Happy 80th birthday to Dickey Betts!
“I think with my dad being a fiddle player I kind of naturally liked the uplifting aspects of music. But I was in a band with Gregg Allman, who is basically a melancholy kind of writer, the beautiful melancholy that Gregg would come with. So, I’m looking at what we have here and I’m thinking how do you balance this out? I don’t want to write a song that makes you want to go hang yourself in the bathroom. So, I would really make an effort to write more up songs, to balance the band out. That kind of influenced the way I wrote.”“Duane and I had an understanding, like an old soul kind of understanding of let’s play together. Duane would say, ‘Man, I get so jealous of you sometimes when you burn (a guitar solo) off and I have to follow it,’ and we would joke about it. So that’s kind of Duane and mine’s relationship. It was a real understanding. Like, ‘Come one, this is a helluva band, let’s not hotdog it up’ and that was our understanding, and it was an understanding from previous years of experience. That’s kind of amateur shit, you know, when you start trying to upstage everybody? That was kind of the way the thing built momentum. And then I wrote ‘Elizabeth Reed’ and instead of Duane being jealous of it he said, ‘That is the greatest thing, man.’Wade Tatangelo / Herald Tribune
Photo: Ebet Roberts
Elizabeth Reed - The Dickey Betts & Great Southern band
Elizabeth Reed - The Allman Bros with Greg, Duane and Berry, Butch Jai and Tom
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