Dickey Betts, guitarist and founding member of the Allman Brothers Band, dies 80

Dickey Betts, the guitarist and co-founder of Southern rockers the Allman Brothers Band, died Thursday of cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary sickness. He was 80.

In statement posted to Betts’ web page, the musician’s spouse and children reported he died at dwelling in Osprey, Fla. They explained Betts was a “legendary performer, songwriter, bandleader, and family members patriarch.

“Dickey was more substantial-than-lifetime, and his decline will be felt around the globe.”

Although the group’s titular brothers ended up the frontmen, Betts’ ferocious and elegant enjoying gave the group its distinctive taste of harmonized guitar solo, tempered with the jazz and country influences that made the Allman Brothers these influential, cross-genre favorites of the period. Betts wrote and sang on several of the group’s most beloved singles, like “Ramblin’ Man” and the instrumentals “Jessica” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”

Born in West Palm Seashore, Fla., Betts proved a quickly research on guitar, banjo and other instruments. He fashioned a group identified as the 2nd Coming with bassist Berry Oakley, who later introduced him to Duane Allman. Betts joined the Allman Brothers Band in 1969, and promptly created his mark with both of those his outlaw very good looks and his composing on tracks like “Revival” and “Blue Sky” as the band grew to become a international celebrity of the southern rock motion together with peers this kind of as Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Following Duane Allman’s demise in a 1971 motorbike crash, Betts uneasily turned a co-frontman, while albums like the Allmans’ 1973 smash “Brothers and Sisters” and his rangy 1974 solo LP “Highway Call” proved he could uncover equally commercial results and critical acclaim in his new position.

Betts had a lover in then-President Carter. In one particular unforgettable assembly at the White Residence, exactly where Betts was attending a jazz efficiency, “Jimmy was strolling all around the premises and an individual claimed to me, ‘Go above and speak to him,’ but I didn’t want to bother him,” Betts instructed Rolling Stone. “Then I went to use the men’s place in the White Dwelling, and as I was coming out, I ran into Jimmy with a team of people today and he claimed, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dickey Betts, a person of the greatest songwriters around nowadays.’ That just floored me.”

Soon after the band fell apart in the late ‘70s (in element about a drug demo involving a band worker), Betts recorded with his team Excellent Southern, while the Allmans reunited briefly in 1979 and again in 1989, acquiring renewed significant and chart good results and carrying out at Woodstock ’94. He was greatly credited as the inspiration for Billy Crudup’s character of Russell in Cameron Crowe’s film “Almost Renowned.”

Yet Betts’ temper and compound use — long aspect of rock ’n’ roll legend — grew to become a legal responsibility in the group. He was arrested various occasions about the a long time for combating with police officers, and in 2000 he left the band. “The Allman Brothers Band deserved a much better ending than this. We’ve accomplished so lots of terrific factors, trapped collectively as a result of all these points,” Betts instructed the Hartford Courant in 2000.

The Allman Brothers Band continued touring (with guitarists Warren Haynes and Derek Vehicles), although Betts retired and un-retired from executing. In 2018, Betts canceled live dates right after struggling a stroke and slipping in his yard, injuring his head in what his loved ones explained as a “freak incident. Dickey is a infamous fighter and he is exhibiting that now.”

Betts is survived by his spouse, Donna, and 4 youngsters, Duane (also an acclaimed singer-songwriter), Christy, Jessica and Kim.