Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul

In 2014, around the time of the tribute concert held for him at Atlanta's Fox Theatre, Gregg Allman sat down in front of a camera. He already knew he had cancer, though he hadn't told the public yet. That interview, never seen in full until now, is the heart of 'Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul', the documentary in which James Keach, producer of 'Walk the Line' and director of 'Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me', looks back at the life of the Allman Brothers Band's singer and organist.

It starts long before the fame, with the murder of his father when Gregg was a boy and a mother, Geraldine, who raised him and his older brother Duane on her own. Gregg picked up the guitar first, but Duane became the guitar legend, and he was the one who insisted his kid brother sing in the band they formed in 1969. "I spent my life trying to impress him," Gregg says in the interview, then pauses: "The first 20 years anyhow." Duane was killed in a motorcycle crash in 1971. He was 24.

Keach doesn't steer around the rest: the cocaine and the drinking, seven marriages, the very public one to Cher among them, and children who grew up without him and say so plainly. Nor does he skip the fact that Allman, a shy man away from the stage, barely remembers the night in 1995 the band went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, because he was too drunk. Jackson Browne, Chuck Leavell, Warren Haynes, drummer Jaimoe and Don Was, who produced 'Southern Blood', the album Gregg made shortly before he died in 2017, all turn up too.

It had its world premiere on 9 June 2026 at New York's Gramercy Theatre, with his son Devon Allman and Duane Betts playing live, and Subtext Films put it in US cinemas on 17 June, where it took just over $430,000. It was made in association with Rolling Stone Films. It averages 69.7 out of 100 across the seven reviews collected on the site, though not everyone was sold: one critic felt it rushes through his career.

• Documentary
• Biography
• Music