Sunday, May 28, 2017

Greg Allman, 1947-2017.

I guess "Ramblin' Man" was the first song I'd ever heard by The Allman Brothers Band. According to Wikipedia it was released in August 1973, but I'd swear they were playing it on the jukebox in my high school cafeteria when I was a freshman in 1972.

The song, written and sung by guitarist Dickey Betts (and the band's only top 10 single), contains the lyrics:

My father was a gambler down in Georgia,
He wound up on the wrong end of a gun.

Little did I know, according to his obit in the Times, that Greg Allman's father, "Willis Turner Allman, a combat veteran of World War II, was murdered by a hitchhiker in 1949."

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