Bassist and Allman Brothers co-founder Berry Oakley dies three blocks from where his best friend and band-mate, Duane Allman, died a year earlier.
On a beautiful Macon afternoon, after leaving Idlewild South, heading up Napier Avenue enroute to Big House, Berry Oakley on his 1967 Triumph Bonneville along with his friend (and Allman Bros. roadie) Kim Payne on a 1969 Sportster, started messing around with each other. Lane-splitting, cutting in between cars, laughing with /at each other. As they reached the intersection of Bartlett Avenue Kim passed a car on the right side and Oakley passed it on the left, Kim pulling further ahead. Coming into the intersection at Inverness Avenue the street takes a hard right, speeding up to catch Payne, Berry was moving too fast to make the corner and slammed into a Macon city bus. Originally thrown from his bike the Triumph eventually landed on him and they then skidded fifty-eight feet from the point of impact.
Amazingly, he was still conscious after the accident, he got to his feet and refused medical treatment. He took a ride home with a passing motorist, refusing the driver's offer to go to the hospital as well. Later that afternoon, he was taken to the same emergency room complaining of a headache and speaking incoherently. He skull had been fractured in the accident and there was swelling on his brain. Numerous attempts were made to save him. Berry Oakley died at 24.
Berry Oakley and Duane Allman are buried in side-by-side plots in Rose Hill Cemetery, just 100 yards or so from the grave of Elizabeth Reed Napier. Their gravestones are white marble and both bear several inscriptions. On the side of each headstone is carved the band's mushroom logo, and on the flat part of the elongated stones are a Gibson Les Paul and Fender Jazz Bass, respectively. Inscribed on Duane's is an excerpt from his diary: "I love being alive and I will be the best man I possibly can. I will take love wherever l find it and offer it to everyone who will take it...seek knowledge from those wiser...and teach those who wish to learn from me."
Berry’s is inscribed. "Help thy brother's boat across the water and lo! Thine own has reached the shore."
In 1998, the Georgia state legislature passed a resolution designating a bridge on State Highway 19, in Macon, Georgia, as the 'Raymond Berry Oakley III Bridge' in "honor and remembrance" of the late founding member of the Allman Brothers Band.
