In Praise of Dickey Betts (Part 1 of ???)

"Goddamn he kicked my ass tonight," Duane Allman

Welcome to another edition of Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture.

This is the first in what I’m sure will be several missives on Forrest Richard “Dickey” Betts, fellow south Florida native, and one of the most important pieces to the Allman Brothers Band puzzle.

But I’m not talking about the ABB today.

ABB Fan Commandments

Along with “Thou Shalt Not Call the Allman Brothers Band Southern rock,” which I addressed already, another ABB fan commandment seems to be

“Dickey Betts never gets enough credit.”

There is truth to the axiom, particularly in real time. Dickey was somewhat overlooked in the first iteration of the Allman Brothers Band.

But I’d argue Dickey is well-known among not only among hardcore Allman Brothers Band fans, but rock music fans in general. Even Rolling Stone, the magazine that everyone loves to hate on, ranked Dickey #58 (2010) and #61 (2015) in their top 100 guitarists lists.

I think a lot of this sentiment comes from Duane’s early efforts touting his virtues. He did it onstage—“A song Dickey Betts wrote from our second album, ‘In Memory of Elizabeth Reed’”—he said on At Fillmore East. And he regularly did it in interviews: “I’m the famous one, man, he’s the good player,” he quipped in 1970.

As I wrote in Play All Night!

“Duane was his partner’s biggest evangelist. Said Dickey, ‘Duane was the flashier player and he’d get more attention. But he used to get mad when they’d overlook me.’

‘Ain’t no way I can fail,’ Duane remarked. ‘Not only do I got it coming on two fucking ends, but Dickey’s doing at least half the shit they think I’m doing.”

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Dickey’s 1974 Headshot

A few months ago, a colleague from the history museum world¹ sent me an image from an exhibition.²

Person with Guitar (Green) by John Baldessari. Photo: LLtABB Archives

I recognized it immediately.

(And later saw the piece myself at the Frist.)

Here’s the original image.

Another of Dickey with Duane’s Dobro³ graces the cover of Highway Call, Dickey’s first solo album.

Highway Call

Highway Call is one of the real gems of the extended catalog of the Allman Brothers Band. It is an acoustic album from one of the acknowledged rock guitar gods of the era.

Dickey’s initial plan was a collaboration with French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, longtime partner of Betts’s hero, the great Django Reinhardt.

Though the project never came to fruition, Dickey found another creative foil at a bluegrass festival: fiddle⁴ player Vassar Clements.

Clements was a well-regarded bluegrass player with pedigree in the bands of Bill Monroe, Jim & Jesse, and Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs.

By the early 70s, Vassar had engaged in several partnerships with rock musicians. In 1972, he was featured on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s⁵ Will the Circle Be Unbroken. One year later, he had joined Old & In the Way, a bluegrass band that featured Jerry Garcia on banjo.⁶ He recorded and toured with Betts in 1974.

The partnership was a full-circle moment for Dickey.

I grew up in South Florida and my family was pretty poor. We weren’t your upper-class whites by any means. Our main thing we’d have to entertain us: All my uncles would come over and we’d sit around the living room on a weekend night and we’d play. That was a big event for me, getting to play. We never did have any percussion. I had a ukulele when I was about seven. Then I started playing around with the mandolin and the banjo. My daddy’s main instrument was the fiddle.

Maybe that’s why I am so fascinated with Vassar’s fiddle. Mostly, though, I think it’s Vassar. Him and I are doing something we’ve never talked about. I’m 31 and Vassar, he’s in his 40s, a stone country player. Me being younger is probably why I got into electric country rock or whatever you call it.

But Vassar never stopped — he hasn’t kept himself in the old school. And I’m not a country picker at all. So me and Vassar are two different kinds of player but we’re the same kind of person.

What’s happening is when he and I get together there’s … there’s a kind of marriage between those two things. When we start exchanging riffs back and forth, we really … we get to talking to one another … and it just feels so goddamn good.”⁷

Highway Call is a result of that merger.

The first side is a mix of laid-back acoustic ballads—“Rain”⁸ and my personal favorite cut on the record “Highway Call”—a Western Swing stomper “Long Time Gone,” and the bluegrass-inflected “Let Nature Sing.”

Side two is all instrumental and it’s a delight. Dickey, Vassar, ABB pianist Chuck Leavell, and pedal steel legend John Hughey cut heads. It’s Western Swing with a healthy dose of psychedelic bluegrass: a 14-minute “Hand Picked” and Vassar’s “Kissimmee Kid.”

• YOUTUBE Highway Call

• SPOTIFY Highway Call

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Dickey’s 1974 American Music Show

In fall/early winter 1974, Dickey embarked on the tour for the record. He had an ambitious concept in mind, one showcased not only his own artistry, but also the depth and breadth of American music.

He called it the American Music Show.

“What I’m trying to do with the show is to put together a concept. I wanted to show an evolution of the music. We start with bluegrass, which is the music that came over to America from Europe. I’d like to start right off with the bluegrass but it’s not working that way. I think you have to come out first and establish that you have an electric band and that you’re going to play. Then you can go back and do something acoustic and the audience will accept it.

“The concept is that you do songs like ‘Joe Clark’ … things that go back to the 1800s. Then we do a Jimmie Rodgers tune which is set in the Thirties and then a couple of Hank Williams numbers, which are up into the Fifties. Then we ease into the electric set. We do some of the tunes that I wrote for the Allman Brothers and some from Highway Call. So the show is about evolution.

Ultimately the tour didn’t do very well. Road manager Willie Perkins always blamed Dickey’s decision to tour as “Richard”—arguing Dickey always struggled with name recognition in a band that didn’t carry his name.

This might have hurt sales, but so did a Gregg Allman solo tour weeks before Walden had scheduled Dickey to play the same venues.

I agree with fellow ABB historian Alan Paul that the concept seemed a little undercooked. “The idea that drove the formation of that band was visionary, but its potential remained unfulfilled. It seems likely that with a bit more refinement and some more gigs under their belt, Betts's unique solo band would have been truly exciting.”⁹

Instead, after spending most of 1974 on hiatus while Gregg and Dickey each took solo tours, the band began recording the follow-up to their #1 hit Brothers and Sisters. Released in 1975, Win, Lose, or Draw, was a somewhat desultory effort overall, “shipping Platinum, returning Gold,” Phil Walden joked.¹⁰

The Allman Brothers Band would break up, seemingly for good, the following May. Two-plus years later, they reunited at the 1978 Capricorn Picnic and in 1979 released Enlightened Rogues.

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Vassar’s Fiddle

Dickey was apparently enthralled by Vassar’s fiddle, and the instrument does have a fascinating backstory. Here’s what Clements told Rolling Stone in 1975:

“They tell me it’s 400-years-old. See this writing here. It looks like Latin but they had it at the Smithsonian and they decided it’s the combination of about three languages. They think it might have been a Gypsy fiddle.

Dickey was joking about it the other night, asking me if he could see it and all. I just gave it to him, and it was funny how it made him nervous.”

Vassar’s website shares more details (and photos)

Several reliable sources speculate the instrument was built by the famous violinmaker, Gaspar Duiffoprugcar in mid to late 1500s. At this point, we feel reasonably certain that it was built by Duiffoprugcar or is an excellent copy of the original.¹¹

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Dickey Betts name drops

Hiss Golden Messenger just released a new album, Jump For Joy. A year(?) ago, MC Taylor, the creative force that is HGM, mentioned Highway Call as an inspiration, so it was cool to hear Dickey’s name in the title track, Hiss Golden Messenger “Jump for Joy”

Jump for joy
See where it gets you
Take it to the highway
Like Dickey Betts
Nothing's a given
In the Book of the Dead or the bed of the living

I got to thinking of other songs that shout-out Dickey. Three came to mind:

1. Dean Ween Group has a killer instrumental track called “Dickie Betts.” Here’s a live version Dean Ween Group “Dickie Betts” 2018.¹²

2. Bob Dylan, in the nearly 17-minute “Murder Most Foul”—his contemplation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “Play, ‘Blue Sky,’ play Dickey Betts”

3. Charlie Daniels has perhaps Betts’s most famous call-out, in his paean to his fellow Southern rockers, “The South’s Gonna Do It Again”—

   “Now people down in Georgia come from near and far
   To hear Richard Betts pickin' on that red guitar.”

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What’s in a name?

Dickey released Highway Call under his given name, Richard. As I noted earlier, Willie Perkins thought this hurt his name recognition and, therefore, sales for the American Music Show tour.

This may be true, but Capricorn Records had a really hard time with Betts’s name.

• On The Allman Brothers Band (1969), he was “Dick” Betts.

• It was “Dicky” in the liners of Idlewild South (1970), At Fillmore East (1971), Eat a Peach (1972), and Wipe the Windows, Check the Oil, Dollar Gas (76).¹³

• He’s “Richard” on Highway Call, the ABB’s Brothers and Sisters (73), and Win, Lose, or Draw (75), and in the program for the Campaign 74 tour.¹⁴

Betts finally settled the matter for good in 1977 when he released the debut of his post-ABB project, Dickey Betts and Great Southern. Enlightened Rogues is the only Capricorn record to originally carry the name Dickey Betts.¹⁵

This is the convention I used in Play All Night.

Random Notes

• Interestingly only to me, perhaps, but Dickey’s name has never officially appeared as “Dickie”—except in two cases: label copy for the Baldessari piece (see footnote 2) and the Dean Ween Group song above.

• This piece in Relix magazine leaves circle unbroken in a lot of ways. (And the Vassar reference is simply too good not to share.) “Duane Betts: Staring at the Sun.”

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Thanks for reading Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture.

Be well.

1. What’s up Chris?

2. The Virginia Museum for Fine Arts curated the exhibit, Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art. Here’s the label for the piece:

The printers of Baldessari's Person with Guitar series commented that “John never cared to focus on who the guitarists were; he found it far more interesting if the resulting image was visually important.: The artist indeed cropped out the performers' heads in each of the prints. We do know, however, that for some of the works, he used mass-produced celebrity photographs for source material. The guitarist in this work, for example, is Dickie Betts, the longtime guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band, who here appears in a promotional photograph for his 1974 album, Highway Call.

3. Thanks www.groundguitar.com for this great rundown on the guitar Duane played on “Little Martha.”

4. The best definition for the difference between a fiddle and a violin: “Depends on if you’re selling or buying.” Ya tu sabes.

5. Don’t forget, the Dirt Band is why Duane and Gregg were in LA as Hour Glass in 1967-8.

6. Banjo was Garcia’s first instrument.

7. Tim Cahill, “Gregg Allman & Dickey Betts: Nothing Matters But the Fever” Rolling Stone January 16, 1975.

8. Chuck Leavell included “Rain” in his setlists for years and sang it in Betts, Hall, Leavell, Trucks “Rain—BHLT”

9. Alan Paul, Brothers and Sisters.

10. He’s saying 500,000 pre-orders were returned.

11. See Vassar’s Fiddle.

12. Dean Ween on the inspiration for the track.

13. And the flyer for their first gigs in Macon, May 2-3, 1969.

14. Though Bill Graham introduced him as “Richard” on the album’s first track.

ps: Wrote about that overlooked album here:

Wipe the Windows, Check the Oil, Dollar Gas

15. Some rereleases have updated the spelling to “Dickey” in the liner notes.