Little Martha
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"Little Martha", the ninth and final composition on The Allman Brothers Band's fourth album, Eat A Peach, was the first and only Allman Brothers track written solely by group leader and partial namesake Duane Allman, who would die on October 29, 1971, shortly after the recording sessions that produced it.
Allman's original recording of the song is a bouncy fingerstyle acoustic guitar duet with minimal accompaniment. Allman and bandmate Dickey Betts played the tune on 6-string guitars using open E tuning. The song's simple melody and rhythmic counterpoint quickly made it a favorite among fans; acoustic guitar virtuoso Leo Kottke, who often covered the song in performance, once called it "the most perfect guitar song ever written".
[edit] Song Origin
The story goes that Allman had a dream where Jimi Hendrix showed him the melody of the tune in a Holiday Inn motel bathroom, using the sink faucet as a guitar fretboard. Remembering the melody during the October 1971 sessions that produced most of the third side of what would become Eat A Peach, Allman laid down the track, joined only by Dickey Betts and bassist Berry Oakley, though Oakley's part would be mixed out of the final version, leaving the number as a duet for the two guitarists. (Oakley's part would be restored on the 1989 box set Dreams.)
The song's namesake was Martha Ellis, a twelve-year-old girl whose grave the Allman Brothers Band had come across during their frequent trips to Rose Hill Cemetery in their homebase of Macon, Georgia. (Both Duane Allman himself and Berry Oakley would be buried there by the end of 1972). As with Dickey Betts' 1970 instrumental "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed", the song was named for one person but actually about somebody else. Allman envisioned it as an ode to his then-girlfriend, a groupie named Dixie Meadows, who later would sue to control Allman's estate after his death, going as far to assume the name "Dixie Allman". Her claim was rejected in favor of Allman's young daughter Galadrielle, whom he had with his former common law wife, Donna Roosman.
[edit] Longevity
Both Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts have had the song appear on live albums. It appears in a wildly different form as the opening track to Dickey Betts' limited-release live album, Live At The Odeon, and later in an electric version as the lead track to the 2004 release Instant Live by Betts and his current band Great Southern. On Allman's 1974 effort, The Gregg Allman Tour, the studio version can be heard faintly on the PA system after the closing track, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken". It was also interwoven into bassist Oteil Burbridge's bass solos during certain live shows in the late 1990s by The Allman Brothers Band.
The song has occasionally been recorded by other instrumentalists in the decades since its original release, including notable versions by guitarists Leo Kottke and Tim Farrell and dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas.
