Lord he was born a ramblin’ man, and died one as well. Perhaps no song encapsulated a rock ‘n’ roll legend more than Dickey Betts’s 1973 “Ramblin’ Man,” a staple of classic rock radio stations across the country. Betts, who was born on Dec. 12, 1943, in West Palm Beach, Florida, and who died this past week in Osprey, Florida, had an itinerant existence from an early age.
As a child, Dickey was compelled to change schools frequently; his one constant was music. At 5 years old, Dickey started out on the ukulele, then switched to banjo. Surrounded by Southern music in his youth, he at first gravitated toward country and bluegrass. After he heard Chuck Berry for the first time in his early teens, his musical tastes expanded to encompass rock and R&B. At that time he switched to the guitar as well, in part due to Berry’s influence and in part because, as he put it, he “started realizing that girls like guitars.”
Never very much interested in formal education, and with an innate hankering for life on the road, Betts dropped out of high school at age 16 to play guitar with a traveling circus band. It was when he was playing with one of these groups when an up-and-coming guitarist named Duane Allman heard him play; impressed, Allman invited him to jam with him. Even more impressed after the jam session, Allman invited Betts to be a part of a new band that he was forming with his brother Gregg. In 1969, the Allman Brothers Band was born.
Though the Allman Brothers are now a firm part of the classic rock aristocracy, their early songs were not exactly anything worthy of being etched into the annals of rock history. All that changed in 1971, when their live double album At Fillmore East sold over a million copies. By that point, Duane and Dickey had learned how to share the lead guitar role, playing off one another and to one another’s strengths (Duane in blues, Dickey in country) and ultimately blending their chords and voices together to produce a new, distinctive sound in rock that fans responded to enthusiastically.
The novel brand of Southern rock that they pioneered combined blues and country as well as jazz and swing (which Betts particularly enjoyed) and Chuck Berry-inspired R&B with lyrics about the Southern experience — and in song lengths that exceeded the standard three or so minutes of typical pop songs of the age. They were more willing to experiment than other bands of their times as well. Their still-popular “Jessica,” which Betts wrote in 1973, is a purely instrumental ballad that was inspired by another of Betts’s artistic favorites, the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. And his “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” (1970), also a purely instrumental piece, plays less like a rock ballad than it does an extended jazz guitar jam session.
Almost as soon as they had their big breakthrough, however, tragedy struck the Allman Brothers when Duane was killed in a motorcycle accident in Macon, Georgia, in 1971, only four days after At Fillmore East had achieved gold record status. Distraught by the death of his dear friend, a year later the band’s bassist, Berry Oakley, crashed his motorcycle in nearly the exact place where Duane had died. Desolate but not deterred, Betts soldiered onward with Gregg and the other remaining members of the Allman Brothers, hitting No. 4 on the Billboard chart with their 1972 album Eat a Peach and topping the record charts the following year as well with their 1973 double album Brothers and Sisters. It was that year when Betts achieved true immortality with his now-iconic (and semi-autobiographical) song “Ramblin’ Man,” the only Allman Brothers single to ever make the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it rose as high as No. 2.
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Over the next several decades, Betts and his bandmates would go through a head-spinning number of breakups and reunions, culminating in a decisive breakup in the year 2000. Throughout it all, Betts’s one constant (along with his music) was life on the road. Betts continued to tour well into his 70s, even after a stroke and brain surgery in 2018, inspiring many others along the way — including the director Cameron Crowe, who based the traveling rocker character in his 2000 film Almost Famous on Betts.
So, yes, Dickey, we know it’s time for your leavin’ — and now we do understand that you were indeed born a ramblin’ man.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published last summer by the University of Alabama Press.