Young Duane Allman: The Bob Greenlee “House Rockers” Interview

The Inside Story of Duane’s First Performances, Musical Evolution, and Final Days

Duane Allman’s initial love of music came from his father, Willis Allman, who was murdered when Duane was three years old. In a previous Substack post, Jim Shepley, Duane’s closest friend during his teen years in Daytona Beach, recalls, “Duane would say to me, ‘Gee, Jim, I remember my dad pickin’ and singin’, and that’s kind of where I always got my interest in music.’” Shepley, in turn, inspired Duane to play guitar, teaching him how to fingerpick and showing him the 12-bar blues of Jimmy Reed and B.B. King.

As Shepley points out, Bob Greenlee was another key figure in Duane’s musical development. As a teenager, Greenlee organized an integrated musical review that consisted of the Untils – four Black singers – backed by the all-white House Rockers. Gregg and Duane Allman performed in the House Rockers before starting their own bands, notably the Allman Joys, Hour Glass, and Allman Brothers Band. Greenlee was also an outstanding student and athlete. He was captain of the 1966 Yale University football team and a 1967 fourth-round draft pick for the Miami Dolphins, a position he turned down to devote himself to music.

Shepley and Greenlee remained friends long after Duane’s death in 1971. During the 1980s, Bob played in the Midnight Creepers and put together Root Boy Slim & The Sex Change Band. He created an independent label, King Snake Records, and produced albums by Rufus Thomas, Lucky Peterson, Noble Watts, and Raful Neal. In 2004, he succumbed to pancreatic cancer. The following interview took place on May 18, 1982. At the time, Bob was living on his family farm in Sanford, Florida, and producing a Root Boy Slim LP.

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Could you tell me about your first acquaintance with Duane?

I think it was in a friend of mine’s basement. There was three of us who was playing blues in Daytona. I specialized in playing like John Lee Hooker. Jim kind of played like Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Duane played kind of like B.B. King. We got together to trade off a few licks. We didn’t really know very many of them. It took me a long time to figure out that John Lee Hooker was playing “Boogie Chillen” in an open chord. I finally had to have a Black guy show me that it was in an open-A chord. Otherwise, I was always trying to play John Lee Hooker licks in a regular tuning. We just sat around and played – that was back when there were no unwound G strings or anything like that.

What year was this?

I would make it about ’59 or ’60. I was about 15. I was born in ’44.

How were you introduced to blues music?

I think the way all of us were turned on to the blues in those days was through WLAC, the radio station. That was pretty much how I got turned on to it when I was in about in the seventh or eighth grade. I started listening to it, and I remember sending away and getting this great big deal, like a radio antenna made out of iron, and setting it up outside my window to try to improve the way I could bring in WLAC. When you twist the dial and hear Jimmy Reed, you just have to go back and hear some more. That was how I felt about it.

There used to be a magazine, kind of like Song Hits or Hit Parader, called Rhythm and Blues. It was the same format that Hit Parader had, real pulpy, and had song words. I had to spend the summer with my parents in Michigan, and I saw this magazine. I started getting into buying 45s. I bought Elvis Presley 45s – “Heartbreak Hotel.” Then I started getting into buying these current blues records – say, “Further on Up the Road” by Bobby Bland, the early Bo Diddley stuff on Checker, Jimmy Reed records like “Honest I Do,” stuff like that. So that’s how I got into the blues. I became very into John Lee Hooker.

This is before you met Duane?

Yeah, well before.

Was Jim Shepley pretty much Duane’s best friend back then?

Yeah, he was. And he showed him a real lot of guitar in there. If I recall, Shepley was one year younger than me, and Duane was a year younger than him, in and around in there. And they lived in the same part of town. They lived pretty far south, down around the Port Orange area. The Allmans lived on Van, and Shepley lived on a street called Cardinal, which was maybe a half a mile away from there. I lived maybe another half a mile north. Yeah, I’d say Shepley was his best friend, and they both had motorcycles – I think they both had 165s.

Was Duane a quick learner?

Very, very, very quick learner. And quick to learn stuff off records too. Lots of times he would be able to help Jim and I figure out what was going on off of records. If we couldn’t pick it out, he could. Actually, all three of us were fairly quick at that. But when that’s all you’ve got to learn off of, then you learn to do it off of them.