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Article snippet: All of the mythic South was in Gregg Allman’s music: soul, blues, country, gospel, rock ’n’ roll, jazz. The roadhouse, the back porch, the juke joint, the church, the farm, the highway. It was in the weary, determined drawl of his voice, rising to a sustained, honeyed ache or rasping with stubborn gumption. It was in the way his keyboard playing took turns steering the Allman Brothers Band and creating its backdrop: the Hammond organ that could be greasy or celestial, the piano that summoned hymns, honky-tonk, boogie-woogie and jazz. (He played serviceable guitar, too.) And it was in the songs Mr. Allman, who died Saturday at 69, wrote, putting terse, bluesy riffs behind lyrics that spoke of endless troubles, domestic and universal, and the will to survive them. “Bearing sorrow, having fun,” as he put it in “Melissa.” It all sounded natural and rooted, straight from the Georgia soil, when the Allman Brothers Band unveiled its musical hybrid on its self-titled 1969 debut album. It was music that would become a foundation for both the sturdy structures of southern rock and the far-flung extrapolations of jam bands. There was radical effort behind the band’s seeming ease. The Allman Brothers Band had thoroughly figured out the segues among all of the styles they merged: where rhythms could coincide and metamorphose, where simple harmonies could support jazzy elaboration, how a soul revue’s horn lines or a country band’s fiddle could be translated onto the band’s gui... Link to the full article to read more