Gregg Allman, Influential Force Behind the Allman Brothers Band, Dies at 69 -<br />By BILL FRISKICS-WARRENMAY 27, 2017<br />Gregg Allman, a founding member of the Allman Brothers Band, the incendiary group<br />that inspired and gave shape to both the Southern rock and jam-band movements, died on Saturday at his home in Savannah, Ga.<br />His death was announced in a statement on Mr. Allman’s official website.<br />Duane also worked as a session guitarist in Muscle Shoals, Ala.,<br />and New York, recording with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, the saxophonist King Curtis and other artists before talking Gregg into becoming the lead singer for Mr. Trucks’s band.<br />The band’s lead singer and keyboardist, Mr. Allman was one of the principal architects of a taut, improvisatory fusion of blues, jazz, country and rock<br />that — streamlined by inheritors like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band — became the Southern rock of the 1970s.<br />The group, which originally featured Mr. Allman’s older brother, Duane, on lead<br />and slide guitar, was also a precursor to a generation of popular jam bands, like Widespread Panic and Phish, whose music features labyrinthine instrumental exchanges.<br />“Low Country Blues,” Mr. Allman’s sixth studio recording as a solo artist, was nominated for a Grammy Award for best blues album in 2011.<br />He taught me to be absolutely sure of every note you hit, and to hit it solid.”<br />Mr. Allman also enjoyed an enduring, if intermittent, career as a solo artist, both while<br />a member of the Allman Brothers Band and during periods when he was away from the group.
