Happy 80th Birthday Jaimoe: Watch The Allman Brothers Band Reunite In 1986 For Volunteer Jam

Today marks sole surviving The Allman Brothers Band original member Jaimoe’s 80th birthday. To celebrate the milestone for the co-founding drummer, JamBase takes a look at a 1986 ABB reunion performance for Volunteer Jam during their mid-1980s hiatus.

Jaimoe was the first drummer Duane Allman recruited when he set about putting together The Allman Brothers Band in 1968. Along with Duane’s brother Gregg Allman on keyboards and vocals, bassist Berry Oakley, drummer Butch Trucks and guitarist Dickey Betts constituted the band’s original members — playing their first concert together in Jacksonville, Florida in 1969.

While the Allman Brothers Band would soldier on after the tragic deaths of both Duane and Berry in the early 1970s and continued to have success, ABB began to fall apart at the end of the decade with Jaimoe fired from the band in 1980.

“One of the real blights on the history of the Allman Brothers Band was that Jaimoe, this gentle man, was fired from this organization,” Gregg Allman stated in his 2012 autobiography My Cross To Bear.

The Allman Brothers Band dissolved in 1982 but reunited to play the 1986 Volunteer Jam, a semi-annual event founded by the Charlie Daniels Band. Volunteer Jam — held in 1986 at the Starwood Amphitheatre in Nashville — marked ABB’s first full band performance in four years and Jaimoe’s first with ABB after being fired in 1980. The Volunteer Jam play took place on July 12, four days after Jaimoe’s 42nd birthday. It’s a smoking set full of favorites from the ABB catalog.

The lineup for Volunteer Jam consisted of Gregg, Jaimoe, Butch, Dickey, guitarist Dan Toler and keyboardist Chuck Leavell along with a pair of bassists Jerry McCoy and Bruce Waibel. The set got underway with the Allmans’ classic cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues.”

“Blue Sky” and “One Way Out” followed ahead of the instrumental “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” the latter spotlighting the complimentary double drum attack of Jaimoe and Trucks. “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica” came next. ABB capped the performance with “Whipping Post.” The band would go on to perform at the Crackdown on Crack concert in October 1986 and would make a full comeback in 1989. The Allman Brothers Band said farewell in 2014.

In celebration of Jaimoe’s 80th birthday, watch ABB perform for Volunteer Jam in 1986 below:

Following his return to the stage with ABB associated band Friends of The Brothers to honor his Allman Brothers bandmate Dickey Betts, who sadly died in April, Jaimoe is set to celebrate his 80th trip around the sun by joining Friends of The Brothers for a trio of upcoming shows. Check them out below.