‘He experienced a full life of trauma’: documentary explores troubled tale of Gregg Allman

A new documentary focuses on the hugely successful musician whose life was punctuated by tragedy

L ate in the afternoon on 29 October 1971, one of the world’s greatest guitarists, Duane Allman, was riding his motorcycle when he swerved to avoid colliding with a flatbed truck that suddenly stopped short in an intersection. He wound up slamming into the back of the truck with such force, it threw him under his bike which skidded and dragged him for 50 ruinous feet. Suffering a collapsed chest, a ruptured coronary artery and a damaged liver, Allman was pronounced dead three hours later. He was 24.

Four decades after that tragic event, when journalist Alan Light was hanging out with Gregg Allman to ghostwrite the musician’s memoir, titled My Cross to Bear, he couldn’t help but notice how present Duane remained in his life. “In Gregg’s house, he was surrounded by photos of Duane, notes from Duane and music from Duane,” Light said. “It was obvious that he was still very much a part of Gregg’s day-to-day existence. The sadness and loss never left him.”

In fact, it only exacerbated the sense of tragedy that had been with both Allman brothers nearly from birth. When Duane was three years old and Gregg two, their father was shot to death by a hitchhiker he’d picked up. “Gregg experienced a full life of trauma,” said James Keach, who has directed a comprehensive new documentary about the star titled Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul. “That level of trauma, suffered young, informs everything you do, especially if you’re an artist.”

But if trauma underlay Allman’s music, the way he used it as a singer, songwriter and musician couldn’t have been more rousing, creative or cathartic, something the performances in the film make abundantly clear. While much of the documentary covers his decades with the Allman Brothers – which suffered another tragedy with the death of their bassist Berry Oakley one year after Duane’s demise – its greater value comes in differentiating Gregg from the rest of the band. To do so, it emphasizes his unique role within their ranks, as well as his separate solo identity, delineated over a wealth of solo albums released before his death from liver cancer in 2017 at 69. “If Duane had never formed the Allman Brothers, Gregg would have become a solo artist with an affinity for Jackson Browne and Tim Buckley,” said Alan Paul, author of the definitive book on the group, One Way Out. “He wouldn’t have been out of place in the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter scene.”

That’s apparent not only from the craft and melodic range of his writing, which pushed far beyond the blues idiom he’s often associated with, but also the husky timbre of his voice and the weight of emotion in his singing. Heavy with sadness and hurt, Allman’s voice was the perfect expression of the burdened life he led, though as Paul pointed out, “Gregg would have been a great singer even if he lived a very different life.”

Early in that life music represented redemption. After the murder of the boys’ father, their mother never remarried, forcing her to raise the kids herself. Though she was enormously devoted to them, the job she took to support the family required her to live apart from them for some years, during which she sent them to military school. In those years, Gregg felt abandoned by both parents. Though Duane became a kind of parental substitute, he could be an intimidating one to the more inward Allman. “People have this image of Gregg as this hard-living rock’n’roll pirate,” Keach said. “But I always saw him as a shy and sensitive guy.”

Interestingly, Gregg took up guitar first, but Duane became intrigued and quickly surpassed him in skill. The younger brother reacted by developing his voice, modeled on the southern Black blues singers whose phrasing, gravitas and swagger entranced him. Though the boys were raised in the segregated south, they were drawn to Black culture. An early band the brothers formed, initially named Allman Joys and later dubbed Hourglass, earned a recording contract but the restrictive sound their record company required frustrated Duane, who quit to become a session guitarist at Muscle Shoals studio where he played on classic recordings by artists such as Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. By 1969, Duane had an idea for his own band fired by an unusual lineup, with two harmonically attuned lead guitarists and two powerhouse drummers, the latter modeled on similar lineups in James Brown’s and Otis Redding’s bands. The sound Duane conceived wound up defining the Southern Rock movement, heard in bands from Lynyrd Skynyrd to the Marshall Tucker Band. Duane’s first hire for the Allmans was Jaimoe (John Lee Johnson), a Black R&B and jazz drummer, making them one of the few major integrated bands in the Jim Crow south.