First of all, this album cover has nothing whatsoever to do with Duane Allman’s fatal motorcycle wreck. No less an authority than Snopes.com weighs in that Duane was taken out by a flat bed with some logging apparatus on the back, and not a peach truck.
Same with the back cover:
Berry Oakley, in a second motorcycle fatality for the band, crashed into a city bus, not a watermelon truck. Oh well, they do make for good stories.
So, whence the title? Though some cite T.S. Eliot (are they insane?), it’s actually just a reference to oral sex – i.e., the peaches were of the “the two-legged Georgia variety."
As for the artist, I think he was simply trying to channel the incredible fruit crate labels of yore. That’s how fruit was displayed in markets at one time, with the labels helping sell the produce as much as anything else.
There are plenty of great orange, apple, and other ones out there as well:
By the way, that artist was W. David Powell, and he actually got the idea from some old promotional post cards he had seen in an antique store. I think the idea was that the produce grown down South was so bountiful that it had to be shipped by rail or truck, one fruit at a time. Indeed, the original title of the album had been “The Kind We Grow in Dixie.”
Of course, we can’t end this post without a nod to the inner cover:
And that was designed by Powell and his brother, James Flournoy Holmes.
The two actually had their own company, Wonder Graphics. Powell’s got 6 album credits, and Holmes just over 100. Here’s one I like from Powell, and a bunch I like from Holmes:
My favorite photo of the band … and arguably the best bad shot of all time:
Butch
Trucks, Dickey Betts, Duane, Greg, Jaimoe, all overlooked by Berry Oakley
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