Lessons from Duane Allman’s Journey to Fillmore East: Byington Lecture on the Contemporary South

🍄 Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505 🍄 Subscribe to Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture. www.longlivetheabb.com 🍑Join the Community YouTube @longlivetheabb Substack www.longlivetheabb.com Instagram www.instagram.com/longlivetheabb Facebook www.facebook.com/LongLiveTheABB Threads threads.net/LongLiveTheABB TikTok www.tiktok.com/@longlivetheabb 1:00 Dedication to Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko 9:40 Improvisation/virtuosity/live experience 17:05 The South 19:55 Duane's bandmates 23:07 Capricorn Records 27:38 The Audience 31:35 Piedmont Park May 1969 34:36 An integrated band of southern hippies 41:11 Place and history 41:53 Duality of the southern thing 52:48 Lessons Audio drops a bit, here is the full text _Music is one of the South’s most significant resources, the taproot from which nearly all popular American music emerged. Southern music is where British and African folk traditions first intersect in a society long defined by limitations--“a social context of poverty, slavery, suffering, deprivation, religious extremism, and cultural isolation.” Southerners transcended limitations with music. Crossing color lines was rebellion. To Duane, it was worth the risk. “They were called hippies because they had long hair and were weird,” Floyd Miles recalled. “The bond was built between us because we all experienced some kind of discrimination.” The Allman Brothers Band helped change the South, and therefore the nation, for the good. And I won’t event have time to discuss one of their most significant achievements this dynamic: Jimmy Carter’s road to the presidency. Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent the majority of my career in state and local history that I have a bias towards place as a way to understand the past. Two years ago, I trekked to Macon and began the final manuscript that became Play All Night! The following October 29, the 50th anniversary of Duane’s death, I was in Muscle Shoals, finishing the book. It was there, where it all began for Duane, that I began to make connections to the South and my southernness. The unending conversation inspired me. I listened to Jason Isbell and Drive-By Truckers. I won’t go into all of the history here, but it’s deep, and it connects directly to the Allman Brothers Band story. DBT are originally from Muscle Shoals. Their founder Patterson Hood’s dad David played bass with Duane. They are one of the most important southern bands of my generation. Patterson coined the phrase “The duality of the southern thing." It frames something I have long struggled with about my beloved South: How can a region that has given the world such beauty and cooperation in its music and arts be so casually accepting of the long tail of racism in southern life? I am a southerner as much by upbringing as geography. I only attended integrated schools; I was taught to be fearful of Black students. I am a southerner who grew up in a small beach town in Florida and made my history bones in Orlando. I’m a southerner who currently lives in Nashville, one of the major hubs of southern music and culture for way longer than any of us have been alive. I am a southerner who chooses to celebrate the culture that overcomes the racism through music and art as it is the best of the South. As are the Allman Brothers Band. Using these two bands, one from before my time and one from my time, I want to look at change over time—specifically how musicians have dealt with the South’s divisive history. What is the contemporary South? Let’s back up 50 years. By 1974, as the Southern rock movement began to flourish, bands began displaying on stage the “rebel” flag. 50 years later, the condemnation of such imagery is near universal. But Southern rock bands, the ABB included, seemed to pay little attention to the reality that flying the rebel flag redeemed racism in their midst. Yet even in the 1970s, the prominent display of the rebel flag led critics and fans to dismiss the South and Southern rock as preternaturally backwards, behind the times, and racist. And displaying the rebel flag was exactly those things. Southern rock’s embrace of Confederate imagery signaled public acceptance of segregationist ideals. But white band members, almost all educated in southern schools, considered flag waving as an expression of regional pride and defiance. The band was 1/3 Black, but neither Jaimoe nor Lamar Williams ever commented on the matter. How did the flag become an innocuous symbol? Southern schools taught the Confederate cause was just, a rebellion in the spirit of the American Revolution rather than an act of treason against the United States to create a southern slave nation. The acceptance of the flag throughout southern culture was a success of the Lost Cause narrative that framed the Civil War as a valiant defense of southern virtue against overwhelming odds.