Dickey Betts, a honky-tonk hell raiser who, as a guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band, traded fiery licks with Duane Allman within the band’s early-Nineteen Seventies heyday, and who went on to write down a few of the band’s most indelible songs, together with its greatest hit, “Ramblin’ Man,” died on Thursday morning at his dwelling in Osprey, Fla. He was 80.
His dying was introduced on social media by his household. Mr. Betts’s supervisor David Spero mentioned in a press release to Rolling Stone journal that the trigger was most cancers and power obstructive pulmonary illness.
Regardless of not being an precise Allman brother — the band was led by Duane Allman, who achieved guitar-god standing earlier than he died in a bike accident in 1971, and Gregg Allman, the lead vocalist, who obtained an added flash of the limelight in 1975 when he married Cher — Mr. Betts was a guiding pressure within the group for many years and central to a sound that, together with the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd, got here to outline Southern rock.
Though pigeonholed by some followers within the band’s early days as its “different” guitarist, Mr. Betts, whose solos on his Gibson Les Paul guitar appeared at occasions to scorch the fret board, proved a worthy sparring companion to Duane Allman, serving as a co-lead guitarist greater than a sidekick.
Along with his chiseled facial options, Wild West mustache and gunfighter demeanor, Mr. Betts actually regarded the a part of the star. And he performed like one.
Nonetheless, balancing lead duties with a future legend proved a problem. “It was arduous to not try to have simply this entire contest on a regular basis, attempting to outdo, as a result of we had been each enjoying lead,” Mr. Betts mentioned in a 1981 interview. “The one method that may work is that if any person lays again just a bit bit.”
“If I had that jealousy and obtained concerned in it an excessive amount of,” he mentioned, “it simply wouldn’t have labored. So in that sense it was form of arduous. However, hell, I realized extra by way of these years than most likely some other interval of my enjoying profession.”
A whole obituary will observe.
