Name Lamar Williams Children Lamar Williams Jr. Spouse Marian Belina (m. 1974) | Died January 21, 1983 Role Musician | |
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Lamar Williams (January 14, 1949 in Gulfport, Mississippi – January 21, 1983) was an American musician best known for serving as the bassist of The Allman Brothers Band (1972-1976) and Sea Level (1976-1980).
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Influenced by players from James Jamerson to Stanley Clarke, by the 1960s Williams was playing bass in a soul music band known as Sounds of Soul with future Allman Brothers drummer Jai Johanny Johanson.
In 1968, Williams was drafted into the United States Army and sent into the Vietnam War. Opposed to the war and to killing in general, Williams went AWOL frequently and wandered around the jungles of South Vietnam, occasionally returning to various units. He was given an honorable discharge in 1970.
After jamming with a Biloxi group known as the Fungus Blues Band, Williams joined the Allman Brothers Band in late 1972 after the death of original bassist Berry Oakley. His tenure in the group coincided with the peak of their commercial success. When Williams auditioned, or 'tried out,' for the bass player gig with the Allmans, second drummer Butch Trucks suddenly declared three songs in, "Enough of this tryout shit, let's rehearse." Although rooted in the contrapuntal fluidity of Jamerson's style, Williams' style was more traditional than Oakley's lead guitar-like approach, freeing the band's drummers to be more adventurous.
After the Allmans dissolved in 1976, Williams founded Sea Level with Johanson and pianist Chuck Leavell of the Allmans. In Sea Level he played in a looser, jazzier fashion. Williams left Sea Level in 1980, shortly before that band broke up.
Williams married Marian Belina in 1974 and they had two children. One child, Lamar Williams, Jr., is also a musician and currently plays with the Athens, Georgia-based band The Revival. From 2015 to 2017, he also performed with several Allman Brothers alumni (including Johanson, Trucks, percussionist Marc Quiñones and bassist Oteil Burbridge) as a vocalist in Les Brers. The short-lived band (envisioned as a continuation of the Allman Brothers Band's stylistic approach) fulfilled its final engagement in August 2017 following Trucks' death in January of that year.
Williams was found to have lung cancer in 1981. His doctors believed that the disease was derived from exposure to Agent Orange during his Vietnam service. He died less than two years later at the age of 34 and was buried in Biloxi National Cemetery in Biloxi, Mississippi.
One of Williams' brothers, James Williams, is also a bassist. He is a leader of the Lansing, Michigan-based blues band Root Doctor.