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 put in writing probably the most band’s maximum indelible songs, together with its largest hit, “Ramblin’ Guy,” died on Thursday at his house in Osprey, Fla. He used to be 80.
His dying used to be introduced on social media via his circle of relatives. His supervisor David Spero mentioned in a observation to Rolling Stone mag that the purpose used to be most cancers and persistent obstructive pulmonary illness.
In spite of now not being a real Allman brother — the band, based in 1969, used to be led via Duane Allman, who completed guitar-god standing sooner than he died in a bike twist of fate at 24, and Gregg Allman, the lead vocalist, who were given an added flash of the limelight in 1975 when he married Cher — Mr. Betts used to be a guiding power within the team for many years and central to the sound that, at the side of the song of Lynyrd Skynyrd, got here to outline Southern rock.
Even supposing pigeonholed via some lovers within the band’s early days as its “different” guitarist, Mr. Betts, whose solos appeared now and then to scorch the fretboard of his Gibson Les Paul, proved a worthy sparring spouse to Duane Allman, serving extra as a co-lead guitarist than as a sidekick.
Along with his chiseled options, Wild West mustache and gunfighter demeanor, Mr. Betts unquestionably regarded the a part of the superstar. And he performed like one. Nowhere used to be that extra obvious than at the band’s landmark 1971 are living double album, “At Fillmore East,” which used to be stuffed with expansive jams and showcased the intricate interaction between Mr. Betts and Mr. Allman. It offered greater than one million copies.
“The second one part of ‘At Fillmore East’ is as brilliant and exhilarating as recorded rock has ever been,” Grayson Haver Currin of Pitchfork wrote in a 2022 appraisal.
A centerpiece of the album used to be “In Reminiscence of Elizabeth Reed,” a haunting, jazz-influenced instrumental written via Mr. Betts whose identify used to be taken from a gravestone at a graveyard within the band’s fatherland, Macon, Ga. That monitor’s “textural interaction,” Mr. Currin persevered, “resembles Miles Davis’s then-new electrical bands, organ and guitar oozing into one any other like melting butter and chocolate.”
“Duane and I had an working out, like an previous soul more or less working out of let’s play in combination,” Mr. Betts mentioned in a 2020 interview with The Sarasota Usher in-Tribune in Florida. “Duane would say, ‘Guy, I am getting so jealous of you now and again while you burn off and I’ve to keep on with it,’ and we might funny story about it. In order that’s more or less Duane and mine’s courting. It used to be an actual working out. Like, ‘Come on, it is a helluva band, let’s now not scorching canine it up.’”
That sensible guitar discussion led to Macon on Oct. 29, 1971, when Mr. Allman misplaced regulate of his motorbike after swerving to omit a truck and died of in depth inside accidents sustained within the crash (Berry Oakley, the band’s bassist, used to be killed a 12 months later in a bike twist of fate only a few blocks from the website).
Mr. Betts took over because the band’s chief and featured guitarist when the Allman Brothers Band regrouped to finish its subsequent album, “Consume a Peach.” Launched in 1972, it used to be seriously acclaimed and vaulted to No. 4 at the Billboard charts. A few of the album’s maximum memorable tracks used to be Mr. Betts’s sunny country-inflected quantity “Blue Sky,” which lived on as a rock vintage.
The band reached new industrial heights with its follow-up the following 12 months, “Brothers & Sisters,” which contained two of Mr. Betts’s signature songs: “Ramblin’ Guy,” which rose to No. 2 at the Billboard Sizzling 100, and the upbeat instrumental “Jessica.”
“Ramblin’ Guy,” which Mr. Betts sang, is a carefree story of an unfettered existence at the open highway. “I suppose the music is kind of autobiographical,” he mentioned in a 1973 interview with the longer term film director Cameron Crowe, who used to be then a creator for Rolling Stone. “No longer proper all the way down to the purpose, however total it’s a beautiful true music. There’s a large number of issues I want I may just say in my songs that I will be able to’t.”
He it seems that made an affect on Mr. Crowe. His horseshoe mustache and bad-boy swagger was the foundation for Billy Crudup’s rock-star persona in Mr. Crowe’s quasi-autobiographical 2000 movie, “Nearly Well-known.” As Mr. Crowe instructed Rolling Stone in 2017: “Dickey looked like a quiet man with a large quantity of soul, conceivable risk and playful recklessness at the back of his eyes. He used to be an enormous presence.”
Forrest Richard Betts used to be born on Dec. 12, 1943, in West Palm Seaside, Fla., one among 3 youngsters of Harold and Sarah Betts. Rising up at the Gulf Coast in Bradenton, close to Tampa, he realized an early appreciation of song from his father, a fiddler, and began enjoying ukulele at 5.
He graduated to guitar and shaped his personal band in his teenagers. In 1967, he shaped any other band, the 2d Coming, with Mr. Oakley. They later jammed with Duane Allman, who in the end invited them to enroll in his new band.
After the triumph of “Brothers & Sisters,” which crowned 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, “Freeway Name,” in 1974.
Alongside the best way, the band’s outsize drug and alcohol use used to be turning into an expanding drawback, as used to be the interior pressures that got here with luck. The band splintered in 1976 after Gregg Allman testified towards the band’s safety guy in a federal drug case; Mr. Betts vowed by no means to paintings with Mr. Allman once more.
Nonetheless, he did. Even supposing Mr. Betts persevered 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 excursion and file, in spite of long hiatuses, till 2000. That 12 months, the gang fired Mr. Betts, mentioning “ingenious variations” — whilst additionally alluding to proceeding struggles with substance abuse, which he denied.
Through that time Mr. Betts have been via quite a lot of struggles with medicine and alcohol, in addition to a couple of arrests, together with a much-publicized incident in 1996, during which he used to be accused of aiming a .44 Magnum handgun at his spouse, Donna, right through a quarrel over his drug use and charged with irritated home attack. The fees have been dropped after he agreed to test himself right into a rehab facility.
Along with his spouse, Mr. Betts’s survivors come with his daughters, the rustic 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 Nineteen Nineties and later joined Nice Southern.
In spite of present process mind surgical treatment in 2018 after a fall at house, Mr. Betts launched are living albums with the Dickey Betts Band in each 2018 and 2019.
He won notable popularity when Bob Dylan referenced him in “Homicide Maximum Foul,” Mr. Dylan’s 2020 opus in regards to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It accommodates the road “Play Oscar Peterson, play Stan Getz/Play ‘Blue Sky,’ play Dickey Betts.”
When pals known as him in regards to the shout-out, Mr. Betts used to be deeply commemorated, he mentioned in a fresh interview, but in addition embarrassed. “I might say, ‘Smartly, he simply used me as it rhymes with Getz.’”