Paul Hornsby said no to Phil Walden until Johnny Sandlin convinced him otherwise, launching their careers alongside Duane and the Allman Brothers. “Phil says, ‘I’ve got a studio I’m building in Macon. Would you consider moving to Macon and being in the staff band?’ I said, ‘Macon—where’s that?’ He said, ‘Macon, Georgia.’ I didn’t even know what state it was in. I declined and Sandlin declined. But Phil kept calling us and went through about—it seems to me—a month of calls. And every time he called, the deal got a little more prosperous—sounded a little better every time—and finally he talked Sandlin into doing it, and Pete Carr, and then Sandlin called and convinced me. He said, ‘We’re going to do it,’ and I thought, ‘Well, if y’all are gonna do it, I’ll do it.’ We had always been kind of a bloc vote, so to speak, even in the Hour Glass. What one of us three did, the other two went along with. So that’s how we ended up in Macon. We went to work as the rhythm section in the studio. Duane and his fellow band members arrived in Macon about a month before we did, so all of our careers sort of took off at about the same time.” 📷Phil Walden at Capricorn Picnic