Butch Trucks, a drummer who was one of the founding members of the seminal Southern rock group the Allman Brothers Band, died on Tuesday at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 69.
His booking agent, Page Stallings, confirmed the death but said he did not know the cause.
Mr. Trucks was one of the band’s two original drummers; the other was Jai Johanny Johanson, known as Jaimoe. Mr. Trucks was considered to be the straightforward rhythm player, while Mr. Johanson added R&B and jazz influences.
The Allman Brothers Band, led by the guitarist Duane Allman and the keyboardist and vocalist Gregg Allman, helped define Southern rock, a style that incorporated elements of blues, country and jazz as well as rock.
The band was formed by the brothers, Mr. Trucks and Mr. Johanson, along with the guitarist Dickey Betts and the bassist Berry Oakley, in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1969. They moved to Macon, Ga., to cut their first album, released that year by Capricorn Records.
Their breakthrough came in 1971 with the live album “At Fillmore East,” featuring an extended version of one of the band’s signature songs, “Whipping Post.” They cemented their status as one of the leading rock bands of the 1970s with the double album “Eat a Peach” in 1972 and the album “Brothers and Sisters” the next year.
Both Duane Allman and Mr. Oakley died of injuries sustained in motorcycle accidents in Macon — Mr. Allman at 24 in 1971, shortly after the “Fillmore East” album was released, and Mr. Oakley, also at 24, in 1972. The band continued to record and tour before breaking up in the late 1970s. Over the last 30 years, the Allman Brothers Band reformed several times with various members. The band played a series of farewell concerts at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2014.
“I’ve lost another brother, and it hurts beyond words,” Gregg Allman said in a statement on Wednesday. “Butch and I knew each other since we were teenagers, and we were bandmates for over 45 years.”
The Allman Brothers Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
Mr. Trucks’s nephew Derek Trucks leads the Tedeschi Trucks Band with the singer Susan Tedeschi and was a member of the Allman Brothers Band from 1999 to 2014. Another nephew, Duane Trucks, is the drummer for the band Widespread Panic.
Mr. Trucks most recently toured with the band Butch Trucks and the Freight Train.
Claude Hudson Trucks was born in Jacksonville on May 11, 1947. He started playing drums in the eighth grade and played in his high school band and two other bands before graduating. He also played timpani in the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra and the Jacksonville Symphonette.
At Florida State University, he formed a band called Bitter Ind. He met Gregg and Duane Allman when they saw his band perform at a club in Daytona Beach, Fla.
Mr. Trucks is survived by his wife, four children and four grandchildren.
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine last year, Mr. Trucks said the Allman Brothers Band had started out only wanting to play the music its members loved, never counting on stardom.
“We were out spreading the gospel of this music we had discovered,” he said. “We never thought that we would be more than an opening act.”
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