The night Gregg Allman's dad died in Norfolk

Gregg Allman lived the ultimate rock star life, elements of which have become cliché – early fame and the extravagance it brings, a high-profile marriage, a well-publicized drug habit and a redemptive return. He died a celebrated legend from complications of liver cancer last week. He was 69.

But long before he and older brother Duane pioneered jam band aesthetics as the Allman Brothers Band, blending blues and rock with intense jazzlike improvisation in the late 1960s and early ’70s, they survived a childhood scarred by tragedy. The brothers were just toddlers – Duane was 3 and Gregg 2 – when their father, Willis Turner Allman, was murdered the night after Christmas in 1949.

It all happened in what is now Norfolk, where the Allmans briefly lived at the time while Willis, a 31-year-old second lieutenant in the Army, was stationed at Fort Story. The night of the murder, his wife, Geraldine, and their sons were visiting family for the holidays in North Carolina.

The story appeared in The Pilot on Tuesday, Dec. 27, 1949, with the headline “Army Lieutenant Robbed and Slain In Princess Anne,” the location still not an annexed part of Norfolk. It seems as though Willis Allman and another officer, Robert Buchanan, 28, were targeted. The afternoon of Dec. 26, they met a hitchhiker in Oriental Gardens restaurant at the corner of what was then Cottage Toll Road (now Tidewater Drive) and Granby Street. The three played shuffleboard at the restaurant until about a quarter to 7 before heading over to another joint, where they played more shuffleboard and had several drinks.

Afterward, the hitchhiker asked for a ride to Jimmy’s Drive-In at First Street and East Ocean View Avenue. Soon after arriving there, the man, who was seated in the back of the car, asked to be taken home and directed Allman and Buchanan off of what is now Tidewater Drive and what was then mostly an open field. It was there, near a place called Lambert’s Farm, where the hitchhiker drew a small automatic pistol and ordered Allman and Buchanan out of the car. He took their wallets and made Buchanan give up his shoes before ordering them to walk farther into the darkness of the open field. He ordered them to lie face-down. It was then that Allman is believed to have lunged for the gun. As Buchanan ran toward a farmhouse far off in the distance, he heard two shots. When he returned, the hitchhiker had sped off in the car as Allman lay in the field, dead from a bullet wound in the chest.

Twenty years later, Allman’s sons, who had grown up in Tennessee and Florida following his death, formed the Allman Brothers Band. Shortly before that, Duane became one of the most in-demand session guitarists around, playing on recordings by titans of soul and pop including Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Laura Nyro and Percy Sledge. Not long after the formation of the Allman Brothers Band, Duane died in 1971 from injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident. He was 24.

His younger brother, a blues-steeped vocalist, songwriter and keyboardist, continued to record in styles that blurred edges. Gregg married several times, including a four-year union with Cher that ended in 1979. Despite commercial success and industry respect, Allman’s drug problems plagued him for much of his life. Like the blues that influenced him, Allman often musically explored with a funky frankness how mystifying and brutal life can be. The story of his father, a soldier killed late one night in an open field, had the makings of a blues song long before he and his brother ever picked up a guitar or sat at a keyboard.