Duane drove his Harley into the ground, then sold it for spare parts. He used the money to buy his first electric guitar: a Gibson Les Paul Junior. The little red solid body was a simple instrument with strength of purpose and a pleasing weight in his hands. Filling up his room with that electrified sound sent a thrill through him every bit as exciting as any other high. He communed with that guitar, bending notes to his will, learning to rely on his ear by mimicking and repeating licks in popular songs.

Duane and Gregg’s first band, the Uniques, performed at the dances held at their local YMCA. The brothers both played guitar and took turns singing, but Duane did all of the talking between songs.

If it was her day off, Jerry would drive them to the Y and stay to watch, even though they said she made them nervous. She thought that was just ridiculous.

Jerry was genuinely surprised by what she saw. Her gangly, awkward boys were all polished up with their hair brushed and their shirts pressed, and the music sounded more impressive in the high-ceilinged room full of kids than it did blasting through her closed garage door, driving her neighbors crazy.

Her sons were having a real effect on those kids. She watched a fourteen-year-old girl in Bermuda shorts, her hair in a ponytail, stand in front of Gregg, then dreamily drift back to Duane, then right back to Gregg as if she were in a trance. For a moment Jerry could see her boys through that girl’s eyes. They were handsome boys, lit with a glow from within. They were remarkable, and she was so proud.

Soon Duane and Gregg moved on from the Y and started playing house parties. They went through a series of band names: the Uniques, the Shufflers, and finally, the Escorts. It was hard to find guys who played well and owned their own gear, and harder still to find guys who took playing as seriously as Duane did. Each new incarnation of the band became a little more professional. On weekends the Escorts traveled as far as Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, to play fraternity parties and proms, bringing home travel stories and pocket money. The measure of freedom the brothers had was rare and impressive to their friends.

Duane and Gregg started haunting the nightclubs down by the Daytona shore. Duane was quick to introduce himself to owners and managers. He met other young musicians, black and white, wherever he found them. He wanted to learn everything he could. That’s how he and Gregg met Floyd Miles. Floyd was a young black kid with the voice and presence of an older, seasoned performer. He fronted a vocal group called the Untils, who were backed by a white band called the Houserockers. They could tear through “Twist and Shout” and “Land of a Thousand Dances,” then smooth out with a tune like “Daddy’s Home.” They had a standing gig at a club on the ocean pier, and kids would roll in off the beach and get mesmerized. Floyd had style and a strong set of pipes. At sixteen years old, he already had a wealth of experience and had lived on his own for a year. Duane and Gregg took turns sitting in on guitar with the Houserockers and they invited Floyd to come hang out at their house. He hesitated at first, but he did come.

It was an unusual thing for white kids and black kids to become friends. Beaches, schools, restaurants, and clubs were all segregated in Florida, and a nightly curfew was strictly enforced. If a black person went out on the white side of Daytona after dark, the police would be called. But music was an exception; young black musicians had talent that even bigoted white people wanted to enjoy, so rules were bent when it came to performers. Music was a force of change in the lives of young people.

Gregg didn’t seem to entirely realize what he had. However, Duane heard something developing in his baby brother that he didn’t have himself: a voice. Duane told Jo Jane, “If I had that voice, I could rule the world.”

Even though he was still shy about it, Gregg had great pitch and natural control over his voice, and emotion just poured out of him when he sang a song he really liked. Duane had the passion and confidence, but singing wasn’t his gift. He asked Floyd to show Gregg the ropes.

Soon Floyd was teaching Gregg how to sing from his diaphragm, and how to protect his throat. Duane and Gregg snuck Floyd into parties to see their new band play, and sometimes hid him in the kitchen to watch from the doorway of white clubs. Floyd took the brothers to his neighborhood record store and eventually to George’s Place, a nightclub where white kids were not often seen. Jerry said Duane looked like a marshmallow in a cup of hot chocolate, the only white face there.

Duane would pick up his guitar case and head out the front door, his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and drive his mother’s car over the high bridge, to the other side of the river, the neighborhood whites had ugly names for: Darktown, Niggertown.

The trees were taller there, the roads narrow and lined with churches and bars, little cinder-block houses, people sitting on concrete porches in metal folding chairs in the dark. He went to George’s Place and sat by the small stage with Floyd. He was happy to be there and he was never afraid. Why would he be? He had friends and he made more, just by playing and being smooth. He was young and strange, with his long hair and pegged pants, but he was always kind and respectful.

He’d ask to sit in with a band, usually an R&B cover act of guys not much older than him, and he’d catch on quick. He shared the stage well, knowing how to stand back and support with rhythm until the other player looked him in the eye and nodded ever so slightly, just tipping his head to the floor, and Duane would step into the empty space carved for him in the song and fill it with a hot lick. The sound of his guitar whipped through the room, funky and changeable, then he’d drop down into the rhythm and the other player would laugh with his eyes. Damn! Where did you come from? Duane would nod and smile back, thinking, What is better than this? Playing your way into a world that doesn’t belong to you? A world your mama can’t follow you into? Music filled up the space between people, moving their hips. Songs about love and longing, bald-faced and fearless. It felt good to play so sweet and earnest, then rock the room and forget where you were altogether. You forgot the walls, the floor, the bridge over the dark water that divided the town. You moved and found your body in the music. It was everything, and he was making it.

Jerry wasn’t keen at first on her boy’s friendship with Floyd, a fact that is hard to imagine now that she and Floyd have been friends for more than forty years. She was a white woman of a generation in the South raised in racism, and back then she saw black people as belonging to a separate and lower class. But her boys were not deterred when she loudly tossed out slanderous names and washed the glasses they had used—twice.

“He’s a musician, Ma” was all the explanation they felt was needed.

Floyd stayed and Jerry grew to know him and love him. Jerry grew, period.

Eventually the Escorts moved up to playing in nightclubs they were too young to enter legally as patrons. Jerry would go down and introduce herself to the owners, so they’d know the boys weren’t on their own and couldn’t be taken advantage of. She made Duane and Gregg join the local union and pay their dues out of their earnings. If they were going to do this thing, they were going to learn to be professionals, as far as she was concerned. Duane insisted that they buy matching suits to wear onstage. They took publicity photos at a local studio, and made calling cards to give to club owners. They looked like clean-cut young men with a slight bohemian edge, their carefully combed hair touching their mandarin collars.

Duane was making up his mind to leave school. The more he played, the more he wanted to play, and school was feeling like a waste of precious time. He wasn’t getting away with anything. Jerry knew he was skipping class and no amount of yelling was getting through to him. Duane would say what he always said. “I will never use anything they’re teaching at that school. I can read. I can write. What more do I need?” If she really started screaming at him, he’d just leave the house and stay away for a day or two.

The dynamic of their family of three was a complicated balancing act. Duane and Jerry were both strong-willed and fiery, and Gregory was left to retreat into himself, or step up and become the peacemaker. When his mama questioned him about Duane, he would tell her just enough to keep her satisfied. She kept a closer eye on Gregg because she knew he was more likely to listen to her. He was gentle and easygoing. Duane did what he wanted, regardless. The best she could hope for was that he would do what he wanted to do while staying under her roof. Myrtle and even Janie wondered whether Jerry working so hard was the real issue with the boys; they suggested she had taken on too much at the restaurant. They didn’t understand her ambition or her desire to give her sons nice things. She had raised them to take care of themselves. They had the right to make choices of their own. They were young men. She even understood and respected their rebelliousness, up to a point.

Daytona was a small community, and the drinking and smoking, the beer heists from the local liquor store and the speeding through town, were not going unnoticed. Patti’s father would yell at Jerry over the phone, telling her to keep that wild boy away from his daughter. Mr. Hicks gave her pitying looks. Gregg’s grades started to dip down, too. All he thought about was his little girlfriend. Jerry was getting sick and tired of her neighbors’ talk. She wasn’t going to let her sons become juvenile delinquents and something had to be done to rein them in.

In 1962, when Gregg was a sophomore and Duane should have been a junior, she decided to send them both back to Castle Heights Military Academy. Duane had missed so much school that Jerry hired a special tutor so he could pass the entrance exam, but he was still held back and enrolled as a sophomore, a further indignity. The upper school was even more rigid than the lower school had been. Their hair was clipped close to their scalps, their uniforms were heavy, and classes, drills, and inspections accounted for almost every waking moment. Defiance and broken rules were met with swift corporal punishment and total loss of freedom.

Duane took his guitar, his record collection, and a portable record player off to school. Music remained his focus. He holed up in his dorm room, practicing guitar while listening to records. He held records still with his big toe while he figured out riffs, controlling the flow of music. He and Gregg formed a band called the Misfits and performed at school parties, but it wasn’t enough to divert Duane or keep him there for very long.

Within the year, Duane left Castle Heights with his guitar case in hand and hitchhiked to Nashville, where he boarded a bus home to Daytona without telling anyone but Gregg—AWOL.

After being home alone with his furious mother for a couple of weeks, he couldn’t take the heat and went back to school and hid out in Gregg’s dorm room. Jo Jane later teased him that he was the only guy who ever ran away to boarding school. He didn’t stay very long, and when he returned home again he refused to return to Seabreeze High School, no matter what Jerry said. He was finished with high school for good.

“Wait, Granny. When did Duane drop out of high school?” I asked.

“Which time? He was in and out of school.”

“Was he just a sophomore? Like, fifteen or sixteen years old? Didn’t you try and stop him?” I asked.

My granny reared up in her chair and seemed to grow a few inches taller, her voice hard and loud, her eyes blazing.

“Galadrielle, I’d like to see you try and tell a boy taller than you and stronger than you what to do! I couldn’t stop Duane from doing anything he wanted to do!”

I was glimpsing her as she must have been fifty years ago—strong enough to handle two young men on her own through sheer force of will. Whether she could control them or not, she was clearly a force to be reckoned with. I had never seen this side of her before, but I was certain my father had.

She said, “I’ll tell you what I did. I told him: ‘You sure as hell aren’t going to lie around my house or walk the beach like you’ve been doing.’ I said, ‘If you don’t work, I won’t work, either, and we will both sit right here all day, staring at each other and starving!’ ” She was quiet for a moment, and then Granny said, “Duane would have become a killer if he hadn’t found that guitar.”

Duane did go to work. He found a job playing music in a strip joint. Jerry saw it for what it was—an opportunity to be a paid musician—and she didn’t stand in his way. In fact, she let Duane borrow her car, as long as it was sitting safely in the driveway when she woke up to go to work. He didn’t have his driver’s license yet, but he was a workingman now.

Bucky Walter’s Five O’Clock Club was on the opposite side of the river. The live trio that played for the dancers was looking for a bass player and Duane went to check it out. He took a job washing dishes in the kitchen and chatted up the players during their breaks. He talked them into letting him sit in with them.

Duane took to the nightlife without skipping a beat. There was a world going on out there, bodies moving, cars screeching, girls shaking, and bands swinging. Duane was headed that way, and why walk when you can run? He smoked cigarettes and let his hair grow back down over his collar. He pressed his long-sleeve shirts and shined up his dress shoes. He didn’t look like a kid of sixteen; he carried himself like a man. He brought home money and lived his own life. Music was everywhere, in everything, a light shining brighter than every other. Duane’s ears and mind were wide open now. He saw the beauty and promise in it, and it called to him. He slept with his radio in his ear, and turned it up loud in his mama’s car coming home from playing at work.

Duane played bass, because that’s what the band needed; he’d stand in front of a piano player who played only the black keys. It was an after-hours joint that would often get busted for selling cheap liquor in top-shelf bottles. When the police came by, the rest of the band would hide Duane away in the girls’ dressing room or make him hunch down in a car in the parking lot.

Duane looked into the little crowd of men seated at small round tables with glazed eyes. They were only hearing the backbeat, the one-two coming off the hips of the girl’s slow shimmy. The music was just the water she was swimming in, this sweat-shiny mermaid gliding in place through waves of smoke. Duane didn’t care. He wasn’t playing for the men anyhow. He was following the song through its changes and keeping pace with the beat, he was learning every minute, and it felt good to forget what he was trying to do, and just do it, like breathing. It was happening. The life in this dark club was a mysterious brew served in a chipped cup—his first taste of another world. He was on the inside now, building this thick atmosphere brick by brick, part of a rhythm section, no longer a spectator. Even on this little stage, he could feel it was where he belonged. This was his classroom; these cats laying down this sleazy groove were his teachers and he was going for a gold star.

Gregg hated Castle Heights, too, but he managed to stay for almost two years. The work was never a problem, but he was heartsick over being separated from Vicki. She told him she would wait for him, but he learned on a home visit that she was dating a football player. He decided to drop out, too, and when he finally stirred up his courage to leave, he was determined to go with dignity. He put on his full dress uniform and walked into the headmaster’s office. He said, “If you see me getting smaller, it’s because I’m leaving.”

Once Gregg was home, music took up its rightful place in their lives again, and it remained the most powerful thing he and Duane shared. Duane wanted Gregg to quit high school so they could really hit the road. Jerry backed him off quick, saying, “You do what you want with your life, but you leave your brother alone.”

Jerry enrolled Gregg in Seabreeze High and he stayed until he graduated in the summer of 1965.

In their room Duane and Gregg listened to everything: corny crooners and perky pop stars, blues criers and rhythm kings, and the Beatles, oh God, the Beatles. Their heads were just swimming with Beatles harmonies and the brilliant simplicity of their melodies. How could so much power and feeling hide in so few chords?

Their garage smelled of cool, dusty concrete. The walls were lined with metal shelves of gardening supplies and cardboard boxes. Duane and Gregg set up little amps and played out there for hours, woodshedding with the door raised up for air when it got too hot, standing facing the road, and whole afternoons passed within a Beatles song like “This Boy.” Neighborhood kids were drawn to the sound and sat in their driveway to listen to them practice. The brothers ran through the same song over and over until they got it down, perfect, and then moved on to another. They played every day for months. Then at night, Duane and Gregg would lie in their beds in the dark and sing the harmonies until they were just right. What was left to do as a young band that the Beatles hadn’t already done better? Duane was determined to learn from them and keep going.

Their biggest break came in the spring of 1965, when the Escorts were offered a chance to open up for the Beach Boys at the City Island Ball Park. The only trouble was, they had to share the limelight with their local rivals, the Nightcrawlers, who always seemed to be a step ahead of them. They had recorded a song that became a regional hit on the radio called “Little Black Egg.” The envy and frustration of hearing their rivals’ song played around town lit a fire under Duane. They practiced constantly for that gig, and when the time came, they knew they had to blow the Nightcrawlers out of the water.

The Nightcrawlers and the Escorts were told to set up side by side on the big stage, and trade off tunes, one band and then the other. If they hadn’t felt like rivals before, this gig would have done it. The Escorts had worked so hard and it showed. Their tones were better, their energy higher, and at the end of the night, they felt great.

Duane couldn’t stop talking about everything that was to come. They were going to hit the road and be a real professional outfit! It just wasn’t happening fast enough. The rest of the guys sat quietly listening, thinking about all the other things they wanted to do more than take off and play. No one had the drive or focus that Duane did, and even if they had, their folks would have killed them. They had to admit they were not ready to make a career out of their high school band; they wanted to go to college, even Gregg.

Gregg had a taste for playing, of course, but he had a fallback plan. He wanted go to dental school and get himself a stable career, but he learned to keep quiet about it around his brother. He didn’t want to disappoint Duane, and he never had his brother’s blind faith that they could succeed as musicians. Gregg imagined a house on the water, a wife, money in his pocket, cars, and nice clothes. Duane didn’t care about any of that; he just wanted to keep playing. Gregg would slip off with his girl and miss practice, and Duane would ignore him as punishment, disappearing for a few days and never saying where he’d been.

Granny says, “Duane could see Gregg’s talent long before he saw it in himself.”

When Gregory told me about this notion of becoming an oral surgeon, I searched his face to see if he was kidding, but no joke—that was his teenage plan for the future. I tried to imagine him with a Pat Boone haircut and a white coat, smiling over open mouths all day, pulling teeth. It is impossible to picture.

When I asked Gregory how he and Duane got along in their early bands, especially in the moments when Gregg considered moving on, he said, “Well, let me see.” He paused.

“My brother beat the shit out of me just about every day of my life. I mean, he could just make you feel about this small,” he said, pinching his fingers together on a half inch of air. “Then, I got to be bigger than him and I fought back. One time, I was hanging out at this apartment that was owned by a club owner in town, just across the road from the club where we were set to play later that night, and here comes Duane. Drunk and pissed-off, cuz I have this beautiful honey sitting on my lap, a girl he liked, too. He walks up and says, ‘Baybro, did you go to the doctor and get that rash on your dick looked at?’ and I mean that did it. I was so pissed-off. I told him to get the fuck out, and he leaned in to punch me and I shoved him away. He was not expecting that, and we ended up out in the middle of the street, just brawling. We were just beating on each other, until finally, I clocked him in the ear and he was just laid out flat. The police came and everything, and I had to carry Duane home. Blood was coming out of his ear, and I was terrified, but that was the end of it. He never hit me again.”

Gregg looked into my eyes for a moment, proud and strong, and I didn’t know what to say. Then he softened a little, mumbling something about how playing music together helped smooth things out between them, too.

In the end, it didn’t matter what Gregg wanted. Duane never left any room for doubt about the plan. Giving up was not an option. Music was the only way forward. He wouldn’t let his baby brother walk away.

When Gregg graduated from Seabreeze, they renamed their band the Allman Joys and hit the road hard. Their sets were so slick. They were a real pro club act, with long vamps between every song, and Duane talking in the low, melodic voice of an emcee: “Thank you, thank you very much … Bless your hearts. This next one is by James Brown, and he’ll be in town … soon.” They were so sharp in their matching suits, singing harmonies, and Duane was commanding, flinging out licks and leads like it was the easiest thing in the world.

But before Gregg graduated from high school, before he and Duane hit the road as the Allman Joys, before their lives became completely devoted to playing, something happened in Duane’s life that was kept secret from everyone around him.

In September 1964, when Duane was seventeen and his girlfriend Patti was sixteen, they had a baby girl.

Learning that I am not my father’s only child was a confusing shock, and I chose to focus my outrage on how I found out. A woman armed with a tape recorder had traveled to Berkeley, California, in 1989 to interview my mother. She was a serious Allman Brothers fan who edited a photocopied newsletter called “Les Brers.” She and her boyfriend wanted to write a book about the band, and they had already spoken to Linda Oakley, Granny, and even Gregg. My mom was assured that this would be the first authorized telling of the band’s story, including the families’ perspectives, and she didn’t want to be left out. Although she had been approached many times, Donna had never given an interview about Duane before and she was nervous.

On the tape, you can hear Donna’s hesitation and discomfort at first, but after an hour or so, she opens up and offers the woman a choice of wine, red or white, and completely lets down her guard. She describes meeting Duane, my birth, their breakup, and his death in great detail. Mom told her stories that were secret, stories I thought she would only ever tell me. Worse, she described things with a candor and openness I did not recognize at all, and listening to the tape, I felt jealous.

Several weeks after the interview was done, the woman sent my mother a letter to ask her one more question: “Have you ever met the child Duane had with his first wife, Patti?”

Donna called Gregg. “That baby died,” he said.

Then she called Jerry, who said she had met Duane’s daughter. The woman writing the book about the band had brought her by her house. Jerry said the young woman did not look like Duane to her. She said she thought Duane believed the child had died at birth. Frankly she was not sure what he thought happened. Patti had given the baby up for adoption at birth, and when Duane and Patti later tried to find out about the baby, they could have been told anything.

Donna called Jaimoe, but he said Duane had never mentioned a baby other than me. No one could tell Donna what she really wanted to know: Why hadn’t Duane told her?

My mom flew to New York, where I was in college at the time, and told me while we rode a city bus to the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was sitting, and I swayed over her holding the chrome bar above my head. I don’t remember the words she used, or how I received them, only my anger slowly rising while I looked out the window at the crowded sidewalk. My next memory is of standing in front of the Calder circus inside a glass box in the museum’s lobby. I could hardly see it. My fury found its target in the woman with the tape recorder, this stranger who knew more about my family than I did.

Patti’s parents hated Duane, and Jerry would barely tolerate the mention of Patti’s name. Patti’s father yelled into the phone, “If I see your son put his foot on my lawn, I’ll shoot his ass with rock salt!”

Jerry screamed right back, “If you touch one hair on my son’s head, you better start looking for the red lights of the police car, coming to toss you in jail!” She would defend Duane with her life, which didn’t mean she wasn’t also absolutely furious. Duane wasn’t the one she blamed. She had always known these little girls traipsing in and out of her home were looking to trap her sons and make meal tickets out of them; Patti just confirmed her worst fears.

Patti was sent to a home for unwed mothers in Jacksonville. While she was pregnant, she contracted rubella, and the baby was born deaf, with heart complications. The baby girl spent the early years of her life in an orphanage and then foster homes, until she was adopted by a couple at age five. Her new parents had a deaf relative and understood her needs. She was raised in Jacksonville, the same city I lived in until I was eleven.

Later in life, Patti and her daughter found each other and formed a relationship.

They visited my granny and gave her a school picture: a pale girl with brown eyes and dark brown curly hair with a sweet smile, a stranger.

Twenty years after learning of her, I still cannot untangle how I feel. She makes me see that I built my identity on being Duane’s only child. The thing that I felt most special in me feels threatened by her existence, in a childish way.

Stranger still, all I have of him, which never felt like enough to satisfy my need for him—the stories I have gathered, the relationships with our extended family, and even my name—suddenly feels like a great wealth of riches that she does not share, and I feel ashamed of that. Most of all, I am wounded by the thought that she cannot hear his music.

The woman with the tape recorder got in touch with me just a short time ago and informed me that my sister wanted contact with me. I took her phone number and we began talking through emails and texts, brief polite notes, telling about our lives in the simplest terms. It’s hard to know what to say. She sends me pictures of herself and her son and daughter, and she even has a granddaughter. I can’t help but search all of their faces for some trace of my father. I cannot see him in them, and I have no way of knowing what that means.

My mother reminds me that we have no way of knowing the truth of her paternity, but it seems unkind to ask her, after all this time, to take a test. There seems little harm in letting things stay where they have always been, in the mysterious gray area where my father kept his most personal moments. I wrote to Patti but she didn’t answer my letter. Her silence doesn’t surprise me, even though I remain disappointed and curious about her relationship with my father. Duane’s constant determination to keep his private life private seems to be holding fast. His will is still at work, and I accept it.