NEW YORK (AFP).- Butch Trucks, one of two drummers for The Allman Brothers Band who brought a steady, powerful rhythmic backdrop to their hit Southern rock, has died, the group said Wednesday. He was 69.

A band statement said Trucks died Tuesday in West Palm Beach, Florida, without specifying a cause of death. He left behind a wife and four children.

Founded in 1969 in the northern Florida city of Jacksonville, the Allman Brothers jammed to a classic rock sound that incorporated folk, jazz, R&B and country.

Since the band's inception, it had two drummers -- Trucks, who provided a hard-hitting rhythm that drove the band, and Jaimoe, who pushed forward with jazz touches.

Named after brothers Duane and Gregg Allman, the band saw tragedy at the start of its success when Duane, the lead guitarist, was killed in a motorcycle accident.

But the band, whose members lived communally in a house in Macon, Georgia, quickly recovered and became a leading live act in the early 1970s with hits such as "Ramblin' Man."

In an interview last year, Trucks said the band was "spreading the gospel of this music we had discovered" and resisted a more commercial approach.

"We never thought that we would be more than an opening act," Trucks told Rolling Stone magazine.

Trucks said the band successfully fought its record label who wanted frontman Gregg Allman to "stick a salami down his pants and jump around the stage like Robert Plant."

The group played its final show in 2014 at New York's Beacon Theatre, where the band had a regular residency. Trucks' nephew, Derek Trucks, joined the Allman Brothers in its final decade as a guitarist.

The drummer remained active and his group Butch Trucks and the Freight Train Band had been scheduled to start a US tour in March.

But Trucks, for years a heavy drinker, said in a 2009 interview that he gradually decided on a more mellow life and had bought a farmhouse in the south of France surrounded by wild boar as a second family home.

"I've finally come to the conclusion that the great American dream, that all we have to do is buy stuff, is not necessarily the key to happiness," he told The Florida Times-Union.

The Allman Brothers were often considered at the forefront of Southern rock but they disliked the term, saying it was limiting and incorrectly associated them with Confederate imagery.

The band had a close relationship with former president Jimmy Carter and later campaigned for Barack Obama.


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