In April 2024, the Clarke County Historical Museum in Jackson, Alabama, invited me to speak at a historical marker dedication for the Allman Brothers Band’s March 1971 arrest in Jackson, Alabama.
Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East1 is as much a local history as anything. I did my best to frame the conversation around the local connections. Not just the arrest, itself, but the ways the Allman Brothers Band’s story is a story of the small-town South. This relates to my own work in state and local history over parts of the last four(!!!) decades.
With Play All Night, I did my best to tell a story that was interesting not only to fans and fellow hardcores, but to general readers. History is all about contingency; it’s about “if, then.” History is also less useful without context. It is the story of their lives in a particular time and place: the small-town South of the 1960s and 70s. One of my goals was to place the Allman Brothers Band’s story in situ.
This video is that talk verbatim. What followed was a tour of the jail, which is now Bigbee Coffee Roasters.2
Below is a transcript, cleaned-up for print for paid readers of Long Live the ABB
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