Key to the Highway

Charlie Segar first recorded "Key to the Highway" in 1940. Jazz Gillum and Big Bill Broonzy recorded it in 1940 and 1941 in the eight-bar arrangement that became standard, and Little Walter's electric Chicago version reached number 6 on the R&B chart in 1958. The Dominos' take runs a little under ten minutes and was essentially an impromptu jam. According to Dowd, the band heard Sam Samudio playing the song for his album Sam, Hard and Heavy in another room and began to play it themselves. He told the engineers to start the tape, which explains why the track fades in with the music already underway. Whitlock remembered it differently, saying the tape was running all session and Dowd ran back into the control room shouting to push up the faders.

Rolling Stone's 2020 entry on the album singled out the interplay between Clapton and Allman here as both harmonious and fiercely competitive. Clapton later recorded the song with Johnnie Johnson in 1991 and with B.B. King on Riding with the King in 2000, and he joined the Allman Brothers Band to play it at the Beacon Theatre in New York on 19 and 20 March 2009.