Delaney Bramlett had plenty of famous musical friends, including George Harrison and Eric Clapton. But few were closer to him than Duane Allman.
The Allman Brothers Band guitarist befriended Bramlett in the late 1960s and became a member of the extended musical family surrounding Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. Allman played on several of the group’s recordings, and in 1970, he gave Bramlett a beautiful three-tone sunburst 1961 Fender Stratocaster with a rosewood fretboard.
As Bramlett told Guitar Player, the gift was a remarkably personal gesture from a friend who had become like family.
“Duane had left the Allman Brothers to tour with my band,” Bramlett told the magazine in its March 1996 issue. “Sometimes he’d play my goldtop, and most of the time I’d play his Strat ’cause I liked it so much. We were gigging in New York, and he had to go to Macon for some reason. My brother found the Strat in his room with a note he left: ‘To Delaney, my best friend. Wear it in good health.’”
Bramlett said the last time he saw Allman was at the funeral of bluesman King Curtis, who had died in August 1971. Allman died just over two months later, on October 29, while Bramlett was on the road in western Oregon.
“My brother got a call that Duane had got killed,” Bramlett recalled. “He wouldn’t tell me till I got through the show. So the next thing I knew I was at Duane’s funeral.”
The gift was especially generous considering that Bramlett had once refused to return a guitar that Allman desperately wanted back: the first electric guitar he had ever owned.
In 1961, Allman’s mother bought him a cherry-red double-cutaway 1959 Gibson Les Paul Junior to stop him from constantly borrowing his brother Gregg’s Teisco Silvertone. Allman eventually pawned the Gibson. Sometime later, Bramlett acquired an electric guitar that sounded suspiciously like the one Allman had lost.
“I called Duane to brag about it, and he said, ‘Does it have a big scrape across the back?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘That was my first electric guitar. I pawned it and forgot where. Can I have it back?’ And I said, ‘No way. This is a real good ’un.’”
Bramlett’s recollection of his guitars wasn’t always entirely accurate. In the same Guitar Player interview, he told a story about another famous instrument in his collection: a rare 1913 Gibson Style O archtop that had previously belonged to Eric Clapton and George Harrison.
According to Bramlett, he and Clapton discovered the guitar while they were touring in support of Clapton’s debut solo album.
“We used to keep our eyes peeled for guitars,” Bramlett said. “We found this neck stickin’ out of a Dumpster, grabbed it out, and there it was. One of the real rare ones. It had a broken neck, but other than that, it was a beauty.”
The story, however, doesn’t line up with the guitar’s documented history.
Clapton had acquired the 1913 Gibson by 1968, and he and Harrison used it during the songwriting sessions that produced some of their most important work. The guitar is associated with “Badge,” the Clapton-Harrison co-write that appeared on Cream’s final album, Goodbye, as well as “Here Comes the Sun” and other songs Clapton and Harrison composed in the late 1960s. Clapton later passed the guitar to Bramlett around 1970.
The instrument eventually became known as “Pattie,” a nod to Pattie Boyd, Harrison’s former wife who later married Clapton. The guitar was listed for nearly $1 million on Reverb in May 2025 before being offered by Heritage Auctions in November of that year, where it failed to sell.
Bramlett’s collection grew to include other famous guitars, including Harrison’s 1968 Rosewood Telecaster, which is now back with Harrison’s estate. He sold Allman’s Les Paul Junior in 1999, and many of Bramlett’s remaining guitars were sold off following his death in 2008. While Bramlett may have been a little loose with the details of how he acquired one of the most historically significant guitars he ever owned, there’s no question that he was the keeper of some extraordinary instruments.
