[11] Gregg had failed to make a name for himself as a musician during a late-1960s stint in Los Angeles,[12] and was on the verge of quitting music altogether when his brother Duane Allman called and said his new band needed a vocalist.
[13] Gregg, the group's only songwriter at the time, was commissioned to create additional songs that would fit into the context of the new band, and in the next five days he wrote several, including "Whipping Post".
[14] The song's metrical pattern and lyrics were written quickly on an ironing board cover,[15] by Allman's telling in the middle of the night using the charcoal from extinguished kitchen matches.
Writer Jean-Charles Costa described the studio version's musical structure as a "solid framework of [a] song that lends itself to thousands of possibilities in terms of solo expansion.
"[15] The actual part that played the introduction was devised by bassist Berry Oakley;[21] it gave the song a more menacing feel than the melancholy blues that Allman had originally written.
[27] Gregg's delivery of the vocal is transformed compared to the original,[26] and culminates in the chorus where he places emphasis on a particular word: "Like I've been tied to the whipping post".
[6] Between them the guitarists play a half dozen or so melodies and lullabies, including familiar ones such as "Frère Jacques", interspersed with classical music motifs, psychedelic blues riffs, and bell sounds.
[27] Poe writes that this section is a "leap into the unknown ... it feels as though everything could simply fall apart at any second, but Dickey continually pulls things back together at what ... seems to be the last possible moment".
[26] But even as the sound lingers and the audience bursts into applause, the music doesn't stop;[27] the tympani keeps going and within seconds, the guitarists start up the mellow lead line to "Mountain Jam" as the record fades into the end grooves.
[29] Despite its length (or perhaps due to it), the live rendition of "Whipping Post" received considerable progressive rock radio airplay during the early 1970s, especially late at night or on weekends.
"[8] VH1 would say that "Whipping Post" was "what the band would become famous for, an endless climb of heightening drama staked out by the twin-guitar exorcisms of Duane and Dickey Betts and the cool, measured, almost jazz-like response of the rhythm section.
"[33] The musical reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die wrote that the "side-long version of 'Whipping Post' brings the house down" and that it is a "Southern gothic lament" that is "[s]immering with a tension that is almost cinematic".
[35][36] Later this same yell-out-at-a-concert "role" would be taken over to a far greater extent by Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird",[33] although the "Whipping Post" tradition made something of a later comeback at indie rock shows.
Musicians continued to study it: Hal Leonard Corporation published a multi-volume sheet music book of the Allman Brothers' work in 1995, and it took 42 pages to transcribe all the guitar solos in the At Fillmore East rendition of the song.
Ron Rash's 2006 novel The World Made Straight features a character listening to the opening bass line of the song at so loud and close a volume that the speakers shake.
[41] In non-fiction, John C. Leggett and Suzanne Malm's 1995 work The Eighteen Stages of Love uses "Whipping Post" as a metaphor for a romantic relationship in which the participants masochistically stay in though it has gone bad.
[43] Live versions of "Whipping Post" surfaced on other, later Allman Brothers Band albums, although none approached At Fillmore East in sales, airplay, or influence.
[5] Earlier 1970 renditions of "Whipping Post" have subsequently been released, such as an 8-minute run on Fillmore East, February 1970 and a 14-minute effort on Live at the Atlanta International Pop Festival: July 3 & 5, 1970.
A November 2, 1972, performance of "Whipping Post" from Hofstra University featured this lineup (nine days before Oakley's death) and was later shown on the national late-night ABC In Concert show, introducing television audiences to both the band and song for the first time.
Briefer than usual, and with Leavell taking an electric piano solo in the first slot, Betts still led the band through some of the tempo changes and emotional currents of the song.