According to his New York Times obituary, Dickie Betts was “deeply honored” by his name-check in Bob Dylan’s Kennedy assassination song “Murder Most Foul.” “Play Oscar Peterson, play Stan Getz / Play “Blue Sky,” play Dickie Betts,” the line goes. But he was also embarrassed. “I would say, ‘Well, he just used me because it rhymes with Getz.’”
Whether or not Betts himself believed this, I don’t think it’s true, or at least not true in a way that matters. There is admittedly something embarrassing about The Allman Brothers Band. Great name, let’s get that out of the way; “All man brothers band,” what could better exemplify Southern Rock of the hippie era? Never mind that one of the two eponymous brothers died in 1971, two years and two and a half albums into their run, leaving Dickie Betts to play second billing to a dead man for the rest of the band’s existence. Time was not kind to my own infatuation with their music, which took hold halfway through high school and had run its course before I was out of college. I philosophized about “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” while driving around Madison with my (eventual) first girlfriend. We were all sixteen once.
I met the Allmans on the frontier between rock-and-roll and the jam bands and ultimately pulled away from the noodling solos and instrumental conceits into chords and verses. But one landmark always remained, one indisputably great song that Dickie Betts wrote and sang. It could ring out in my head, note for note, at any time since 1996. That was “Blue Sky,” from 1972’s Eat a Peach.
The lyric is so simple it’s almost daft. Clichés so big-hearted they break free and run wild in your head. Who is the “you”? It can be anyone, a beloved most obviously but also a friend, even God if you want it. Who has not been able to picture, at any given point in your life, a person to whom you might say “You’re my blue sky, you’re my sunny day,” whose very presence in your life—even the recollection of whose existence, near or far away—makes it more luminous? The lyric is not possessive or consumed with passion, it is merely, so to say, appreciative and grateful. The one time I can remember playing it in front of people was with my jamming buddy Pete (see also) for a friend’s birthday party. We swapped her name for “you” because she was a delightful person who had the gift of making everyone around her feel better about themselves.
Into this open and delightful wisp of a lyric is dropped a doubled lead guitar part, first over the introduction and then through the long instrumental break. Duane Allman plays the first section of the solo, then Betts comes in, first doubling Allman and then taking over. If that break were any longer it would have been indulgent vamping of the type they and their imitators did so often; any shorter, and it would lose the heart-bursting fullness of the thing. It’s perfection. The tone of the guitars itself deserves an essay I can’t write.
How does anyone manage to capture such a startling fusion of form and content? How do guitar players settle down from jamming and blazing away long enough to find a lyrical register to shadow and expand on a simple melody? It’s a mystery. They never did anything else like it, at least that I ever heard.1
So no, I don’t think Bob was just groping for a rhyme. He knows musical perfection when he hears it, and Dickie Betts did it once as well as an anyone ever did. Rest in peace.
“Little Martha” is also beautiful. Some of their blues covers really cooked, too. Credit where due.