Dickey Be s, hit-cra ing mainstay of Allman Brothers Band, dies at 80

Dickey Betts, the singer-guitarist who co-founded the genre-defining Southern rock group the Allman Brothers Band and wrote several of the group’s most enduring compositions, including “Ramblin’ Man,” died April 18 at his home in Osprey, Fla. He was 80.

His family announced the death on his website but did not cite a cause. His manager, David Spero, said that Mr. Betts had cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He had been treated in 2018 for a brain injury following a fall in his backyard and canceled a tour following a stroke.

“Ramblin’ Man” (1973), which some bandmates initially deemed too country for their repertoire, became the group’s only top-10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. The lyrics, set against a bouncy, upbeat melody, expressed the resigned and unrepentant wanderlust of a man “born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus rollin’ down Highway 41.” “When it comes to leaving,” the song went, “I hope you understand that I was born a ramblin’ man.”

Mr. Betts wrote several of the group’s most enduring compositions, such as the jazz-inflected instrumental “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and the pastoral love song “Blue Sky.”

The Allman Brothers Band built its style on guitar interplay between leader Duane Allman and the highly melodic fretwork of Mr. Betts, whose influences included gypsy jazz musician Django Reinhardt and bluesman B.B.

King.

Allman and Mr. Betts would play a theme in harmony before cutting loose with their own solos or answering each other’s licks in a call-and-response style. By the mid-1970s, a wave of Southern Rock acts including Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Charlie Daniels Band and the Outlaws borrowed heavily from their twin-guitar format.

At their popular peak in the 1970s, the Allman Brothers Band played nearly 300 concerts a year, grossed between $50,000 and $100,000 a show and crisscrossed the country on a private Boeing 720. When not touring, they shared quarters in a Tudor-style mansion in Macon, Ga.

The band survived the 1971 death of Duane Allman following a motorcycle accident, then broke up twice – largely because of increasing acrimony between singer and organist Gregg Allman (Duane’s brother) and Mr. Betts. Both men struggled with substance abuse.

Mr. Betts blossomed as a singer and songwriter on the Allman Brothers’ 1973 release “Brothers and Sisters.” During the recording sessions, founding bassist Berry Oakley died after a motorcycle crash. Pianist Chuck Leavell and a new bassist, Lamar Williams, joined the lineup to finish the recording.

In a retrospective review, Rolling Stone magazine praised Mr. Betts for “increasing the country light and buoyancy in the Allmans’ electric-blues stampede” with his songs such as “Ramblin’ Man,” “Pony Boy” and “Jessica.” “Pony Boy,” an acoustic showcase for Mr. Betts’s slide guitar, recounted family lore about a hard-drinking uncle who rode a horse home from a tavern to avoid a DUI.

Fatherhood inspired “Jessica,” an instrumental showcase for his nimble fretwork.

“With ‘Jessica,’ I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t quite find it,” Mr. Betts told Guitar World magazine. “Then my little daughter, Jessica, crawled into the room, and I just started playing to her, trying to capture the feeling of her crawling and smiling. That’s why I named it after her.”

The next year, he recorded an acclaimed solo album, “Highway Call,” credited to Richard Betts, with guest appearances by fiddler Vassar Clements and steel guitarist John Hughey. Several songs acknowledged a yearning for a simpler rural life that perhaps was a reflection of the strain of relentless touring.

Critics dismissed the band’s next album, “Win, Lose or Draw” (1975), on which many of its members recorded their parts separately, as below the band’s standards. That same year, Gregg Allman married pop singer Cher and moved to Beverly Hills. Then in 1976, Allman, caught up in a federal drug case against a supplier, testified against the band’s roadie in a plea bargain for immunity. The band broke up.

Mr. Betts stayed busy, doing recording sessions