The Allman Brothers, Mama Louise, and Rose Hill
Near Macon, Georgia
The Allman Brothers Band arrived in Macon on May first, nineteen sixty-nine, at the invitation of Phil Walden. Seven musicians, a few thousand dollars, and no record deal yet. They moved into a communal apartment on College Street that the scene called the Hippie Crash Pad, and they played wherever they could book a stage, including their first paid Macon show the very next night at the College Discotheque.
Money was scarce. The story that defines their early Macon period is about a restaurant. The H&H at eight-oh-seven Forsyth Street was run by Inez Hill and Louise Hudson, known universally as Mama Louise. One day the band pooled what they had and walked in hoping to split two plates between the group. Mama Louise looked at them, looked at the money, and started bringing food until everyone had eaten. She told them to pay when they could. After the band became famous, they came back to the H&H for decades. The walls eventually covered with Allman Brothers memorabilia, and the musicians, civil rights leaders, NAACP organizers, and state officials who all ate at the same tables were a kind of measure of what the place had been to downtown Macon since it opened in nineteen fifty-nine.
The band spent hours in Rose Hill Cemetery, which opened in eighteen forty on the banks of the Ocmulgee River, designed as a garden cemetery where the living were meant to walk among the dead in a landscape of trees and water. The Allmans went there to think and to play. One of the women buried there, Elizabeth Reed Napier, gave her name to one of their most celebrated instrumentals.
Gregg Allman, Duane Allman, Butch Trucks, and Berry Oakley are all buried in Rose Hill now. The cemetery became the band's permanent address in a way that their apartment on College Street never quite was.
