Skydog: The Duane Allman Story is necessarily a fast read. Clocking in at a slim yet respectable 266 pages (plus discography and bibliography), biographer Randy Poe captures a life lived quickly, brilliantly, in the best Romantic sense, recklessly, and briefly.

Poe’s credentials include former executive director of the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, current President of Leiber and Stoller Music Publishing Company, as well as a widely published author and critic. His association with his subject began when he and his sister, then pre-teen, wandered down a pier on Daytona Beach on a summer’s day in the early 1960s to see a band, and more specifically, who was playing lead guitar - a young Duane Allman.

Gratefully, this biography focuses only briefly on the Allman brothers' childhood, emphasizing their Tennessee roots and the murder of their armed services father. Poe spins a tale of the brothers growing up in Florida and Georgia and, in a stepwise fashion, introduces all of the musicians who would eventually become not only the Allman Brothers band, but Cowboy, Dickey Betts’ Great Southern and the Capricorn Records rhythm section.

Along the way, Poe documents Duane Allman’s rise as a studio musician whose function as such both cemented his fame and helped fund the fledgling Allman Brothers Band. Pivotal among Allman’s many studio swings was his suggestion and appearance on Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude.” Needing material for the recording and not knowing how to read charts, Allman suggested Pickett record “Hey Jude,” a song Allman knew. Originally the Muscle Shoals management’s conventional wisdom was that since the Beatles had just charted with their song, there would be no market for a Pickett version. But Allman countered that precisely because Pickett was black and the changes they would make to the arrangement. Sure enough, the song was a hit and it ensured Allman’s participation with Boz Scaggs (“Somebody Loan Me a Dime”), Aretha Franklin (“The Weight”), and King Curtis (“Games People Play”), the latter two sporting Allman’s fine slide guitar.