Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture with historian Bob Beatty

Here’s a video intro to the third playlist that accompanies Chapter 4 of Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East. The Play All Night Playlist Project : Hour Glass Repertoire. One thing that became VERY apparent as I researched this time in Duane’s life, was the huge gap between Hour Glass as a live band and how Dallas Smith of Liberty Records produced them in the studio. The ba...

Episode Overview Lamar Williams Jr. is the son of Allman Brothers bassist Lamar Williams, and he’s spent two decades building his own place inside the Allman Brothers’ extended musical family. I talked with him about The Offering , the long-gestating album with Oteil Burbridge recorded in Iceland, and about the lineage that carried him from Macon’s church choirs to Butch’s Les Brers, the Big Band...

At Fillmore East was released 55 years ago, July 6, 1971. My book Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East is the story of that album and the biography of the Allman Brothers Band’s sound. In celebration of the anniversary, I excerpted Chapters 12 and 13 of Play All Night in four posts. Part 1: “The Allman Brothers did it all. On stage they were giants.” Part 2: “Some of the gre...

Join me and past Conversations from the Crossroads guest Jeff Kollath to celebrate the 55th anniversary of rock’s greatest live record, At Fillmore East, which I count among the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th century. Join us here: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/267211 🍄 Sharing is caring. 🍄 🍄 Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East 🍄 BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT Bro...

Episode Overview Sue Ferentinos and I have been friends for eighteen years. When I needed an editor for Play All Night! —someone I trusted, someone who came to the Allman Brothers completely fresh—she was the call I made. She gave me a sharp outside eye, a historian’s instincts, and the willingness to tell me when I’d hit it and how to make it better if I hadn’t. That collaboration shaped the book...

On Global Beatles Day (June 25, 2026) , I’m ABBsolutely thrilled to bring you this episode with Chris O’Dell, who was on the rooftop the day of the Beatles’ last performance. It’s far from her only incredible encounter with rock & roll. Though podcast episodes are typically pre-released for paid members of Long Live the ABB , putting this behind a paywall was inappropriate on Global Beatles Day. T...

Episode Overview Richard Josey and I have been in conversation for close to twenty years. He began his history career at Colonial Williamsburg as a pre-teen, portraying free and enslaved Africans well before we openly discussed the impact of interpretation of the enslaved experience on the interpreters themselves. Richard built Collective Journeys as a practice for helping institutions move from t...

The livestream failed miserably. John & I recorded the conversation anyway. Episode overview John Lynskey returned to the Crossroads to talk through Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul . The movie documents well by Gregg’s duality as a singer of a jam band who hated long guitar solos, his late-career rebirth in sobriety, his long career fronting the Allman Brothers Band, and Jimmy Carter’s friendsh...

I had no idea what I was walking into when I saw the Allman Brothers Band for the first time, November 13, 1993. I walked in expecting moldy oldies; I left with my mind blown. My life has truly never been the same. I caught the second of a three-show run through Florida. I had no idea Dickey had just returned from a leave of absence. The band was fierce, powerful. Dickey was simply outstanding. Wa...

Greetings from Stockholm. We’re visiting our daughter Tyler, who’s here for a study abroad. While touring Scandinavia, this adage/wisdom from my cousin Brad came to mind. Here’s the full conversation: Thanks for reading, y’all. Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community. MUSHROOM MAGICIANS (Founding Members): Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty PA...

The Unending Conversation The first time I encountered Kenneth Burke’s concept of the Unending Conversation was in 1997. It was my first semester of graduate school in a class called, Modern Rhetorical Theory. I’ve carried the ideal that life is an unending conversation ever since. It’s a central precept of my teaching, my writing, my way of seeing the world. The good thing is, I’m surrounded by p...

The Allman Brothers Band’s story intersects with my own. I grew up in a South still shaped by segregation, Massive Resistance, and decisions that kept Black communities excluded from the means of power. The integrated Allman Brothers Band offered a powerful informal protest against the South's racial mores. How I found liberation in history. FULL EPISODE This video is an excerpt from a recent Conv...

A clip from a recent podcast with John Lynskey, where we talked about the Allman Brothers Band as the ultimate team—players locked in with improvised intensity that very few bands ever match. Put simply, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That ethos was a founding principle of the band, and it inspired both of our professional lives as teachers and historians. When our conversation tu...

Episode Overview John Lynskey taught history at Miami’s Columbus High School for thirty years, coached for twenty, and served as assistant principal for seven. Upon retirement, he moved to Macon to work hands-on with the Big House Museum, where he had served on the board since day one. He has produced more than two dozen archival releases for the Allman Brothers Band, co-wrote Allman Joy: Keeping...

Episode Overview A native of Miami, Sebastian Garcia’s parents emigrated from Colombia with a clear theory of his success in America: a career in medicine, law, or engineering. He entered the University of Central Florida as a biomedical sciences major and lasted two semesters before adding a second major in history. His work spans a narrative series about the First Seminole War and his master’s t...

Episode Overview Jessica Dawkins grew up on a rural Indiana farm, raised by a single mother born in East Tennessee and a grandmother whose family had lived on a mountain ridge straddling the Tennessee/North Carolina border for two centuries. When Indian Removal came, the men walked West and died on the trail. The women and children hid in caves for four months. What followed for generations was po...

Episode Overview Adam Choit runs The Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Band Podcast —hundreds of episodes in, built from a simple compulsion to share a band he couldn’t stop thinking about. That impulse is the throughline of this conversation: what it means to love music so completely that you build something around it, and why that act of building pulls others in. Adam loved TTB so much he built a podca...

Warren Haynes turns 66 today. It’s hard for me to even describe how much Warren has influenced me as a fan of the Allman Brothers, as a student of the Allman Brothers, as a scholar of the Allman Brothers. Haynes has been an ABBsolute constant from the minute I discovered the band in 1993. Back then, everybody talked about the magic that the band had recaptured in the Dreams reunion and subsequent...

Episode Overview Sean Gaillard discovered the Beatles in fifth grade when his British teacher demanded he listen to them as penance for foul language. When he first found the Allman Brothers, he saw Jaimoe front and center in the Brothers and Sisters gatefold. These entry points were invitations, and Sean has spent a lifetime of practice around the idea that the music we love isn’t just soundtrack...

On what would’ve been Berry Oakley’s 78th birthday, I want to stop and acknowledge his IMMENSE contribution to the Allman Brothers Band. [Bonus preview episode of Conversation from the Crossroads for paid subscribers.] Lead Bass Berry laid the foundation with rock-solid bass, something his successors in the band—Lamar Williams, David Goldflies, Allen Woody, Oteil Burbridge—brought to the group in...

[ Conversation from the Crossroads bonus episode: East Village, NYC] I found this video from 2024 while searching for something else in my archives. I stop and visit 105 Second Avenue, the site of Fillmore East every time I go to New York. The East Village was not only ground zero for the Allman Brothers Band’s triumph at Bill Graham’s legendary venue, it was also my own introduction to New York C...

Episode Overview It was a real honor when Big Rick—host of Rock Talk Studio podcast—put Play All Night on his annual best-of list. We’ve been fellow travelers in the rock & roll media world ever since. Rick reviews rock and roll books and documentaries every week on Rock Talk Studio , which means he reads about thirty books a year and watches somewhere around fifteen docs. That’s history graduate...

The Conversation from the Crossroads podcast has launched! Thanks for all of the comments and the love. All six (to date) episodes are here www.longlivetheabb.com/podcast . Stay tuned, lots more coming. And while I have your attention… I know you wanna know how to best support my efforts. Upgrade to a monthly or annual membership. Paid memberships testify to our shared love of music and its meanin...

Episode Overview Ahmad Ward and I have been rolling strong since the early days of the pandemic, when a small cohort of museum leaders got together just trying to make sense of things. He is a historian, a museum leader, a Southerner, a father, and one of the most honest people I know. Our Crossroads Ahmad and I met in the history museum field and stayed close because of what the work demands—hone...

Episode Overview TY Yoken produced Duane Allman Anthology Volume II . He got the job through sheer effort: an FM DJ and Duane fanatic who fed a steady diet of Duane tracks to the folks at Capricorn Records. His efforts made the case there was a second record’s worth of Duane Allman anthology material. When Phil Walden eventually called offering the opportunity to write the liner notes, TY said yes...