"Down To The River" is the name of the debut album of the band by Devon Allman, son of Gregg Allman, and Duane Betts, son of Dickie Betts and named after Duane Allman, who died in 1971. Already in 2018 they were on the road together as Devon Allman Project feat. Duane Betts. In the meantime they have brought on board another son of an Allman Brothers band co-founder, bassist Berry Duane Oakley. It was therefore not surprising that the Allman Betts Band presented even more ABB classics on their 2019 tour than the Devon Allman Project had done before. In conversation with eclipsed, Allman and Betts showed themselves in a beer and chatty mood in view of their satisfaction with the first album of their new band.
Devon Allman: We've been sitting together for ten minutes and you haven't asked us a single question about our fathers or the Allman Brothers Band.
eclipsed: That's true, but so far we've concentrated more on drinking beer.
Allman: You just have to set priorities.
eclipsed: Did you decide to follow in the footsteps of your fathers only after the death of most of the founding ABB members (Devon's father and the former ABB drummer Butch Trucks died in 2017, Berry Duane Oakley's father as early as 1972)?
Duane Betts: If Devon and I and now Berry were on the same stage together and didn't play Allman Brothers songs, that would be almost ridiculous.
Allman: But we are not and will not be the Allman Brothers Band 2.0. That's why we recorded the album "Down To The River". The basis of the concerts consists of the songs of this album. In addition there are songs from our own past, but also some ABB classics.
Betts: We make music similar to our fathers in the broadest sense, but we are still personalities with our own history. Besides, we haven't been 19 for a long time. We don't start our musical careers with this band only now, we are right in the middle of it.