Remembering Dickey Betts

By Stratton Lawrence

After Duane Allman went down to Miami to record Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, guitar tech Joe Dan Petty asked him what it was like to play with Eric Clapton. Duane said that Dickey Betts would wear out Clapton in five minutes.

Duane passed a year later, and with him, the greatest duo of electric guitarists, ever. Dickey didn’t have Duane in his ear anymore. There’s no way to replace Duane Allman. But Dickey persisted. Eat a Peach was released three months after Duane died, including Betts’ compositions “Blue Sky” and “Les Brers in A Minor.” Those two songs, and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” feature Dickey and Duane, locked in.

But Duane never even heard “Jessica,” “Southbound,” or “Ramblin’ Man”—Allman Brothers Band songs as iconic as any. By August 1973, two years post-Duane, the Brothers were the biggest band in the country. And it freaked Dickey out, especially when “Ramblin’ Man” made it into a bar scene in “The Exorcist.” ABB was a band of the people. Their songs weren’t supposed to be in the background of Hollywood movies. Dickey responded to the song’s success by generally refusing to perform it.

This is a man who once disappeared to St. Simons Island to spend three days living with a blindfold on, just to see what it was like. On flights to a show, the seat next to Dickey stayed empty—if you sat with him, he might not say a word the whole trip.

“Nobody could ever figure Dickey out,” says Bunky Odom, the Vice President of Phil Walden & Associates, which managed the band. “He kept to himself and said very little, but when he spoke, he meant it.”

Remembering Dickey Betts Dickey was a Florida-born country boy who preferred a quiet life away from people. Put him in a crowded bar, and he might punch somebody before the night’s out. He distanced himself from the rest of the band in Forsyth County, north of Atlanta (“So far up in the hills that we couldn’t get up there sometimes, and once thought we were going to need a helicopter to get in there and tell him it was time to go to work,” Odom recalls). In 1973, he moved to Love Valley, North Carolina, where he lived with his wife, Sandy Bluesky Wabegijig. Betts wrote “Blue Sky” and “Southbound” for her, and “Jessica” for their daughter.

Over the band’s arc, no band member contributed more to the sound of the Allman Brothers Band than Dickey Betts. He wrote—to my ear—the most wonderful melodies in the history of recorded music.

When I was 18, I heard Dickey’s last show with the Brothers. Nobody knew it at the time.

May 7, 2000. A Sunday afternoon in Atlanta—the way it all started 30 years before. We cut it close, squeezing in a drive to Chattanooga that afternoon to buy a case of Busch heavies with a fake ID (Atlanta and every county north of it was dry for to-go alcohol sales on Sunday).

I sprinted to the field in time for “Blue Sky.” My favorite song as a teenager, and still today at 42. The band chugged through, closing the set with Liz Reed and “Revival.” It was heaven, but even listening from a crowd of 30,000 people, I remember feeling that something in the band’s chemistry felt off.

Dickey got the fax that week.

I kept seeing the Brothers after that. Jimmy Herring saved the band, as he does. Derek Trucks found peaks in the 2010s that felt like Duane Allman channeling from beyond. But the Derek/Dickey overlap was far too short. And after May 2000, it was never really the Allman Brothers Band again. It became a tribute. Dickey was the creative force. I heard Dickey play for the last time at the Macon City Auditorium in 2018, with Bunky and Willie Perkins, the band’s tour manager in the 1970s. We ate fried chicken at the H&H that afternoon with Chank Middleton, then went backstage before the show, where I met Sandy Bluesky and Jessica. I floated through those hours, listening, pinching myself, not saying much, just soaking it in.

Duane Betts carried the band that night. Dickey struggled to play. The spirit and the spark were there, but his fingers just couldn’t move in time. Duane backed him up. It wasn’t the power of 1971, but it had the soul.

Dickey Betts took everything that came before him and distilled them into these perfect instrumental verses. The harmonies with Duane, and later Chuck Leavell and Warren Haynes, and briefly Derek Trucks—they’re simple and raw, yet mysterious and abstract. It’s something that I love innately and don’t even try to understand. Like the man himself. Rest peacefully, Dickey. By Stratton Lawrence PHOTO COURTESY OF CONSEQUENCE.NET