ON HIS SOLO DEBUT, THE ALLMAN BROTHERS-PEDIGREED GUITARIST EMERGES WITH A VISION ALL HIS OWN
By Jim Beaugez
AS THE ONLY son of Dickey Betts and the namesake of Duane Allman, his father’s legendary foil in the Allman Brothers Band, Duane Betts has spent the past two decades honing his craft between the massive legacy he inherited and the contemporary music he grew up on.
Now, with his debut solo album, Wild & Precious Life, Betts reckons with his father’s legacy and makes considerable strides toward creating his own. “The idea was to take the kind of playing I come from and intertwine it with some cool songs that have a modern kind of flavor to them,” he says. “I think we accomplished that.”
Betts cut his teeth playing alongside his father in his backing band, Great Southern, and later toured as a member of Dawes and co-founded the Allman Betts Band with Devon Allman. For his solo debut, he recruited longtime sidemen Johnny Stachela and bassist Berry Duane Oakley and recorded at Swamp Raga Studio, the Jacksonville haunt of friends Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi.
Trucks makes an appearance on the jammy “Stare at the Sun,” a 6/8-meter tour de force named in reference to the late, elder Betts that finds the trio of guitar slingers stacking licks toward the song’s crescendo. “Derek said something about my dad being one of those players that’s not afraid to stare dir
