Dickey Betts, Fiery Guitarist With Allman Brothers Band, Dies at 80

Dickey Betts, a honky-tonk hell raiser who, as a guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band, traded fiery licks with Duane Allman within the band’s early-Seventies heyday, and who went on to write down among the band’s most indelible songs, together with its greatest hit, “Ramblin’ Man,” died on Thursday at his dwelling in Osprey, Fla. He was 80.

His dying was introduced on social media by his household. His supervisor David Spero mentioned in an announcement to Rolling Stone journal that the trigger was most cancers and continual obstructive pulmonary illness.

Regardless of not being an precise Allman brother — the band, based in 1969, was led by Duane Allman, who achieved guitar-god standing earlier than he died in a motorbike accident at 24, and Gregg Allman, the lead vocalist, who received an added flash of the limelight in 1975 when he married Cher — Mr. Betts was a guiding power within the group for many years and central to the sound that, together with the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd, got here to outline Southern rock.

Though pigeonholed by some followers within the band’s early days as its “other” guitarist, Mr. Betts, whose solos appeared at instances to scorch the fretboard of his Gibson Les Paul, proved a worthy sparring companion to Duane Allman, serving extra as a co-lead guitarist than as a sidekick.

Together with his chiseled options, Wild West mustache and gunfighter demeanor, Mr. Betts actually seemed the a part of the star. And he performed like one. Nowhere was that extra obvious than on the band’s landmark 1971 reside double album, “At Fillmore East,” which was stuffed with expansive jams and showcased the intricate interaction between Mr. Betts and Mr. Allman. It offered greater than one million copies.

“The second half of ‘At Fillmore East’ is as vivid and exhilarating as recorded rock has ever been,” Grayson Haver Currin of Pitchfork wrote in a 2022 appraisal.

A centerpiece of the album was “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” a haunting, jazz-influenced instrumental written by Mr. Betts whose title was taken from a gravestone at a graveyard within the band’s hometown, Macon, Ga. That observe’s “textural interplay,” Mr. Currin continued, “resembles Miles Davis’s then-new electric bands, organ and guitar oozing into one another like melting butter and chocolate.”

“Duane and I had an understanding, like an old soul kind of understanding of let’s play together,” Mr. Betts mentioned in a 2020 interview with The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida. “Duane would say, ‘Man, I get so jealous of you sometimes when you burn off and I have to follow it,’ and we would joke about it. So that’s kind of Duane and mine’s relationship. It was a real understanding. Like, ‘Come on, this is a helluva band, let’s not hot dog it up.’”

That good guitar dialogue led to Macon on Oct. 29, 1971, when Mr. Allman misplaced management of his bike after swerving to overlook a truck and died of intensive inner accidents sustained within the crash (Berry Oakley, the band’s bassist, was killed a yr later in a motorbike accident just some blocks from the positioning).

Mr. Betts took over because the band’s chief and featured guitarist when the Allman Brothers Band regrouped to finish its subsequent album, “Eat a Peach.” Launched in 1972, it was critically acclaimed and vaulted to No. 4 on the Billboard charts. Among the many album’s most memorable tracks was Mr. Betts’s sunny country-inflected quantity “Blue Sky,” which lived on as a rock traditional.

The band reached new business heights with its follow-up the subsequent yr, “Brothers & Sisters,” which contained two of Mr. Betts’s signature songs: “Ramblin’ Man,” which rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Scorching 100, and the upbeat instrumental “Jessica.”

“Ramblin’ Man,” which Mr. Betts sang, is a carefree story of an unfettered life on the open highway. “I guess the song is more or less autobiographical,” he mentioned in a 1973 interview with the longer term film director Cameron Crowe, who was then a author for Rolling Stone. “Not right down to the point, but overall it’s a pretty true song. There’s a lot of things I wish I could say in my songs that I can’t.”

He apparently made an impression on Mr. Crowe. His horseshoe mustache and bad-boy swagger turned the inspiration for Billy Crudup’s rock-star character in Mr. Crowe’s quasi-autobiographical 2000 movie, “Almost Famous.” As Mr. Crowe instructed Rolling Stone in 2017: “Dickey seemed like a quiet guy with a huge amount of soul, possible danger and playful recklessness behind his eyes. He was a huge presence.”

Forrest Richard Betts was born on Dec. 12, 1943, in West Palm Seaside, Fla., one in every of three youngsters of Harold and Sarah Betts. Rising up on the Gulf Coast in Bradenton, close to Tampa, he discovered an early appreciation of music from his father, a fiddler, and began enjoying ukulele at 5.

He graduated to guitar and fashioned his personal band in his teenagers. In 1967, he fashioned one other band, the Second Coming, with Mr. Oakley. They later jammed with Duane Allman, who finally invited them to hitch his new band.

After the triumph of “Brothers & Sisters,” which topped the Billboard 200 for 5 weeks in 1973, the Allman Brothers Band began to fray. Gregg Allman began a facet solo profession, as did Mr. Betts, who launched an album, “Highway Call,” in 1974.

Alongside the best way, the band’s outsize drug and alcohol use was turning into an rising downside, as was the inner pressures that got here with success. The band splintered in 1976 after Gregg Allman testified in opposition to the band’s safety man in a federal drug case; Mr. Betts vowed by no means to work with Mr. Allman once more.

Nonetheless, he did. Though Mr. Betts continued with two facet ventures, the band Nice Southern and the Dickey Betts Band, in 1979 the Allman Brothers Band launched a comeback album, “Enlightened Rogues,” and would proceed to tour and document, regardless of prolonged hiatuses, till 2000. That yr, the group fired Mr. Betts, citing “creative differences” — whereas additionally alluding to persevering with struggles with substance abuse, which he denied.

By that time Mr. Betts had been by loads of struggles with medicine and alcohol, in addition to a number of arrests, together with a much-publicized incident in 1996, by which he was accused of aiming a .44 Magnum handgun at his spouse, Donna, throughout a quarrel over his drug use and charged with aggravated home assault. The costs have been dropped after he agreed to test himself right into a rehab facility.

Along with his spouse, Mr. Betts’s survivors embody his daughters, the nation artist Kimberly Betts, Christy Betts and Jessica Betts, in addition to his son, Duane Betts, who made appearances with the Allman Brothers Band within the Nineties and later joined Nice Southern.

Regardless of present process brain surgery in 2018 after a fall at dwelling, Mr. Betts launched reside albums with the Dickey Betts Band in each 2018 and 2019.

He obtained notable recognition when Bob Dylan referenced him in “Murder Most Foul,” Mr. Dylan’s 2020 opus concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It accommodates the road “Play Oscar Peterson, play Stan Getz/Play ‘Blue Sky,’ play Dickey Betts.”

When buddies referred to as him concerning the shout-out, Mr. Betts was deeply honored, he mentioned in a recent interview, but additionally embarrassed. “I would say, ‘Well, he just used me because it rhymes with Getz.’”