If you are here reading this, you know that a few of us SMM alumni agreed to continue the moribund blog with what has now become an annual ritual: The In Memoriam posts that end the past or start the new year. We all have unbreakable ties to our beloved SMM, and who knows? The phoenix may yet rise from the proverbial ashes.
My choice right off the bat for In Memoriam was Dickey Betts.
I'm of the age that grew up listening to Filmore East and Eat a Peach. Incidentally, I was (un)lucky to enroll at Guilford College, Greensboro, about a year after the Allman Brothers played in the Dana Auditorium as a little-known local/Southern band. I was up in Philly at that time and fully aware of their amazing music, but not in a position to go and see. Would that my timing had been different!
Dickey Betts is often noted as second "fiddle" to Duane Allman. Perhaps rightly so. Certainly, the band's unique (for that time) double lead guitars in counterpoint harmony set them aside. For comparison, look to other top-rated bands of the day. That said, there is a remark made by Joe Dan Petty to Duane Allman, who had just finished working with Eric Clapton, to the effect that Dickey Betts would "wear out Clapton in five minutes."
This past week I ran across a NYT article which mentioned that Betts would have been a member of the band the year that Jimmy Carter ran for president. Chuck Leavell reminisced that Carter visited the band in the studio, rode a minor wave on his association with them, and even in later years stuck by their sides. That, despite the obvious differences in their life-styles.
Off and on following the "main" Allman Brothers line-up, Betts returned to the band until finally being dismissed in the early 21st century. In the 90s, he deserves credit for bringing Warren Haynes into the band (Warren certainly gives him that credit.).
The best verbal picture I have been able to get of Dickey Betts the man is an article in Guitar World written by Andy Aledort, who played guitar in the Betts band Great Southern for close to ten years. I highly recommend it, here.
And here the two of them are in an extended video
