The Allman Brothers hit their instrumental peak with In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed, recorded for their 1971 album Live At Fillmore East.

In my teens, debate in the school common room raged about who was the best guitarist in the world. Many went for the obvious ones – Hendrix, Clapton, Page – but one curveball that often came up was Duane Allman.

Duane died in a motorcycle accident in 1971, aged only 24, and there’s never been anything quite like a premature tragic death to boost a reputation in rock.

But he was a stellar guitarist, even if his reputation has faded over the years; as was his fellow band member Richard ‘Dickey’ Betts.

The Allman Brothers album that introduced me to Duane was a live one recorded at New York’s Fillmore East a few weeks before his death.

It’s a poignant epitaph and my favourite track was this one, In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed: a long instrumental jam, fusing elements of blues and jazz, specifically John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

It’s built largely around the improvised interplay between Duane, his fellow guitarist Dickey Betts, and his brother Gregg’s organ, driven by Berry Oakley’s bass runs and the powerful Santana-like percussion of Butch Trucks – surely the best name ever for a drummer – and Jai ‘Jaimoe’ Johansen.

Despite the formidable reputation of Duane, at least at the time, as the years have passed I’ve developed a preference for the more melodic, country-tinged tone of Betts to Allman’s bluesier bottleneck style, but let’s not quibble about two virtuosos.

Betts composed this song, in tribute to an old girlfriend, disguising her identity by naming the song after a long-dead woman called Elizabeth Reed Napier whose grave he spotted in a cemetery in the band’s home town of Macon, Georgia.

The Rose Hill Cemetery, close to the Ocmulgee river, is where the budding songwriter found the solitude he needed to write music – and, incidentally, where he and other band members found the privacy to indulge their nascent libidos with southern belles who caught their eye.

Betts has said he listened constantly to Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue around the time he composed this song, and had it in mind, though it is also seen as a hommage to gypsy guitarist Django Reinhart, whom both guitarists had studied closely.

The producer Tom Dowd, who created this 13-minute version by editing together the best bits from two or three different performances at the Fillmore, said he thought the Brothers were also influenced by Stephane Grapelli, the French violinist who played with Reinhardt.

Today the cemetery has a special plot for the graves of the entire original band, Duane, Gregg, Betts, Trucks and Oakley – forever close to the last resting place of Elizabeth Reed.