The Murder that Haunts Macon’s Music: A Preface
On a cold December night in 1949, Bill Allman was killed. This series follows the ripple effects — from courtroom to clemency, from grief to guitars — and the music that rose from it all... music that outlasted everyone who played it. Read the full series introduction here.
“Duane and I both knew, from the most fragile age, that death is real and sudden and the loss never ends.”
— Galadrielle Allman, Please Be with Me
When you read about the Allman Brothers Band, you expect legends: guitars like lightning, voices rough as gravel and sweet as gospel, Southern roads at night, stories traded over hotel bars and gravesites. You’ll find all that here — but this series also peels back the myth.
I grew up just outside Macon, Georgia. I knew every word of every Southern Rock song before I really knew what those words meant. I bought my first Allman Brothers t-shirt at the Macon Mall as a teenager in the ’70s, proud that this wild sound came from our part of the South. What I didn’t realize then was how deep the roots ran — through Jacksonville, where so much Southern Rock was born, and back to Nashville, where Duane and Gregg drew their first breath.
Like so much Southern history, this is a migration story: roots running through red clay and river towns, through roadhouses and war wounds, through segregated stages, gospel choirs, and juke joints. It’s a story about the brilliance that changed American music — and the damage it did to the people who made it, and the ones who loved them anyway.
This is not a takedown, and it’s not a worship service. It’s a witness — to fathers who vanished, sons who chased freedom only to be chained by fear of being left, women and children who carried the cost of wild men with guitars and promises they couldn’t keep.
If you came here looking for setlists or tour timelines, you’ll find those beautifully done in other books: Midnight Riders by Scott Freeman, As I Recall by Larry Steele, Gregg’s own My Cross to Bear, Alan Walden’s Southern Man, Willie Perkins’ books, Paul Hornsby’s Fix It in the Mix. This is something different: closer to the heart than the stage lights.
Like Galadrielle Allman’s memoir, Please Be with Me: A Song for my Father, Duane Allman, this series searches for the human threads that run alongside the songs — the wounds that never healed, the ghosts that never left, the love that never stopped trying to make sense of it all. I’m not here to catch anyone failing or prove who was hero or devil. I’m here to say: they were people. Brilliant, broken, beautiful people.
To truly love this music is to understand what it was born from: postwar wounds, Southern contradictions, brotherhood and betrayal, endless highways and the ache of never being home enough to belong to anyone.
Some readers will bristle at the hard parts. Others will find comfort in seeing these men made human again. I hope you’ll find both — the brilliance that can’t be denied, the mess that can’t be erased, and the courage to hold both truths in your hands.
If you came here for saints, you won’t find them. If you came here for devils, you might catch a glimpse of one — in Buddy Green, the man who fired a single shot and set this whole story in motion. The rest you’ll find are brothers. Fathers. Sons. Lovers. Geniuses. Addicts. Runaways. Makers of something that outlasted them all — songs we still play when the sun goes down and the road winds on.
This story follows the arc of the South itself: wounds handed down, stories stitched together, music rising up from the places hurt most. It’s for the ones who stayed behind to remember, for the ones who lived to tell it straight, for the ones still trying to break the cycle and heal what the music alone could never fix.
Come on in.
Let’s stand here together — clear-eyed, soft-hearted, ready to listen.
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths — even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, stray cats, places she loves, and the wild gospel that hums in red clay soil, you’ll find her out listening for the next thing worth saying.
