Giving Credit

When I started working at the post office in Santa Ana, California in 1974, the first thing I bought myself was a decent stereo system and the double album, “The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East.” I’ve loved this band since their inception, witnessed them live many times, and hold them responsible for my hearing loss.

In recent years we’ve visited “The Big House” in Macon, Georgia where the band, their families, and road crew lived from 1970-1973. And we’ve been to their graveyard at Rose Hill Cemetery twice.

My new novel includes a similar band of long-haired white musicians with a Black drummer in the late 1960s. It’s set largely in South Carolina, where my people come from.

In case you don’t know, the Allman Brothers started out in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1969. They were one of the first interracial bands to tour the segregated South, they helped Jimmy Carter become President, and they are credited as being the architects of “Southern Rock.”

Google’s definition of Southern Rock, slightly tweaked by me: “a subgenre of rock music that emerged in the American South during the late 1960s and early 1970s, characterized by a high-octane synthesis of jazz, electric blues, country, and boogie-woogie, frequently driven by twin or triple-lead guitar attacks, multiple drum sets, extended jam sessions, and working-class, Southern cultural storytelling.”

I’m partial to working-class Southern cultural storytelling myself.

I’m also a fan of the Allman Brothers deep respect for Black musicians. When Duane and Gregg Allman were in in high school in Daytona, Florida, they met a Black musician named Floyd Miles. Gregg credited Floyd with teaching him how to sing and Duane credited Floyd for turning him on to the guitar playing of Jimmy Reed.

The Allman Brothers were careful to announce the names of the original blues artist into the microphone before performing their songs. When they were on tour, if drummer Jai Johanny Johanson, aka Jaimoe, wasn’t welcome at a food stop, the band didn’t eat there either. And, unlike many rock and blues bands (Led Zeppelin anyone?) the Allman Brothers listed songwriter names in their album credits.

A new documentary, “Gregg Allman, The Music of My Soul,” is perfectly titled. Gregg Allman’s soul was steeped in music as well as loss, trauma, grief, addiction, sorrow and eventual reconciliation and redemption.

Gregg Allman’s father was shot dead by a hitchhiker when Gregg was two years old and his older brother Duane was three. In order to support her family, Mama Allman put her boys in military school. Gregg grew up feeling abandoned. He idolized Duane—for the first 23 years of his life anyway.

Duane Allman was 24 when he died in a motorcycle accident on October 29, 1971, four days after the “Fillmore East” album pictured above was certified gold. Bass player Berry Oakley died the following year in an eerily similar motorcycle accident. Gregg Allman spiraled into alcoholism and drug abuse. He went to rehab 15 times and married 7 times. He finally quit alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes cold turkey, had a liver transplant, was diagnosed with liver cancer, and died in 2017. He was 69.

Four months before Gregg Allman’s death, the Allman Brothers’ drummer Butch Trucks, committed suicide. Guitarist Dickie Betts died in 2024.

Jaimoe is the only surviving original member.

As the Guardian reported in a recent review of the documentary, “if trauma underlay Allman’s music, the way he used it as a singer, songwriter and musician couldn’t have been more rousing, creative or cathartic, something the performances in the film make abundantly clear.”

Author Jesmyn Ward has also experienced loss, trauma, and grief. She nearly gave up writing after a drunk driver killed her brother, Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home state of Mississippi, and her partner and father of her children died suddenly just before COVID.

I’m so glad she didn’t give up. Her new collection of essays, On Witness and Respair, is wonderful. The word “respair” means the recovery of hope after a period of despair. I think we can all use some of that these days.

Ward credits Mississippi as “the place that inspires me. These are the people, the community, my family, my extended family. They inspire my work and inform the stories that I tell…I felt like working as a writer and living as a writer in Mississippi would keep me honest, because I'm living around the people who I'm writing about.”

Here’s to keeping honest.

I’ve done a few Canvas Rebel interviews in the past. They interview artists, creatives, and entrepreneurs, and ask some good questions. Plus, I like being part of anything that includes the word “rebel.”

This latest interview was centered on “learning a craft” but they also asked me what was most rewarding about being a creative.

I said, “the best part is when someone reaches out and tells me how much they loved my book, how they recommended their book club read it, how they passed it on to their friends and family. My first novel, The Lockhart Women, just celebrated its fifth birthday. My second novel Those People Behind Us will be three years old in October of this year…My novels are still sparking conversations and for that I’m very grateful.”

Thirty-two years ago this month, there was an infamous white Ford Bronco cruising across Southern California freeways. The Lockhart Women were there too.

This novel is not about the passenger in the Bronco. It’s about three women navigating relationships, financial hardships, divorce, regrets, and bad decisions. I have some free eBook versions of the book. If you’d like one, write me back and let me know where you were on June 17, 1994.

My novels are available wherever you like to purchase books, and always on the shelf at Libro Mobile.

For which I am grateful.

I’m also grateful to Rose Molina who gets all the credit for spearheading local indie author events like this “Pop-Up at the Pier.” I’m joining her next Saturday, June 27th, from 11 am to 1 pm at the Seal Beach pier.

Come by if you are in the area and talk books with us.