to do this job, but was unclear how to get out of it, so he humored Allman, saying neither yes nor no. He was bailed out a few days later by Gregg’s mercurial decision-making. “I was in the Capricorn office when the band came in,” Smith said. “Gregg summoned me over and said, ‘Remember what we talked about the other day? Don’t do it.’”
-Excerpted from Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, copyright 2023, Alan Paul
Below is the Foreword I wrote for his 2019 book '70 - '74 Plus a Little Bit More!... A Photographic Journey on the Early Years of the Allman Brothers Band. Unfortunately, it is out of print and only available at an inflated price here. Rest In Peace, Sidney!
Through each of their three great eras, the Allman Brothers Band had an insider photographer – one guy with a camera in position to capture the kind of intimate, behind-the-scenes images no outsider on assignment could have possibly captured. They were Twiggs Lyndon, 1969-1970, Sidney Smith, 1970-74, and Kirk West, 1989-2009.
Twiggs and Kirk were tour managers, whose access happened naturally enough; it was their job to be everywhere the Allman Brothers were, to walk across stages, ride buses, check into hotel rooms, clear backstage areas. It was a happy coincidence that long before they ever hooked up with the band, Twiggs was super handy with a camera and Kirk was a longtime professional photographer. Sidney is an entirely different story.
He wasn’t a tour manager, or a professional photographer when he first met the band. He was a kid with a camera, who walked into the Warehouse in his hometown of New Orleans one night in 1970 to shoot his favorite band and spent the next four years swept up into their orbit, eventually capturing not only unforgettable stage images of Duane Allman, Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley, Butch Trucks, Jaimoe, Chuck Leavell and Lamar Williams, but photographing weddings, snapping intimate behind-the-scenes photos of the band and their extended families at home, on the group ranch in Georgia, and in other unguarded moments. It’s quite an extraordinary story, which began with deep personal sadness: the death of Sidney’s father.
“My father was an amateur photographer who died when I was 15, leaving me an extensive collection of cameras and darkroom equipment,” says Sidney. “My love affair with the camera soon emerged and I started shooting the variety of musicians appearing at New Orleans legendary music club, the Warehouse. In November, 1970, I crashed the Tulane University Homecoming dance with friends to see a band who had already been making considerable waves throughout the South. The Allman Brothers Band was barely 18 months old but the six band members displayed such precision and musicianship that one couldn’t help but take notice. They had a sound and a chemistry that I had never witnessed before. I took very few pictures that first night, as film was expensive, and every picture counted.
“I was curiously drawn to the personalities of this group, including their road crew and decided to learn as much as I could. The next time I saw the band, I did something that few photographers had thought to do: shooting pictures of the roadies at work. After showing various members of the road crew images of themselves, they were amazed that someone that taken notice of them. And guess what? You are far less likely to be kicked off the stage if your friends with the stage hands.”
With that simple but profound lesson learned, Sidney kept returning and shooting the Allman Brothers Band during their frequent visits to New Orleans, a city where they had a rabid following. And the appreciation of his work and mellow presence quickly extended beyond the crew to the band. By the time Sidney turned 18, he had already visited Macon several times, usually staying with Dickey Betts or Butch Trucks. He was a no-threatening kid with a camera who stayed out of the way – and took beautiful photos which he would return with. What’s not to like? Sidney soon became the band’s virtual house photographer. He shot Dickey’s wedding to Sandy Blue Sky and portraits of Butch and Linda Trucks’ new babies.
He relocated to Macon and became the unofficial official photographer for Capricorn Records. He also continued to capture the kind of intimate Allman Brothers pictures no one else at the time possibly could. And at the time, the group was the most popular band in the country, riding high on the success of “Ramblin’ Man” and the Brothers and Sisters album. In 1974, Sidney moved back to New Orleans, but his relationship with the band did not end.
He spent the next 40 years slipping in and out of their lives, as reflected by the photos in this book, which extend all the way close to the present day. Over all those years, Sidney’s skills and his reach expanded. He was 15 when he first picked up a camera and started shooting the Allman Brothers and within a year he was selling photos to the biggest, most important music magazines of the day, including Creem, Circus, Hit Parader, Rolling Stone, and even Time and Newsweek, publications which had an almost unfathomable reach at the time.
In these pages we have an overview of Sidney’s growth from kid with a camera to photographer. And also a peek at his own developing understanding of and relationship with the Allman Brothers Band, an insider’s peek behind the curtain of a band unlike any other.
Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s was my third straight book to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my 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. I am 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.
In Atlanta GA there is a community radio station WRFG (Radio Free Georgia) with one of the longest running blues shows in the country from 6-10 am M-F (now available to stream). Many of the long tenured DJ's get a chance to do live interviews with just about everybody every now and then. Blackjack (and his wife) on Tuesday is no exception and I don't know how long ago (long time!) he interviewed Sidney Smith in great depth. It was mesmerizing and pulled no punches. This was not always a harmonious relationship with Gregg and to hear the details was truly fascinating. For many many years I recorded the shows on a double cassette since this is not exactly prime time :) I still have a very large box full of cassette tapes and now I wonder if I have the interview on tape. I have to acquire another deck to access all of these tapes but this is yet another reason to do so.
Wow! What a great story about a kid showing up with a desire to shoot pictures of a band he likes and starts on a path that becomes his life's work. A lot of youngsters could take a lesson from this story; following your heart can open doors you never imagine at the time. Thanks Alan!