Gregory LeNoir Allman was born on December 8, 1947 at Saint Thomas Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee to Geraldine Robbins Allman (1917-2015) and Willis Turner Allman (1918–1949). The couple had met during World War II in Raleigh, North Carolina when Allman was on leave from the U.S. Army, and were later married. Their first child, Duane Allman, was born in Nashville in 1946. On December 26, 1949, Willis offered a hitchhiker a ride home and was subsequently shot and killed in Norfolk, Virginia. Geraldine moved to Nashville with her two sons and never remarried. Lacking money to support her children, she enrolled in college to become a Certified Public Accountant (CPA)—state laws at the time, according to her son, required students to live on-campus.