Robert “Bobby” Golden was part of Stillwater’s celebrated triple-guitar frontline, helping create the hard-driving sound that took the Warner Robins band from rehearsal rooms onto Southern rock stages during the Capricorn Records era.
Alongside fellow guitarists Mike Causey and Rob Walker, Bobby helped shape a musical identity rooted equally in precision and the restless creativity flowing through Middle Georgia’s music scene in the 1970s.
But like many musicians from Warner Robins’ first great wave of Southern rock players, Bobby’s story stretches far beyond the brief window of record deals and touring mythology.
Bobby Golden's fingerprints are all over Middle Georgia music, whether people realize they're seeing his name or not. As lead guitarist for Stillwater, he helped invent a three‑guitar Southern rock sound rooted in Warner Robins and Macon, but his story starts earlier, with a family band, a trumpet, and a willingness to play anything if it got people moving.
Born Robert William Golden in Detroit on July 24, 1952, his family moved to Perry when he was a small child. He attended Perry High School in Houston County, the same system that produced his future bandmates a few miles up the road in Warner Robins.
Music came from both directions in the Golden household, though not in ways you might expect. His father Iverson "Duggan" Golden, or Duke to everyone who knew him, had played in a country band as a young man in Milledgeville, Georgia, in the 1940s with his uncles, performing local dances before the war called him into service as an Army Air Force captain in World War II.
A Georgia boy who ended up stationed in the North, Duke was in Detroit when Bobby was born on July 24, 1952. When the family eventually settled in the Houston County area near Robins Air Force Base, they planted roots that would last the rest of their lives.
His mother Mildred Allen Golden, a native of Grand Junction, Colorado, was the other pillar. She spent her working years as a Civil Service employee at Robins AFB, while Duke served by working on base in airfield operations. Between the two of them, they built a household that gave four children health benefits, community standing, and enough financial footing that a father could also serve as his son's manager without the whole enterprise being a gamble.
In Middle Georgia in the 1960s and ‘70s, Robins Air Force Base was an economic anchor and the Golden family had two employees planted firmly there.
Duke and Mildred raised four children in that Houston County household: Ike, Kenny, Bobby, and Margaret. The three brothers turned the house into something of a rehearsal space and launching pad almost from the start.
Duke's Boys
Duke and Mildred had married simply, on courthouse steps, a beginning that suits people who build their lives around showing up rather than ceremony. A photograph Bobby posted on Mother's Day 2023, captioned "My mom Mildred with my dad 'Duke' on the courthouse steps right after they were married," shows two young people at a threshold, unaware of the house on Hunt Road, the band, and the decades of music still ahead of them. The word Heavenly in Bobby's caption says what it needs to without elaboration; Mildred was gone by then, and he still marked the day.
Their household, filled with children, instruments, and amplifiers, became part of the foundation on which Stillwater would build. But to understand why Duke threw himself into it the way he did, you have to remember he had played guitar himself with his uncles. That part of his life had ended when he put on the uniform. It didn't disappear wholly, though, because he continued to love music and would always return to it, even if he stopped playing guitar.
When Bobby asked his father to teach him a song on guitar at age twelve, Duke had a private reason to say yes that went beyond fatherly indulgence. He knew what it felt like to want a life in music.
In a 1974 interview with the Macon Telegraph, Duke described his relationship with Bobby in terms that go well past managing a teenager's hobby: "There's never been a generation gap," he said. "I was raised right alongside Bobby." That’s a parent who recognized himself in what Bobby was doing, and decided to go along for the whole ride.
Bobby had started even earlier on trumpet at eight or nine in school, so he arrived at the guitar already understanding how melody moves through an ensemble and how a horn player thinks about space.
Bobby's musical education extended beyond his father's guitar lessons. At night, he listened to AM radio, picking up WLS out of Chicago and absorbing everything from the Beatles and Rolling Stones to the Beach Boys. In Middle Georgia, he was equally drawn to the soul and rhythm and blues of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. Those influences would help prepare him for the stylistic leaps from the Golden Boys to Golden Arcade, Coldwater Army, and eventually Stillwater.
Bobby eventually took lessons from Boudleaux Allen, a guitar instructor who Mike Causey describes as “a monster on guitar.” Boudleaux, now in his 80s, taught in Warner Robins and at Bibb Music in Macon, and since his retirement he’s still been living in Warner Robins.
When he surpassed his teacher within months of picking up the guitar, Duke didn't step back. He stepped further in. By the time Bobby was fourteen and being paid to play, Duke had become the family band's personal manager, booking shows, looking after the boys, and keeping watch over sons who were already serious about the work.
Eventually he extended that role to Stillwater. In the same 1974 interview, he made clear that the band guys were his sons too, not only by proximity but by intention.
Duke's role as manager was never just paperwork and phone calls. He had just finished building out an old farmhouse on their property where most of the band lived, their unofficial home base from 1975 to 1983, what they called The Shack.
The property sat off Hunt Road near Kathleen, the small community tucked between Warner Robins and Perry that felt genuinely rural in those years. Country enough that a farmhouse full of young musicians and weekend parties barely registered on anyone's radar.
Kathleen is different now. Residential developments are filling in that same landscape, and it has become exactly the kind of place Middle Georgia families want to put down roots, which gives those old rehearsal grounds a strange new context. What was once the edge of things is now the center of somewhere.
There were bands everywhere in Middle Georgia in those years, Bobby remembers. Teen clubs, sock hops, USO clubs on the base, and enough weekend gigs to keep a teenager busy every Friday and Saturday night. He credits the Beatles on Ed Sullivan as inspiring thousands of bands to pop up the very next day, boys grabbing instruments to be like the Beatles and have screaming girls as fans. The bands in Middle Georgia weren't all great, he'll tell you plainly, but they were good enough, and the scenes they created mattered.
What was remarkable was how seriously those young musicians took each other. Technology was changing fast, including equipment, sound systems, lighting rigs. Bands made a habit of going to see what the others were doing. If a band had a light show, you went and watched, and then you went home and figured out how to get one too.
Bobby remembers being in a battle of the bands at the Macon Coliseum and watching a young Ronnie Hammond perform with his band, The Celtics, who came in first place. Bobby didn't meet Ronnie properly until later, but he saw him perform around town in that music world, at arm's length at first and then on the same stages. He also remembers seeing Sebie Lacey's band, Prisoners of Time, playing around Warner Robins, and they were popular enough that you noticed them.
As teenagers, the Golden boys formed groups. First The Golden Boys, playing whatever the radio gave them, from the Bee Gees to the Doors, with Kenny on bass while Bobby pushed the band toward better gigs. Their first outside show came in 1967, playing for airmen at the USO club, part of the Air Force base circuit already weaving itself through Warner Robins' music.
The Golden Arcade band followed, a soul revue built around two Black lead singers and a horn section, playing fraternity parties all over the South. They were an integrated band in the late‑1960s Deep South, holding rooms full of white college students with a sound that had more Stax in it than anything on Top 40 radio.
Golden Arcade expanded into Coldwater Army around 1969, mixing horn‑driven Chicago‑style rock with original material. Coldwater Army recorded Peace on Agape Records in 1971, when Bobby was seventeen. The album never broke out, but the band logged serious studio time in Macon and gave him an early education in how to hold a stage and shape a set.
Coldwater Army had a second album recorded and ready, and the band drove to Nashville to mix it when Bobby was 19, but when the arrangement between their management and Starday-King Records fell apart, the album was shelved. It was not the last time a Stillwater-adjacent project would get that close and go no further. But Bobby had the time of his life being in Nashville, mixing those songs.
One of the musicians Bobby met during those early Warner Robins years was keyboardist Bob Spearman, not yet a bandmate but an airman stationed at Robins Air Force Base. Their friendship predated Coldwater Army and would eventually extend through Stillwater's recording years, another small thread in the larger base‑to‑band network feeding trained musicians into Middle Georgia.
Duke Golden, Bobby’s dad, who assisted and supported Stillwater during the band’s formative years.
The Dorm Room Decision
When Bobby arrived at Georgia College in Milledgeville, he and Mike Causey ended up in the same dormitory. Two guitarists who already knew what they wanted, sharing a hallway. It didn't take long.
Each of them had his own private reason for leaving. For Mike, it was a deal made with his parents, asking them to give him one year to try music, and he’d go back to college if it doesn't work. He never intended to honor the second half of that promise.
Bobby had drawn number four in the Vietnam draft lottery, putting him near the front of the line for possible induction. College had offered him a deferment. When Nixon ended the draft, the equation changed overnight. "I don't need to go to college anymore," Bobby thought. "No chance of being drafted."
With a band taking shape and the prospect of a musical career ahead, Bobby made his choice.
They dropped out together and formed Stillwater at the beginning of 1973, a mutual commitment, as Bobby put it, "to give the music a full-time shot."
The Shack and the Sound
The band of seven that coalesced around that commitment nearly signed elsewhere. Capricorn moved only when it learned Atlantic Records was interested and Phil Walden realized another label was circling.
During the Capricorn years and well into the early 1980s, Stillwater practiced at Duke Golden's house off Hunt Road, where they kept their equipment set up in a room that was always ready. Duke had built out the rehearsal space for his musical family and then when Stillwater came along, they used it.
Just down the road on the same property sat The Shack, where most of the band lived at one point or another. Bobby was there until he got engaged in the late 1970s, Sebie was there until he married and moved across the street from Duke's house. Al never lived there. Women, Bobby notes with a dry smile, never would have. The place was old and only semi-habitable, the kind of quarters that work perfectly well for young men who spend most of their time rehearsing and playing elsewhere.
Every weekend they were home, there were parties. Not jams, which only happened at Duke’s a couple of times. Mostly just the natural gathering of people around people who were happy to be there. Sometimes if they arrived home late on a Sunday, cars would be lining the road and folks milling about waiting to start a party.
On Stillwater's first album, critics raved about "guitars the way we like them from Mike Causey, Rob Walker, and Bobby Golden," wrapped around melodic vocals from Sebie and Jimmy and a rhythm section "many bands would like to have." Bobby's guitar is a big part of that sound with fluid leads, thick harmonies, and the kind of parts that feel inevitable once you've heard them, even though someone had to dream them up first.
Bobby’s a player, a writer, and arranger, too. AllMusic’s credits list him on Stillwater records as guitar, background vocals, and composer, and fan histories tie him closely to key tracks like "Out on a Limb" and "Sam's Jam."
Ask him his favorite Stillwater recording, though, and he points to "Women" from I Reserve the Right. "Technically one of the best recorded tunes," he says, and the solo on it satisfied him the way only the songs he fought hardest to get right ever do.
All of those pre-Stillwater and Stillwater antics ran for years through Duke and Mildred's house. The equipment stayed set up in a room that was always ready, and on weekends people gathered, not because anything was planned, but because Duke and Mildred had decided, consciously or not, to keep the doors open.
The Triple Whammy
In 1983, Bobby faced a triple whammy. His father died. His marriage ended in divorce. And Stillwater, with Capricorn gone and no new opportunities opening up, was reaching the end of its first chapter. Like his bandmates, Bobby faced the reality that it was time to build a life beyond the band.
Of the three, Duke's death sits at the center.
Duke was more than a parent. He had been Bobby’s manager since Bobby was fourteen years old, the man who taught him his first guitar chord and then spent decades helping build the musical world surrounding his son. The house off Hunt Road, the rehearsal spaces, The Shack, the open-door atmosphere around the band; Duke helped create all of it. When he died in 1983, Bobby lost not only his father, but one of the central figures who had made his musical life possible.
Near Christmas 1983, Stillwater played what was supposed to be its final show, a suggestion Sebie gets credit for making. After seventeen years of performing, Bobby was exhausted and ready for a different kind of challenge. He returned to college, setting aside regular gigs to concentrate on his education and the career ahead. He barely picked up his guitar for those four years.
But that final Stillwater show turned out not to be final after all. The band members continued gathering for reunion concerts, eventually making them an annual tradition. Bobby never missed one. Even as their individual lives took them in different directions, those concerts kept the musicians connected to one another and to the fans who had followed them from the beginning.
The years of constant rehearsals, recording sessions, and touring were behind him, but Bobby hadn't lost the band. The music and the friendships that came with it remained part of his life.
The triple whammy wasn’t just three bad things happening at once. They were the simultaneous end of the life Duke had helped him build, from a talent show guitar lesson in Houston County to stages shared with the Allman Brothers and the Charlie Daniels Band.
Bobby is grateful for his father’s support and, looking back, grateful for the decisions he and his bandmates made during those years that brought them into a secure future. Stillwater's survival as a group of living, healthy men is not something he takes for granted. He'll note, carefully and without drama, what happened to some of the bands they shared stages with. Molly Hatchet lost members to addiction and tragedy. Of the original Allman Brothers Band, only Jaimoe remains. The original lead singer of Atlanta Rhythm Section is the sole surviving member of that lineup.
Ronnie Hammond, a longtime friend of Stillwater who sometimes joined their reunion performances, survived a police shooting but died of heart failure in 2011. "Lots of musicians when not on stage did not have a great life," Bobby says. "They'd create bad habits on stage that followed them afterward."
Stillwater, for reasons that include luck and the choices these men made, mostly escaped that fate. "We didn't make money," Bobby says. "But we got a little fame out of it." Said plainly, without bitterness, it sounds like exactly the right accounting.
And underneath that accounting, if you listen for it, is Duke. The man who said he was raised right alongside his son and understood what music cost. He gave everything he had anyway. Duke had also given Bobby a high enough platform to leap from and when he lept, he kept going.
The Road Back
By 1983, with Capricorn gone and no new opportunities opening up, the members of Stillwater faced the painful reality that their dream of making a living together through music had come to an end. They agreed to disband as a full-time working group and find other ways to support themselves.
Bobby returned to college, earned a degree in electrical engineering, and built a career developing software for military aircraft, including the F-15 and F-22.
But he hadn't given up performing. From 1991 to 1999, Bobby played alongside Al Scarborough and Bob Spearman in The Wall, a cover band that could move from the Beatles to the Allman Brothers with ease. He later spent a couple of years in Italy working on the Eurofighter. After returning to Georgia, he worked for Georgia Tech, occasionally driving down from his home in Atlanta to play with old friends, especially for their annual shows.
Over time, Bobby stepped back from regular gigs, concentrating on Stillwater reunions and occasional sit-ins where the music and company mattered most to him. He spent thirty years in software development and loved the work, but he's happy to be retired.
In 2026, Bobby had been out of playing in public for about seven years. He began practicing for their reunion concert, methodical as ever about the work. "I'll take a few months to get good enough," he says. "And after this I won't stop playing again. Even if I don't want to play, I'll make myself."
Bobby has been regularly spending time in Fernandina Beach visiting producer Rodney Mills, now 80. Mills, who helped shape the sound of Stillwater's records, is still a friend worth the drive.
He's been interviewed about his Stillwater experiences by Chuck Camp for a documentary about Studio One, titled That Georgia Rhythm. The interview was filmed a decade ago at the now-defunct Crazy Bull bar in downtown Macon. Bobby was interviewed alongside Mark Pucci, former Capricorn publicist who has remained a keeper of that era's history, and who continues to promote artists to this day out of Atlanta.
The record of Stillwater recording at Studio One exists, beautifully shot by Branden Camp, Chuck’s son and co-producer. They’re working hard to finish the film and get it onto a streaming platform. Chuck says they’ve decided their next documentary will be about Stillwater.
Still Here
In the broader Stillwater and Warner Robins narrative, Bobby Golden represents a unique Southern rock life. He came up through family bands and soul revues, learned discipline from a trumpet before he ever touched a guitar, held integrated stages in the segregated South, helped invent a regionally distinct guitar sound that caught Capricorn's ear, and then chose to build a stable life without walking away from the music that defined his youth.
More than four decades after Stillwater's earliest days, Bobby can still take his place beside Mike Causey and Rob Walker, part of a musical conversation they began as young men. The arrangements may require a little more rehearsal these days, but the bond remains.
Bobby Golden's place in Middle Georgia's musical history reaches far beyond the records he made with Stillwater. He grew up in a family that welcomed music into its home, learned to navigate the region's vibrant club circuit as a teenager, and helped shape the distinctive three-guitar sound that carried seven young men from Warner Robins onto the national stage.
Duke Golden helped lay the foundation. Bobby helped build the music. And Stillwater is still standing.
Explore these other voices that helped shape Stillwater and the world around the band:
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.
