“Southern Blood” was recorded almost entirely in March of 2016. It adheres to a concept Allman, Was, and Lehman agreed to a few months earlier: The album would contain mostly covers instead of original Allman compositions. An album of originals, Lehman said, “was gonna require a lot of downtime for him to get into his writing mode.” And they did not know how much time was left to Gregg.

Allman and his band’s guitarist and musical director of 10 years, Scott Sharrard, had settled on including Sharrard’s composition, “Love Like Kerosene,” a blues number that rocks like Howling Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning,” and a delicate version of Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was.” But beyond that, it fell to Don Was to help Allman and Sharrard find the right songs.

“At first, I was trying to see where he was at,” Was said. “We'd meet up in different places or I'd email things to him and suggest songs. We went back and forth quite a bit, and at first, I was just suggesting songs that I knew he'd sing the shit out of.”

But as they narrowed down, Was noticed something telling.

“By then, I could see what he was responding to,” Was said. “There were themes that he wanted to touch on. He and I never once discussed the fact that this was his farewell. I knew he wasn't healthy, but I don't think he would ever allow himself to think that way, which is why he lasted about three and a half years longer than doctors predicted he would. But I knew he was sick, and I knew he wasn't gonna get better. I could see what he responded to, and he responded to songs like [Bob Dylan’s] ‘Going, Going, Gone’ and [Little Feat’s] ‘Willin’’ and [the Grateful Dead’s] ‘Black Muddy River.’”

All three songs, in Was words, present “a mix of resignation and determination.” From Dylan: “I’ve just reached a place / Where the willow don't bend / There's not much more to be said / It's the top of the end.” From Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter: “I will walk alone by the black muddy river / Sing me a song of my own.” From Little Feat’s Lowell George, “I've been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet / Had my head stove in, but I'm still on my feet / And I'm still ... still willin'.”

“He reminded me of that truck driver in ‘Willin’,” Was told me. “All he wanted to do was stay out on the road and play. He'd just point them to where the next gig was. He'd be there for the next thing, and that was really his life. I think that was why he wanted to do the song, and I think that's something that he was trying to say in a number of songs.

“I think, overall, he was trying to tie up the loose ends of his life and make sense out of it, both for the fans who'd been with him for a long time and for himself, too,” Was said. “What was the meaning of this whole trip? For him, the meaning was staying out on the road and playing shows. That's when he was whole and alive and the closest to who he really was. That's the real Gregg Allman. It wasn't some show he was putting on. You were seeing him as he really was.”

Allman sings every song they chose with a youthfulness I would have thought impossible, and his big, tight band honors them flawlessly. But it feels appropriate that the best expression of Allman’s attitude near the end of his life comes from the one original composition on “Southern Blood,” a song called “My Only True Friend” that Allman co-wrote with Sharrard.

Sharrard remembers vividly how the song came to life during a visit to Allman’s home.

“I was at his house in Savannah, and we had a long night hanging out, just talking,” Sharrard said. “We had a lot of talk about Duane this one night. I mean, it just went on and on. It was amazing. I was getting all these incredible stories about their time on the road, and they worked their way into my dream cycle. I woke up in the house when the sun was coming up over the swamp, and I remembered immediately this one portion of the dream where Duane was talking to Gregg. And I remembered a couple of things that he said to him in the dream, and I ran downstairs, and I grabbed a guitar and started writing, and that's literally the first two lines of the song.”

You and I both know this river will surely flow to an end

Keep me in your heart, keep your soul on the mend

The song remained a work in progress until a few months later, in October 2014, when the Allman Brothers Band was playing its final run of shows at New York’s Beacon Theatre.

“I was scheduled to go to his hotel and write with him for a whole day off,” Sharrard said. “I got to the hotel, and he sat me down and he kinda dismissed everyone else from the room. He told me that he had basically received what was a terminal diagnosis. He was very vulnerable with me, and up to that point, we had never crossed that line together.”

Sharrard’s duty became immediately clear to him.

“In that moment, when he showed me that vulnerability, instead of saying, ‘Hey, man, maybe I'll just give you some time,’ I went right to that song. And I said, ‘Man, let's finish the fucking song,’ and that's when that line was born, in that hotel room.”

The line Sharrard is talking about is the most chilling of the album, and it opens the chorus of the song.

I hope you’re haunted by the music of my soul, when I’m gone.

We will be.