Betts, Hall, Leavell and Trucks, often referred to as BHLT, was an American musical group that existed from 1982 to 1984 and that featured former members of The Allman Brothers Band and Wet Willie.
[3] They had reunited again in 1979, with a somewhat different line-up; but by the late 1970s and early 1980s, Southern rock as a genre was out of fashion, with first disco and then other forms of popular music becoming ascendent.
[4] Capricorn had gone bankrupt,[1] and the Allman Brothers Band was by then under contract to Arista Records; the label and its head, Clive Davis, had been intent on getting the group to play in a more modern style which would produce hit singles.
[2] Wet Willie was another Capricorn Records group lumped under the Southern rock umbrella, but more soul- and R&B-flavored than most other artists in that genre.
[3] Rounding out the group were bassist David "Rook" Goldflies, who had been in the Allman Brothers' 1979–82 reunited lineup,[10] and violinist Danny Parks.
[3] The little-known Parks was a young guitar and fiddle player from Wisconsin who was beginning to make a name for himself in the Upper Midwest when Betts and Trucks happened to notice him while in Chicago.
[11] Once on the road, they played in venues such as the Agora Ballroom in Atlanta[3] and the Wax Museum nightclub in Washington, D.C.[12] Other early club appearances included at the Brandywine in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and The Bottom Line in New York City.
[14] Several times, the group's activity had to halt due to Leavell's absence to go to Paris to play keyboards on sessions for The Rolling Stones for their Undercover album.
During the times that the Allman Brothers had been inactive or broken up, Betts had explored several different genres, including country, Western swing, and blues.
[4][11] The instrumental focus tended to be on the front-line players on guitar, saxophone, and violin; Leavell played piano solos but his main role was to tie into the rhythm section while anchoring the harmonic progressions underneath the other soloists.
[12] A review of a January 1983 show in The Washington Post said of the new outfit, "They stripped away all the nonsense and excess of recent Southern-rock and returned to the rhythm & blues and country roots that once made this regional music so exciting.
"[12] There was a feeling within some in the music world that Southern rock had never gotten over the dissolution of the Allman Brothers and the loss of Lynyrd Skynyrd;[1] a profile of Hall in The Tennessean suggested that BHLT, based on its appearance at the Volunteer Jam, had the ability to fill that void.
[11] With its elegiac feel paired to a Bo Diddley beat, it was the single released from the album,[18] and became a centerpiece of Allmans concerts in the years to follow.
[2] During July 1984, BHLT was once again an opening act for the Marshall Tucker Band, playing outdoor venues such as the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland,[19] Pier 84 in New York City,[20] and Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati.
[11] However, in 2016 Betts, Hall, Leavell and Trucks – Live at The Coffee Pot 1983 was released by MVD Entertainment Group, capturing a performance at a club in Roanoke, Virginia.