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The Allman Brothers Band is a Southern rock band based in Macon, Georgia. The band was formed in Jacksonville, Florida in 1969 by brothers Duane Allman (slide guitar and lead guitar) and Gregg Allman (vocals, organ). While the band has been called the "principal architects of Southern rock", they also incorporate elements of blues-rock and hard rock, and their live shows have jam band-style improvisation and instrumental songs.

In 1971, George Kimball of the Rolling Stone Magazine hailed them as "the best damn rock and roll band" of "the past five years." The band has been awarded eleven Gold and five Platinum albums between 1971 and 2005. Rolling Stone ranked them 52nd on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time in 2004.The band continues to record and tour to the present day.

Duane Allman died not long after the Fillmore East album was certified gold, killed in a motorcycle accident on October 29, 1971 in Macon, Georgia (at the intersection of Hillcrest and Bartlett) when he collided with the rear of a flatbed truck carrying heavy pipe that had turned in front of him. The loss of their leader was hard for the group to bear, but they quickly decided to carry on. The album continued to gain FM radio airplay, with stations even playing 13-minute and 23-minute selections.
Dickey Betts filled Duane's former role in completing the last album he participated in, Eat a Peach. The album was often softer ("Blue Sky", "Little Martha") and wistful in tone ("Melissa", "Ain't Wastin' Time No More"), capped by the 34-minute "Mountain Jam" reverie taken from the Fillmore East concerts. Writer Greil Marcus described parts of Eat a Peach as an "after-the-rain celebration... ageless, seamless... front-porch music stolen from the utopia of shared southern memory."
The group played some concerts as a five-man band, then decided to add Chuck Leavell, a pianist, to gain another lead instrument but without directly replacing Duane. This new configuration debuted on ABC's In Concert late-night television program.

Just over a year later, on November 11, 1972, Berry Oakley died from head injuries he received in another motorcycle accident, only three blocks from the site of Duane's accident (near Napier Avenue and Inverness Street). The common retelling that it was at the exact same site as Duane's death is incorrect, as is the legend that the Eat a Peach album is named for what was being carried by the truck involved in Allman's accident.

Oakley was replaced by Lamar Williams at the end of 1972, in time to finish the next album, Brothers and Sisters (1973).

Dickey Betts was becoming the bandleader. Brothers and Sisters included the group's best known hits, "Ramblin' Man" and "Jessica"; the former reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 as a single, while the latter was a seven-minute instrumental hit. The album was accessible with a sense of urgency, no doubt from the deaths of their band-mates, and the new band exploded nationally.

The Allman Brothers Band had become one of the top concert draws in the country. Probably their most celebrated performance of the era took place on July 28, 1973 at the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen outside Watkins Glen, New York, in a joint appearance with The Grateful Dead and The Band. An estimated 600,000 people made it to the racetrack where this massive outdoor festival took place.

In the wake of the Allman Brothers Band's success during this time, many other Southern rock groups rose to prominence, including the Marshall Tucker Band (who played as the Allman Brothers Band's opening act for many shows on their 1973 Brothers and Sisters tour) and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Another peak of the Allmans' success came on New Year's Eve, 1973, when promoter Bill Graham arranged for a nationwide radio broadcast of their concert from San Francisco's Cow Palace. New arrangements of familiar tunes such as "You Don't Love Me" went out over the airwaves, as the show stretched out over three sets, with Boz Scaggs sitting in, along with Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia and Bill Kreutzmann (The Allmans and Grateful Dead members guested at each others shows multiple times in the early 1970s).