The Allman Brothers Band Goes Twang

The Allman Brothers Band's canonical recordings are blues-rock: long improvisational pieces, dual-lead guitar interplay, the Fillmore East concerts. That is the version that entered the rock mythology.

The version underneath it is a southern band drawing on the full musical culture of the American South, which includes country music, gospel, and the acoustic blues tradition in proportions that the Fillmore version does not fully expose.

Duane Allman and the studio sessions

Duane Allman's session work before and during the Allman Brothers years included recordings with Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Boz Scaggs, and Derek and the Dominos. The range is large. What connects the varied session work is a quality of listening and responding: Allman playing to the music around him rather than playing over it.

On the Allman Brothers' own recordings, this listening quality produces something different from the stadium rock version of southern music. The live recordings from the Fillmore East have the rawness and energy of performance. The studio recordings, particularly the material on Idlewild South and Brothers and Sisters, have a warmth that is closer to country-rock than to blues-rock in the production register.

The country thread

Jessica, the instrumental on Brothers and Sisters, is the clearest exhibit. The chord sequence and the melody have a country quality that the electric-rock arrangement partially obscures. Play it on acoustic guitar at half the tempo and the country form is immediately audible.

The Gregg Allman compositions show the country influence most directly in the vocal approach. His phrasing owes as much to country singers as to blues singers. The melismatic passages in his vocal style come from both traditions, but the sustained melodic lines have a country quality.

The Georgia context

Macon, Georgia, which was the Allman Brothers' base through their most significant years, is Otis Redding territory and Little Richard territory, but it is also deep in a region where country music was the popular music of white working-class communities throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

The sons of that region absorbed both traditions. The Allman Brothers Band is the result of that absorption in one of its most musically ambitious forms.

For more Goes Twang essays: Bruce Springsteen Goes Twang, Bob Dylan Goes Twang Part Two, and The Band Goes Twang. Full Mixtapes index.