55 Years Ago: Allman Brothers Band's Debut Launches Southern Rock

Marking definitive dates in music history is always a tricky business. If forced to reach a consensus on the birthdate of Southern rock, however, most would agree it came on Nov. 4, 1969, with the release of the Allman Brothers Band’s self-titled debut album.

Born in Nashville barely a year apart, brothers Duane and Gregg Allman were raised in several Southern cities by their widowed mother. (Their father, a career military man, was murdered when the boys were still young.) They picked up music while in their teens, both starting on electric guitar.

By the mid-'60s, they were playing in bands called the Escorts and the Allman Joys, and eventually wound up in Los Angeles with a Liberty Records contract as the Hour Glass. This was during the peak of psychedelia, and they sold very few records.

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Disillusioned, Duane Allman moved to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1968, becoming a hot session guitarist at FAME Studios while backing R&B giants Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and others. Later, in Jacksonville, Florida, he assembled the Allman Brothers Band with local musicians Jai Johanny Johanson (drums), Berry Oakley (bass), Dickey Betts (guitar) and Butch Trucks (drums). Once Gregg Allman managed to break free from his record contract, he joined the group as singer and organist and completed the classic lineup in March 1969.

They then relocated to Macon, Georgia, to be closer to the newly founded Capricorn Records, which had made the fledgling band its first signing. (Label head Phil Walden was a fan of Duane Allman's guitar playing.) Months of sporadic live dates and intense woodshedding followed as they developed a repertoire. Their first choice for producer, Tom Dowd, was unavailable so the Allman Brothers Band entered New York's Atlantic Studios with Adrian Barber, By then, the Allman Brothers Band was tight enough to record their self-titled debut album in just two weeks.

Listen to the Allman Brothers Band's 'It's Not My Cross to Bear'

Live Shows Would Secure Their Legend

The Allman Brothers Band started off by soaring through the Spencer Davis Group’s "Don’t Want You No More" in two and a half minutes, but discerning listeners quickly noted that the young band's interpretation of the blues came as much from the British Invasion as it did more homegrown sources.

They'd leave no doubt throughout the rest of side one that this was an American band, born and bred inside the South’s rich musical gumbo, buoyed by Gregg Allman's hymnal "It's Not My Cross to Bear" and hard-hitting "Black Hearted Woman" (which gave fans the first taste of Duane Allman's and Betts’ uncanny guitar telepathy) and a personalized reworking of Muddy Waters’ "Trouble No More."

The second side included all Gregg Allman compositions: the biting "Every Hungry Woman," "Dreams" (which set the template for all epic Southern rock jams to come) and "Whipping Post," which essentially defined the Allmans’ sound and quickly grew to astonishing lengths onstage.

They received much critical acclaim from the start, initially little mainstream radio airplay. The Allman Brothers Band was mostly overlooked at the time of its release, rising no higher than No. 188 on the chart and selling only 35,000 copies by most estimates. Live shows would soon help make their legend. Duane Allman tragically died less than two years after the debut's release, but their musical immortality had already been secured.