Southern Blood, recorded in 2016, is set for release on Sept. 8.

Allman says farewell on final album

DETROIT — Only a tight circle of family and friends knew Gregg Allman had been diagnosed with liver cancer a second time and wouldn't survive it.

With limited time, the beloved musician and co-founder of the Allman Brothers Band set a course: He would return to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where his band began, and make a musical statement that would, according to those intimately involved in his final studio album, reach back, resolve past with present and reveal his essence.

“It really captures who Gregg is,” said Don Was, producer of the Southern Blood album that is set for release on Sept. 8. “I think there was a tacit understanding that this album was an attempt to tie up the loose ends of his life.”

Allman, who died May 27 at age 69, spent a dozen days in March 2016 in the legendary Fame Studios recording the 10 songs that would comprise Southern Blood. Allman and his solo band cut two songs daily, but because of his health, sessions lasted only a few hours, Was said.

While the sessions were quick — recorded live, often in a take or two — Was said Allman was “fully present” and “at the peak of his interpretive powers." He co-wrote one song, the aching leadoff track titled, My Only True Friend, but spent years deciding what to record.

The choices were no accident: There's Bob Dylan’s Going, Going, Gone, Tim Buckley's Once I Was and Jackson Browne’s Song for Adam.

The latter features the songwriter and Allman’s old friend on harmony vocal.

Was said the song, about a friend of Browne’s who died while mountain climbing, “struck a nerve with Gregg.”

“I know it always reminded him of Duane,” said Was, referring to Allman’s guitar-playing brother, who died in a motorcycle crash in 1971 as the Allmans were reaching stardom.

When it came to recording the third verse, Allman choked up at the lyric, “It seems he stopped singing in the middle of the song.”

“You can hear his voice crack ... he never got the last two lines out,” Was said. There was talk of fixing it somehow, possibly having Browne deliver the line, but the song was among the mixes Allman approved the night before he died.

“To me, it’s the linchpin emotional moment of the album — that’s his exit,” said Was, who first saw the Allman Brothers in his native Detroit in 1971 and wondered, “How does this blond kid sound like a 60-year-old blues guy?”

The elder Allman loomed large in other ways. Choosing to record at Fame Studios, where Duane Allman first gained notice playing guitar for Wilson Pickett, “was a way of incorporating Duane’s spirit into the record,” Was said.

The high point for Scott Sharrard, Allman’s music director and guitarist, was co-writing My Only True Friend. Sharrard said he was staying at Allman’s home and working on songs a few years ago when he “had a vivid dream where Gregg was talking to Duane.”

The guitarist started working on a song he envisioned “as a conversation across the universe between Duane and Gregg.”

“It’s an obvious farewell to the world," said Sharrard. “I never told Gregg the story ... but he realized in the back of his mind what the song was about.”