When the Allman Brothers singer, songwriter and guitarist Dickey Betts was a younger man, he was most fond of his Jack Russell terriers. One of them, Mugsy, was memorably “mean as hell,” says Betts’s wife, Donna, recalling the wiry-haired creature going on tour with the band with devil horns printed on his backstage pass. Like Betts himself, “he was spirited and funky — full of mischief!” But later in life, the honky-tonk firebrand gravitated toward Labrador retrievers, such as his last dog, the gentle-mannered Mandy (who, Betts always found it important to clarify, was christened in honor of a friend and not the Barry Manilow song “Mandy”). “I think the types of dogs he had kind of reflected all his phases of life,” Donna says. “The Jack Russells were always fighting for dominance. But then as he got older, the Labradors reflected humanity and kind of becoming more at peace. They just want to love and be loved.” Mandy helped Betts mellow out; the musician, in return, introduced Mandy to fishing and golfing and camping, and at restaurants, he would order an extra burger, medium-rare, just for her. When he was injured or ill, she followed him to the hospital. Two years ago, Betts’s daughter and son-in-law moved into the house with their four dogs in tow, and Mandy made sure her new canine peers “knew it was her house, her rules — which was how Dickey was, too,” Donna says. When Betts died, in the couple’s living room in Osprey, Fla., Mandy was right next to him.