30. STATESBORO BLUES
The Allman Brothers Band
GUITARIST: DUANE ALLMAN (1971)
Good medicine in a glass bottle.
There can be no discussion. Though he’d been playing slide for just a few years, Duane was a natural, and there’s a lifetime of experience in his masterful phrasing and smooth singing vibrato. “I heard Ry Cooder playing slide on Taj Mahal’s debut album, and I said, ‘Man, that’s for me,’” Duane recalled. He would usually play in open tunings — most often open E (low to high, E B E G# B E) and occasionally open A (E A E A C# E) — with a glass Coricidin bottle on his ring finger as his slide of choice. Though in the early days, Duane re-tuned his gold-top Gibson Les Paul between songs to play slide, he later adopted a two-pickup 1961 Gibson SG/Les Paul Standard that was used solely for slide playing, its double-cutaway body providing easy access to the upper regions of the fretboard.
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