The taxi ride from the airport in Jacksonville to the Mayo Clinic should have been familiar. We were nearly retracing the route my school bus took thirty years ago, but freeways and strip malls had taken root where trees and swampland had once thrived. The curve of the waterway under the concrete bridge and the smell of pine and saltwater were the only hints of the seaside hippie town of my childhood.

I arrived at the massive medical complex during the hottest part of a June afternoon, after flying all night from California. The land around the hospital was as painfully landscaped as the neighboring golf courses, and the grand foyer, visible through enormous windows, was very like the fancy hotels where I usually visited my uncle.

Gregg and I had rarely spent time alone and never under such difficult circumstances. I was slow to learn that waiting for an invitation to visit him didn’t work, and if he didn’t call, it didn’t mean he didn’t want to see me. I was in my thirties before I started reaching out to him, and I was surprised by how he welcomed me. Soon we were closer than we had ever been. Still, when I offered to help him after his liver transplant, it was his turn to be surprised. I told him I was grateful for the chance to show him my love. Being near Gregg made me feel closer to my father, and I hoped it did the same for him. He had waited for a liver for six months, and when it finally came, I got on a plane.

I found him asleep in a dark room, surrounded by blinking machines. He looked impossibly healthy and handsome given all he had just gone through. I settled on a stiff couch under the shaded window. A fishing show was playing mutely on TV, glowing with gloomy underwater light. I was half watching a group of men grappling with a small shark when Gregg suddenly spoke.

“My brother and I used to watch them catch sharks from the pier at night. They used a chain and a big hook.”

I felt the zinging thrill of hearing his low, familiar voice.

“Hi!” I said, but he kept looking at the screen. I watched his face and waited for him to say more. After a while, I asked, “How old were you?”

He turned his dreamy eyes to me and said, “I don’t know. Nine or ten.”

“You must have just moved to Daytona, if you were nine,” I said, but he closed his eyes. I watched the TV with new interest. A large pink-skinned man in a green vest leaned over the edge of his boat, searching the water for another flash of silver skin.

As Gregg floated away on a cloud of morphine, I could see him as a child walking with his big brother across Atlantic Avenue, both in rolled-up jeans, hands in their pockets, their white T-shirts glowing in the darkness.

The dim moonlight rode the endless ocean and lit the beach with an eerie gleam that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Duane and Gregg climbed the steps to the wooden pier that stretched out into slowly churning water. They walked until they were near the dock’s end, and saw two men heave a baited hook at the end of a chain into the water. Another man scooped chum from a bucket and tossed it over the edge of the dock.

A cooler sat behind the fishermen, and Duane called to them once they were close enough to be heard. “Hey, sir! Can we have a beer?” Gregg watched, amazed, as the man with the bucket glanced up, smiled, and tossed Duane a can without a word. Duane pulled a church key out of his pocket and pushed two small triangular holes into the lid with a quick turn of his wrist and handed Gregg the open can like a dare. “Drink up, Baybro.” They passed the can between them, sipping the cold and sour brew until their bodies felt heavy and odd. Suddenly three men jerked forward, clutching the chain that thumped against the dock’s edge. They tugged hand over hand, pulling up a writhing shadow until it slapped heavily against the boards. The boys leaned in and watched the little sand shark twist desperately, skin luminous and jaw bleeding. Duane smiled and stepped a little closer.

As Jerry drove down A1A beyond St. Augustine, the oaks that shaded the road thinned then disappeared completely as the terrain became low-rolling and sandy. Little dunes and curtains of saw grass parted for quick glimpses of blue water. At Flagler Beach, rough wooden steps bleached gray in the salt air led down from the road to the sand, and the sun drifted higher in the sky with every mile. Duane shoved Gregg away from his window, laughing, trying to block him from their first view of the Atlantic. The interminable drive from Nashville was almost over.

Daytona Beach shimmered ahead of them like a mirage. Shingled houses and cinder-block bungalows gave way to a steady stream of motels with names from lazy daydreams: the Kasbah, the Sahara, the Tangier, and the Miramar Motel. The Sandpiper, the Sea Horse, the Thunderbird, Blue Heaven. The Nomad, the Castaway, and Memory Lane Motel. Motor inns wrapped their futuristic curves around asphalt parking lots, and stucco cabanas with red tiled roofs nested in the dunes. Thousands of little bedrooms faced the sea, waiting to be filled.

Daytona was one of the few places in the world where driving on a beach was legal, and cars cruised slowly ocean-side, night and day. The hard-packed sand was ideal for the speed trials and stock car races held there since the turn of the century, long before the sprawling speedway was built. The boys whooped when Jerry pointed their car down a concrete ramp and drove onto the sand. Motorcycles and curvy Chevrolets rolled by them and fishermen stood hip-deep, casting out their lines. Surfers paddled out to the break. It was February when the Allmans arrived, and the Ferris wheel stood still above a silent, shuttered arcade. Bumper cars sat parked in a clump beneath a painted canopy. The Sky Lift’s bright gondolas hung empty on cables a hundred feet above the Main Street Pier. The boys begged to stop, but Jerry told them to sit still and calm down. There would be plenty of time to explore. Just you wait, she said. When summer came, their new home would be a holiday paradise: the Land of 2,000 Cottages on the World’s Most Famous Beach.

They lived for a while in a first-floor rental on the beach in the center of the tourist district. It was furnished and shabby, but the view of the water made up for everything. Jerry watched the sun rise from a screened porch and dipped in the ocean every morning before the boys woke up. She swam until the icy water felt hot against her skin. It was almost enough to shock the sad right out of her body.

Within a few short weeks of their arrival, she was as busy as she had ever been, keeping books for Mr. Hicks’s Amoco station and for a real estate agent in a nearby storefront. She started to plan her future. She figured she would be able to buy a house of her own in a year or less, if she planned well. Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man. She had always loved the line of that poem, and if she needed a motto, that would be it. She wanted a place no one could take from her, a place to raise her boys without interference. Her traveling days were done.

In the summertime, they moved to another rented house, a few miles south in a sparsely developed neighborhood called the Shores. Dense patches of primordial woods surrounded their little concrete bungalow on Cardinal Boulevard, but rows of identical homes were being raised fast in spaces cleared by a local developer. Still, it had a wild feeling, and her boss asked her why she was moving “way out there.”

The boys were old enough to mind themselves as far as Jerry was concerned, and after Castle Heights, their sudden freedom shocked them. It wasn’t as much fun as they thought it would be. They missed their friends in Nashville, their cousins and uncles, and there wasn’t a lot to keep them busy. Their house was across Atlantic Avenue from the beach, but you could only spend so long staring at the sea. It was lonely. At night the buzzing cicadas and the thrum of waves lulled them to sleep in blackness so thick Duane could close his eyes, then open them and see no difference in the dark. They woke up alone, left to dress and pour cereal for themselves, and the days were long and hard to fill. They walked the beach and dug deep holes in the sand. They listened to the radio and waited for Mama to come home at lunch and again at dinner.

It was a great relief when cousin Jo Jane came to visit for the summer, in her dual role of playmate and babysitter. She was fifteen years old now. Duane and Gregg were eleven and ten. Jerry had empowered her to rule the roost, but she also told her firmly never to challenge Duane. If he got mad or refused to do something, Jo Jane should just leave him be. There was no sense fighting with him—she would never win, and his temper was explosive. Jo Jane understood. She had terrible fights with her mom herself, which she always regretted and apologized for. It was one of the reasons she loved escaping to her aunt’s home. Aunt Jerry was more relaxed and open than her sister Janie, not to say Jerry couldn’t flare up. She was so tired most of the time, her fuse could be pretty short, but she treated Jo Jane like a friend and it made her feel very grown-up.

Jo Jane made tuna salad sandwiches for their lunch. She ironed the long-sleeved cotton shirts Duane wore every day, buttoned at his wrists and tucked into belted jeans. He was fussy about wrinkles. Gregg was usually stripped to the waist in cutoff shorts and ready for the beach, but Duane had to be careful of his fair skin. Gregg had to carry him home swept up in his arms like Scarlett O’Hara once, after the bottoms of Duane’s feet scalded while he napped on the sand.

The three cousins rode bikes up and down the beach, speeding past old ladies in cat-eye glasses sunning themselves on lawn chairs. Gregg bodysurfed while Jo Jane and Duane sat and talked, their backs resting against the little dunes that blocked the wind. Teenage girls with bouffant hairdos covered by gauzy scarves wandered slowly past the lifeguards. Jo Jane had her own, mostly make-believe romance with a lifeguard farther down the beach, but Duane and Gregg would frown fiercely at her if she stopped to talk to him while they were around. They’d start shoving each other to create a distraction, which would often turn into a real fight. She’d have to drag Duane off Gregg’s curled-up body and separate them until Jerry came home. They didn’t like sharing Jo Jane with anybody.

They took a city bus to the boardwalk, where the beach was crowded with bright towels and striped umbrellas stuck in the sand, teenagers thick on the ground. It was heaven. Jo Jane found “Yakety Yak” on the jukebox at the arcade and they played Skee-Ball. Duane hustled the boy who worked the concessions to help Jo Jane win a stuffed lion. She never figured out what he said to the kid, but Duane came sauntering back to her with a wink and a long ribbon of extra cardboard tickets.

In the hottest part of the afternoon, they’d stop in Metz’s Drugstore and pick through racks of comics and MAD magazines, sitting cross-legged on the cold floor and basking in the air-conditioning. Finally home, they listened to Top 40 radio and sang, miming “Twilight Time” by the Platters and “Little Star” by the Elegants. Duane always got to be Elvis Presley and Gregg was Ricky Nelson. Jo Jane was every girl singer, but she loved being Patti Page best.

When Jerry came home, she’d change into her swimsuit and short shorts right away. The kids would beg for burgers, and she’d drive them back to the strip in her yellow convertible with the top down. “Come with me to the Kasbah and we’ll make beautiful music together!” the kids shouted in goofy accents just like the radio announcer did each time they cruised by the Kasbah Hotel on their way to Steak ’n Shake or Krystal for hamburgers.

One evening on their way home from dinner, Jerry told them she needed to stop by Amoco. While they sat out by the pumps in the backseat, Mr. Hicks strolled over. He leaned in and said, “You boys better mind your mama. She can send you right back to military school just as easy as she pulled you out, and don’t you forget it.” It took everything Duane had not to push his face in. He balled his hands into fists in the pockets of his windbreaker and mumbled, “Yes sir,” along with Gregg. Jo Jane scowled after Mr. Hicks and stretched her arms around the boys, pulling them toward her in a protective clutch. The threat of being sent back never completely went away.

On one of the last mornings of Jo Jane’s Daytona visit, Jerry woke them before dawn for a sunrise breakfast on the beach. She said summer would be over soon and they had to seize the day. They loaded the car with a charcoal grill and grocery bag and drove across the road to the sand. Jerry scrambled eggs over dim coals while the darkness slowly lightened, but the sky stayed an ominous shade of gray and it started to drizzle. Jerry laughed at the sky with her wet palms raised and told the three shivering kids to hang in there. They sat wrapped in damp beach towels with their teeth chattering, mostly miserable, while she made milky coffee for them, but then the rain came down hard and the wind started gusting. Jerry laughed about rain getting in the scrambled eggs.

The boys began the school year at R. J. Longstreet Elementary School, a few miles down Peninsula Avenue. They needed new clothes before classes started. Nice clothes were a real point of pride for them. Jerry didn’t have time to take the boys shopping for school clothes, so she called their neighbor Mr. Torme. He worked in the boys’ department at Doby’s Clothing Store on Beach Street. Jerry gave Torme her shopping list over the phone and told him when to expect Duane and Gregg. She said, “Call me if they don’t make it,” and gave the boys cab fare and instructions. She told them they had damn well better mind Mr. Torme. Once Duane and Gregg had all the socks and underwear on their mama’s list, they took their time, slowly sifting through piles of folded slacks and racks of dress shirts. In dressing rooms behind swinging saloon doors, they tried on stiff blue jeans and plaid shirts, T-shirts with stripes, and windbreakers. Back home, Duane came out of their bedroom wearing a new burgundy smoking jacket made out of satin with a shawl collar and deep pockets, belted around his waist. He sauntered into the living room pretending to smoke an invisible pipe. His mama sure yelled her head off, but he got to keep it anyway.

By their second year in Daytona Beach Shores, a house was being built for them in a grid of modern ranch-style homes. Their plot was on a dirt road spanning three blocks from the ocean to the river. Jerry modified the builders’ plans. She liked the slanted roof and walls of windows, but she asked for the main living space to be left open. The builder had planned walls where windows should be, never considering the morning light. She wanted her kitchen rearranged so her sink and counter would face the backyard and imagined watching her boys play outside the window while she cooked. Their backyard was deep and shaded by a big tree and she wanted to see it.

The new house felt tropical, with cool, speckled terrazzo floors. The boys would still share a bedroom, but they’d have their own bathroom tiled in blue. She bought new beds and dressers, and three tall stools for the kitchen’s built-in breakfast bar. A couch was beyond her budget, so she made big floor cushions and arranged them in front of a television cart. A wall sculpture of the Three Musketeers with plumed hats, knee britches, and swords raised in mutual salute hung in the living room. Duane pried the blades out of the carved hands and fenced with Gregg, clanking and jabbing, until one sword broke. They carefully folded a piece of gold paper to replace it and you could hardly tell.

Jerry found a new job at an upscale restaurant called the Bali. She kept the books, redesigned menus, and ordered all the produce and supplies, cutting their costs significantly. The owner came to depend on her completely. Her days lasted ten hours or more, and she worked seven days a week. Most nights, the boys were unsupervised and they learned to heat frozen pizzas and graze on snacks from the cupboards. Duane had a phone number where Jerry could always be reached. When she did find time to make late suppers long after dark, she unwound with whisky while she cooked. No one could argue with that; she had earned it.

My granny still lives in the house she had built in 1959. When I was a baby, I sat up for the first time in her big backyard, pulling myself up with a handful of grass while she watched from the kitchen window. I napped on the twin bed where my father used to sleep and sat on the sofa where he did homework and taught himself to play guitar. In the bedroom, two large windows let in pale light. On a recent visit, while falling asleep in their childhood bedroom, I realized that my father stared out these windows as he fell asleep every night. He heard the same suggestion of the ocean’s pulse when the wind shifted and stared at the cracks in this ceiling. He was everywhere I looked. The faint hum of my thoughts became a stronger buzz that shot forward with a loud and sudden growl. A motorcycle gunned its engine down the street outside as if driven straight from my mind and headed east over the waterway, and into the night.

Daytona was full of distractions, and Duane found it hard to care about school. He was sassy in class and cracked jokes. He pulled pranks like gluing down rulers and protractors to the table in shop class, and even once locked his teacher in the tool cage. He brought in comics and read them in the bathroom, counting down to three o’clock. At the sound of the final bell, he and some neighborhood boys would ride bikes back to Duane and Gregg’s house to watch TV, propped on pillows scattered on the woven grass rug. The boys called themselves a gang and buried a secret time capsule in McElroy Park. They carved their names in wet cement around the base of the new basketball hoop and played football on the lawn of an empty house nearby. Duane was a ferocious fullback, shoving the defensive line out of his way, always unafraid and quick on his feet.

The gang chased one another on their bikes to hotel pools, and walked casually through the fences, impersonating tourists from Tennessee with their towels around their necks, and went swimming. They spent whole afternoons at the Castaway, the only local hotel with an Olympic-sized pool with a real high dive, and Duane’s new friend Larry Beck was the best diver around. He leaped off the platform headfirst and twisted his body before straightening out perfectly and barely breaking the water’s surface on impact with a little splash. It was a beautiful sight to see. Duane didn’t have Larry’s technique. He would throw his arms up over his head in a silent cheer, then jump in after him, feetfirst. Duane was skinny and awkward next to Larry, but he was proud of his friend’s skill and he’d slap his back and tell Larry he was the best.

A couple of blocks down the road, another neighbor’s house was right beside the Neptune Drive-In movie theater. They’d run an extra-long line for a speaker into his yard; the kids, sprawled on blankets, all turned toward the movie screen that glowed like a giant floating postcard in the sky.

Duane was unfailingly confident, always the leader of the pack, but as he got a bit older, he began to disappear for stretches of time. He felt so restless sometimes he walked as far as he could on the beach just to wear himself out, or he’d head to his favorite quiet spot on the river where their street ended. A dirt path led through trees to the water’s edge, a perfect place to sit and think. He’d pull off his shoes and dangle his bare feet in the water. Pelicans would dip down to fish, so close you could catch a whiff of how badly they smelled. The sky was huge above the low bridge, and scant homes lined the river. Sometimes he took a book and read until daylight gave out. Sometimes he just watched the world go by, trying to keep his mind as still as he could.

In the summer of 1960, their uncles Sam and David came to visit. It was a great thrill to see them, Sam a strapping, handsome man and David a slightly awkward teenager with wavy hair and glasses. They took the boys on fast car rides on the hard-packed sand, went to the boardwalk and rode every ride, and then ate steaks in a nice restaurant with their mama, all of them dressed to the nines. After a week or so, they carried Duane and Gregg back to Nashville, to visit Grandma Myrtle and give Jerry a break.

Summer days in Nashville were long and hard to fill. One lazy afternoon at Myrtle’s house, Gregg wandered across the street to look in on her neighbor, Jimmy Banes. Myrtle didn’t approve of Jimmy; she said he wasn’t quite right. He was harmless, but surely slow. Jimmy was painting his car with black house paint and a brush—headlights, chrome trim, and all. Gregg thought, Maybe he likes the way the wet paint shines. He walked quietly across the road to get a closer look and sat on the edge of Jimmy’s porch. He noticed an acoustic guitar leaning against the house.

“Hey, Jimmy, can you play that guitar?”

Jimmy smiled and nodded. He put down his brush and took up a seat beside Gregg and played a simple song. He wasn’t bad. Gregg thought, I could learn to do that if Jimmy can. Jimmy passed the guitar to Gregg and that was it: Gregg caught the fever.

This story is the answer to the question Gregg Allman has been asked hundreds of times: “When did you first know you wanted to play music?” I have read Gregg’s answer many times and I’ve heard him tell it. He sits back in his chair and laughs, his eyes skimming the floor, one hand smoothing his blond hair back into a ponytail. His accent grows a touch stronger as he describes the heat of the summer day, the paintbrush in Jimmy’s hand dripping black paint. The story has the symmetry and perfection of a creation myth, and it has been repeated and embellished by every reporter who ever greeted Gregg with a tape recorder. Sometimes, he describes Jimmy painting his car, and other times, Jimmy’s car is old and dusty, like it was once painted with house paint. Sometimes, Jimmy plays “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” on a Silvertone and sometimes “Long Black Veil” on a Beltone, a real finger-bleeder with strings set high above the neck, and hard to play. Gregg is a great storyteller, funny and warm, and even if the details shift and change over time, when he describes Jimmy patiently showing him his first song, it’s magical to imagine that he can locate the exact moment he found his path.

And Duane’s moment? Gregg tells that story, too. The brothers went to see a rhythm-and-blues review at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium that same summer: Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson, and B. B. King all in one show. The crowd was segregated, with the black teens seated high above the stage on wooden benches in the balconies and white kids below in red velvet seats. Jackie Wilson, smiling and smooth, swayed and clapped in his sharp suit. Hot lights blazed above the stage and everyone rocked in their seats, all except Duane. Gregg says his big brother sat forward on the edge of his seat perfectly still, transfixed.

Otis’s band would glide through love songs, then build to a foot-stomping frenzy, horns synched together so tight and fine you had to shout back at them. Pulsing with the backbeat of the drums, Otis scatted out notes lightning-fast, jumping up and down on his toes, and when the whole band stopped on a dime and suddenly bowed in thanks, a whoop rose up from every mouth in the room.

Then B. B. King took the stage, his gleaming guitar high around his neck. His band swung into action, taking off like a train building a rhythm. The perfect, clear tone of his electric guitar rose out above them all. B.B. sang with his eyes closed and his eyebrows raised in curved surprise, trading verses with his own guitar, singing for him with a voice pure, clean, and so cool. His hand, flashing a big gold ring, wrapped around the guitar’s neck and danced there, shivering and gliding over the strings, effortless, almost involuntarily. B.B. rocked from one foot to the other, nodding his head, sweat pouring over his face, punching the notes with precision, the space between each held like a breath. What he didn’t play was as important as what he did, and the way he made you wait almost hurt.

Gregg watched Duane staring at B. B. King’s hands with complete focus and astonishment. Gregg says he could almost see a decision forming on his brother’s face.

Duane leaned in to Gregg and said, “Bro, we got to get into this.”

Out with their young uncle David one afternoon, they noticed the greasers that were part of the local music scene that was in evidence everywhere they went. They had swooping hairstyles combed up and back in defiance of gravity and wore their combs in their back pockets in case of emergency. They dressed with every bit as much care as their girls, matching their pressed shirts to the cuffs of their socks. The boys watched how they walked and stood, with their shoulders square, but relaxed, too. They even saw the Everly Brothers shooting pool downtown once. The Everlys had a song on the charts, but when they were home in Nashville they still hung out like regular guys. They wore custom-made jeans with only one pocket in back and the legs pegged tight; real slick. Kids surrounded their pool table, standing at a respectful distance to watch them play. Cool just flowed from them. Duane and Gregg were impressed.

When the brothers went back to Daytona, they brought home a little Nashville style and swagger. They put metal taps on the toes of their shoes so you could hear them coming, click click click. They pegged their black pants tight from knee to ankle and wore them with white dress shirts and white socks. They swept their hair back from their foreheads and carried combs. They sure stood out at Longstreet School, slinking down the hallway like a couple of toughs. No one dressed like that at the beach, especially not kids so young. Everybody took notice.

Gregg followed through on the idea planted by Jimmy’s guitar and the thrill of the Nashville show. He decided that when he returned to Daytona, he would get a job and earn enough money to buy himself a guitar. He did it, too. Within a week he found an early morning paper route and was out riding through the neighborhood on his bicycle, tossing folded papers overhand onto porches while Duane slept.

On September 10, 1960, Gregg rode his bike across the bridge to the mainland to Sears on Beach Street and bought his first guitar. He would always remember that date. A new Silvertone acoustic guitar cost twenty-one dollars, and Gregg had earned exactly that and then quit his job. The salesman at Sears counted Gregg’s money and turned him away because he didn’t have change for sales tax. His mama had to drive him all the way back downtown to give that man his handful of coins.

That guitar was the best thing Gregg had ever owned and he’d bought it on his own, which made it even better. Duane heard Gregg make his way through a few real songs and asked, “What do we have here, Baybro?” with all the menace of the Big Bad Wolf. Gregg could see it was going to be hard to keep Duane’s hands off his new prize, so he showed him the few chords he knew and seethed in frustration when Duane wouldn’t pass the guitar back. Duane took it from Gregg as much to piss him off as to play it at first, but soon he couldn’t put it down. Gregg stayed by his side and listened, showing him things and learning from him, wondering how Duane took to it so fast. They passed Gregg’s guitar back and forth, playing and listening, their radio playing low on the nightstand between their beds. Music soon filled the space that had held games and friends the year before.