Dickey Betts, the singer-guitarist who co-founded the genre-defining Southern rock group the Allman Brothers Band and wrote several of the group’s most enduring compositions, including “Ramblin’ Man,” died April 18 at his home in Osprey, Fla. He was 80.
“Ramblin’ Man” (1973), which some bandmates initially deemed too country for their repertoire, became the group’s only top-10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. The lyrics, set against a bouncy, upbeat melody, expressed the resigned and unrepentant wanderlust of a man “born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus rollin’ down Highway 41.” “When it’s time for leavin’,” the song went, “I hope you’ll understand that I was born a ramblin’ man.”
Mr. Betts wrote several of the group’s most enduring compositions, such as the jazz-inflected instrumental “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and the pastoral love song “Blue Sky.”
The Allman Brothers Band built its style on guitar interplay between leader Duane Allman and the highly melodic fretwork of Mr. Betts, whose influences included Romani jazz musician Django Reinhardt and bluesman B.B. King.
Allman and Mr. Betts would play a theme in harmony before cutting loose with their own solos or answering each other’s licks in a call-and-response style. By the mid-1970s, a wave of Southern rock acts including Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Charlie Daniels Band and the Outlaws borrowed heavily from their twin-guitar format.
At their popular peak in the 1970s, the Allman Brothers Band played nearly 300 concerts a year, grossed between $50,000 and $100,000 a show, and crisscrossed the country on a private Boeing 720. When not touring, they shared quarters in a Tudor-style mansion in Macon, Ga.
The band survived the 1971 death of Duane Allman following a motorcycle accident, then broke up twice — largely because of increasing acrimony between singer and organist Gregg Allman (Duane’s brother) and Mr. Betts. Both men struggled with substance abuse.
Mr. Betts blossomed as a singer and songwriter on the Allman Brothers’ 1973 release “Brothers and Sisters.” During the recording sessions, founding bassist Berry Oakley died after a motorcycle crash. Pianist Chuck Leavell and a new bassist, Lamar Williams, joined the lineup to finish the recording.
In a retrospective review, Rolling Stone magazine praised Mr. Betts for “increasing the country light and buoyancy in the Allmans’ electric-blues stampede” with his songs such as “Ramblin’ Man,” “Pony Boy” and “Jessica.” “Pony Boy,” an acoustic showcase for Mr. Betts’s slide guitar, recounted family lore about a hard-drinking uncle who rode a horse home from a tavern to avoid a DUI.
Fatherhood inspired “Jessica,” an instrumental showcase for his nimble fretwork.
“With ‘Jessica,’ I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t quite find it,” Mr. Betts told Guitar World magazine. “Then my little daughter, Jessica, crawled into the room, and I just started playing to her, trying to capture the feeling of her crawling and smiling. That’s why I named it after her.”
The next year, he recorded an acclaimed solo album, “Highway Call,” credited to Richard Betts, with guest appearances by fiddler Vassar Clements and steel guitarist John Hughey. Several songs acknowledged a yearning for a simpler rural life that perhaps was a reflection of the strain of relentless touring.
Critics dismissed the band’s next album, “Win, Lose or Draw” (1975), on which many of its members recorded their parts separately, as below the band’s standards. That same year, Gregg Allman married pop singer Cher and moved to Beverly Hills. Then in 1976, Allman, caught up in a federal drug case against a supplier, testified against the band’s roadie in a plea bargain for immunity. The band broke up.
Mr. Betts stayed busy, doing recording sessions for outlaw country performers Hank Williams Jr., Billy Joe Shaver and Gary Stewart, collaborating on songs with future “Miami Vice” TV star Don Johnson, and touring with his own band, Great Southern.
“There is no way we can work with Gregg again. Ever,” Mr. Betts told Rolling Stone.
But he did, first reforming the band with Allman in 1978. In later decades, he performed in the Allman Brothers Band alongside younger guitarists Warren Haynes (the two had worked together previously in Great Southern) and Derek Trucks, the nephew of drummer Butch Trucks — though he was often in and out of the band.
Forrest Richard Betts was born in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Dec. 12, 1943, and grew up in Bradenton, Fla. At 5, he played ukulele in his father’s bluegrass group. He later switched to mandolin then banjo and finally — as he was trying to impress girls — an electric guitar.
At 16, he left home to join a teen band that worked with a traveling circus.
“Our band would do like splits and we had basketball knee pads and we’d go sliding on our knees playing and then I’d pick the other guitar player up on my shoulders,” Mr. Betts told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “So we did like 10, 12 shows a day. It was like Vaudeville or something except it was rock-and-roll. That was my first road trip.”
As his musical reputation increased, so did his wild streak.
The young guitarist sped around town on motorcycles wearing a jacket embroidered with an explicit phrase. When an Ohio-based band, the Jokers, came through town to hire him, Mr. Betts needed permission from a judge to leave the state. He had been placed on probation after he climbed a neighbor’s fence and shot a cow.
With bassist Oakley and keyboardist Reese Wynans, he joined a Jacksonville, Fla., band, the Second Coming. In 1969, Duane Allman, then a studio session musician for Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama, approached Oakley and Mr. Betts about starting a group with Gregg Allman. The Allman Brothers Band emerged from their jam sessions.
When the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, Gregg Allman was too inebriated to make the acceptance speech. The event proved to be a catalyst for Allman’s sobriety — but not for Mr. Betts.
The following year, there were rumors of a final band break after Mr. Betts allegedly put a gun to his wife’s head during an argument about his drug abuse. A stint in rehab followed.
In 2000, founding band members Allman, Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson fired Mr. Betts with a faxed letter that alluded to a decline in his playing.
Mr. Betts, who threatened a lawsuit and then settled out of court, maintained that the firing occurred after he asked for an accounting of band finances. Mr. Betts returned to leading his own band, often with his guitarist son Duane, who was named after Allman. Gregg Allman and Butch Trucks died in 2017.
Mr. Betts was married five times and had several children. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
In later years, Mr. Betts resided on the water in Osprey, Fla. He and his wife, the former Donna Stearns, frequently butted heads with their neighbors, the Bay Preserve, a nonprofit center that hosted weddings and sporting events on the water.
When a local rowing team would practice, Mr. Betts would fire up his power boat to send waves in their direction. At one point, Donna Betts was arrested after pointing a rifle at a crew team as it paddled by their house.
“They have 300 teenage kids come over there, and they’re arrogant as hell,” Mr. Betts told Rolling Stone in 2017. “They’re driving down the road and won’t get out of your way. You work your whole life to get a place like this, and they’re renting!”
