The Big House on Vineville
Near Macon, Georgia
In March of nineteen seventy, Berry Oakley's wife found a large Tudor Revival house at twenty-three twenty-one Vineville Avenue and rented it. The Allman Brothers Band moved in. The house was big enough to hold the musicians, their families, and the extended community of roadies, girlfriends, managers, and hangers-on that form around any band beginning to feel its momentum. They called it the Big House.
The Big House was where the band rehearsed, argued, grieved, and planned. It was where Duane Allman lived in the months before his death in October of nineteen seventy-one, and where the band regrouped afterward. It was where the sound that became Southern rock was developed not just in the studio but in the informal, accumulated hours of musicians living together, absorbing each other's influences, and working out on the back porch what they were trying to say.
After the band's members dispersed and the decades passed, the house changed hands several times. It was eventually purchased and restored as a museum, now known as the Big House Museum, dedicated to the history of the Allman Brothers Band and their era in Macon. The living room where Gregg and Duane once played to each other, the rooms where the grief of two deaths in thirteen months had to be carried alongside the obligation to keep making music, can be visited today.
Macon does not always announce its history. Sometimes it just keeps the address on file.
