Allman Bros. Band's 'Big House' to open as museum

MACON, Ga. — It's the place where the Allman Brothers Band founded their Southern rock sound, the place where the song "Ramblin' Man" was penned and the last place Duane Allman visited before dying in a motorcycle crash in 1971.

The Big House in Macon, where the band lived when its fame took flight in the early 1970s, has been the place music lovers flocked during pilgrimages to the South over the last few decades looking to experience a small piece of the Allman Brothers Band. Now, the three-story Tudor house where the band got its start is set to become a museum with the help of dedicated fans who have spent years collecting memorabilia and doing renovations.

The museum is scheduled to open in December with a fanfare expected to draw thousands from across the globe to this Georgia town to honor the band.

"We're just a big family," said Greg Potter, president of the Georgia Allman Brothers Band Association and one of the museum's organizers, as he stood in the Big House on a recent muggy afternoon. "This band has touched so many people, not just here in the U.S., but all over the world. This band started a whole new outlook on music."

The museum will feature more than 300,000 pieces of memorabilia collected by Kirk West, the band's longtime photographer and tour manager — everything from Duane Allman's jacket, which was draped over a guitar case next to his coffin during his funeral, to one of the Hammond Organs played by Gregg Allman. It will include posters, photographs and live recordings of the band with interactive computer terminals where guests can flip through digital photos and scan concert footage.

Duane Allman's bedroom will be decorated the way he had it when he lived in the house. On the top floor, the museum will hold music classes for school children, and outside will be a bandstand where musicians can put on shows, said West's wife, Kirsten West, the managing director of the Big House Foundation.

"It was never meant to be just a house with a number of things hanging on the walls but to be active in promoting music in the community," she said.

For now, renovations are going, but a big sign in the front yard declares what it will be: "Allman Brothers Band Museum."

The project is a labor of love by a group of fans who wanted to commemorate the band's early days when communal living — and sometimes bathing, based on the large seven-head shower on the second floor of the house — made them not just a musical group, but a family. The majority of the renovations to the house have been donated — free windows, free roof, free paint, free landscaping — by companies from across the country who employ Allman Brothers Band fans.