Gregg Allman’s Southern rock odyssey spanned worlds within worlds

If America really is a melting pot, music is what melts first. Gregg Allman lived to prove that.

Not long after the Allman Brothers Band first started liquefying rock, blues, country and soul into a sticky new elixir, people started calling it Southern rock. But instead of treating it like a style, the band cultivated it like an atmosphere - with Allman, who died Saturday at 69, positioning himself as the ballast. After all of those sweltering vamps and pathfinding guitar solos, his voice was the thing that any Allman Brothers song could return home to.

Allman first felt the power of his own throat during his military school adolescence, barking “Sir, yes, sir” umpteen times a day. As a teenager, he learned to control that power by singing along to the delicate contours of Aaron Neville and the sweet pleadings of Bobby “Blue” Bland.

Allman and his big brother, the tremendous guitarist Duane Allman, would buy vinyl 45s by the armful and study them inside and out - the riffs, the phrasings, the feel. They learned quick. Even in the duo’s early bands, the Allman Joys and Hour Glass, Gregg’s singing began to show off its bruises. That wounded sound was no pantomime - his father had been murdered when Gregg was 2 years old, foreshadowing a life frequently punctuated with sudden absences, including the motorcycle crash that killed Duane in 1971.

When the Allman Brothers formed in 1969, the younger brother was consigned to write the songs. Out poured the heavy humidity of “Dreams,” the muscular zigzags of “Black Hearted Woman,” and the band’s most dependable warhorse, “Whipping Post.” Allman later said he didn’t really know where his songs came from. They were like a frequency he picked up, not something created so much as received. Maybe that’s why some of his lyrics - “The road goes on forever” on “Midnight Rider,” for instance - feel more like inherited rock ‘n’ roll scripture than expressions of interior truth.

What’s clear is that Allman wasn’t writing these songs for himself - he was writing them for the Allman Brothers Band, an alliance to which he felt total devotion. To him, nothing beat playing with those guys, so he built their songs like drop-leaf dining tables, with parts that could broaden and dilate, always making room for more.

The flexibility of the architecture is best documented on 1971’s “At Fillmore East,” a live album that caught the band in a history-making act of telepathic communication. When Allman groans, “I’ve been run down,” less than a minute into the protracted odyssey of “Whipping Post,” he’s instantly a hero - already defeated and with miles to go. The singer makes you want to hear how the story ends, then the band makes you hope it never does.

Allman had beautiful ideas about creating space within his music. “I know that the longer a note rings, and the more of it that you hear, the more of it you get to enjoy,” he wrote in his 2012 memoir. “A note has to have enough time, even if it’s in a fast song, to start nasty, get nasty, stay nasty, and end nasty - and do it all in a millisecond.”

What an astonishing way to think about listening: Every note is important because every note has its own life cycle. Listen to the Allman Brothers, (or any music), with that in mind and you’ll hear worlds inside worlds. Instead of the melting pot, it might make you believe in the multiverse - the idea that there are many lives to be lived within this one, and maybe some beyond.