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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 largest hit, “Ramblin’ Man,” died on Thursday morning at his dwelling in Osprey, Fla. He was 80.
His loss of life was introduced on social media by his household. Mr. Betts’s manager David Spero mentioned in an announcement to Rolling Stone journal that the trigger was most cancers and continual obstructive pulmonary illness.
Despite 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 acquired an added flash of the limelight in 1975 when he married Cher — Mr. Betts was a guiding drive 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.
Although 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.
With his chiseled facial options, Wild West mustache and gunfighter demeanor, Mr. Betts actually appeared the a part of the star. And he performed like one.
Still, balancing lead duties with a future legend proved a problem. “It was laborious to not try to have simply this whole contest on a regular basis, attempting to outdo, as a result of we had been each taking part in lead,” Mr. Betts mentioned in a 1981 interview. “The solely method that may work is that if someone lays again just a bit bit.”
“If I had that jealousy and acquired concerned in it an excessive amount of,” he mentioned, “it simply wouldn’t have labored. So in that sense it was form of laborious. But, hell, I realized extra by way of these years than in all probability some other interval of my taking part in profession.”
A whole obituary will comply with.
