RIP Dickey Betts

Every one of these musician deaths is sad and hitting closer to home. The Allman Brothers helped define my college days and thereafter. Time to listen to Live at Fillmore East for the millionth time. Enough ramblin’

Post Edited (Mumbo) : 4/19/2024 4:17:52 AM (GMT-8)

Always so sad to hear of the passing of a great rock musician, and Dickey Betts was certainly that.

When it happens, I often feel like posting a sample or two of their work, as a kind of tribute to the greatness that they showed, and the wonderful music that they gave us.

But how to do that in the case of the Allman Brothers and Dickey Betts??? They gave us so many fabulous songs, that choosing just one or two to celebrate Dickey and the band is such a difficult task!

But here are two that I would offer, the first for its bouncy, happy beat that characterized so much of their music, and the other for its almost magical sweetness.

"Jessica":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llbsswefusa

"Sweet Melissa" (IMHO, BTW, one of the prettiest songs ever written!) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggeab0lkz2c

So very well done, guys!

And RIP, Dickey!

i honestly thought he was already dead. so imagine my surprise. tommy smothers too

I would probably put In Memory of Elizabeth Reed at the top of the my list of Dickey Betts tunes . There are not many bad ones though.

F8 said...
and he wrote the song

Duane & Greg Allman + Dickey Betts yielded great songs and complimented each other quite well. However, their version of Stormy Monday is the best I have heard and we have to thank T-Bone Walker for that. Covered by many, perfected by only a few.

Yes, Lee Michaels’ Stormy Monday is my #2 version. Hammond Organ and Frosty the drummer, amazing sound and tempo. If he just had Dickey Betts playing with him…

I had to go back and re-read Cameron Crowe's first Rolling Stone cover on the Allman Brothers. Crowes was 16 when he went on the road with the band, ala "Almost Famous" script. First two paragraphs:

The accent comes up out of Nashville, by way of Georgia, makes a dash across the States and ends up vaguely California. He sounds a bit like Kris Kristofferson, looks uncannily like his late brother, Duane. The hotel television is on; the sound is off. It is late, and the black and white movie something surely about horror and death at this small hour – glows up on Gregg Allman’s tired face like a moonscape in Macon’s Rose Hill Cemetery.

Rose Hill is where the band – the Allman Brothers Band – went in the lean scuffling days, back when they all lived in a two-room, $50-a-month apartment. Sometimes they’d eat psilocybin for inspiration. Sometimes a lonely, bluesy wail would rise out of that old graveyard: a song like Dicky Betts’ “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” It was a grassy, quiet place to be alone together and to talk about music, and love, and finite thoughts. In later years, Duane Allman would be buried there and the band would play a deeply felt set at the funeral in his memory. Bassist Berry Oakley, too, would die, ominously almost a year to the day after Duane. Eerily, the circumstances of the accident would – even the place where it happened – recapitulate the tragedy of Duane Allman. And Berry Oakley would be buried at Rose Hill.

RIP Dicky