Our clue this summer was a cheeky one. “Dad Done Somebody Wrong and Mom is a famous singer,” we wrote under a photo of a lanky man with long blond hair and a heavy-lidded stare, adding that Mama had just celebrated her 80th. The man in the photo is Elijah Blue Allman, the younger of Cher’s two children, and the song in the clue is “Done Somebody Wrong,” the Elmore James blues that the Allman Brothers Band tore through on their 1971 live album At Fillmore East. His father was Gregg Allman, the band’s singer and organ player, and anyone who saw Gregg on stage in the 1970s will recognize that face in his son.
Cher turned 80 on May 20, 2026, and both of her children are now well into middle age. Elijah is 50, and his big brother Chaz Bono, the toddler who once closed out The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in his mother’s arms, is 57. Their roads have run in very different directions, and this year brought the hardest chapter yet for one son and the happiest for the other.
How Did Cher End Up Married To Gregg Allman?
It happened fast. Cher’s divorce from Sonny Bono became final in late June 1975, and days later she married Gregg Allman in Las Vegas. Nine days after the wedding she filed for divorce, which we covered in full in the story of Cher’s nine-day marriage to Gregg Allman. The couple reconciled, and their son Elijah Blue was born in Los Angeles on July 10, 1976.
The romance never stopped being complicated. In Cher: The Memoir, Part One, published in November 2024, Cher wrote that Gregg once broke things off with a handwritten note after she went back to work with Sonny on television. According to TheWrap, the note read in part, “I have two choices, go back to Macon and be heartbroken and lonely, or stay here and be made a fool of.” The pair even made a duet album, Two the Hard Way, in 1977, but it flopped, and the marriage was over by 1979.
Gregg went on to write a second act of his own, touring and recording for decades before he died of complications from liver cancer at his home in Richmond Hill, Georgia, on May 27, 2017. He was 69. By then the boy he had with Cher was 40 and had long since made records of his own.
What Did Elijah Blue Allman Do With That Famous Name?
Music came early. Gene Simmons of Kiss is said to have given him his first guitar, and he toured with his mother as a guitarist when he was just 13. In the 1990s he founded the band Deadsy, a moody, synth-heavy rock outfit he fronted under the stage name P. Exeter Blue. Deadsy released its major-label album Commencement in 2002 and followed it with Phantasmagore in 2006 before going on hiatus in 2007. Along the way Elijah added vocals and guitar to records by Orgy, Coal Chamber, Sugar Ray and Thirty Seconds to Mars.
His childhood, he has said, was lonelier than the glamour suggested. “When you go to boarding school at 7 years old, it’s kind of hard to feel like you’re not being shunned,” he told Entertainment Tonight in 2014. “But I’m at an age where I’m making peace with it because you just have to.” He admitted there was “unresolved stuff” with his mother, but he couldn’t hide his admiration. “You know, she’s really talented. She’s gorgeous, I mean, she’s Cher. What’s not to love?”
In that same period he spoke openly about his past drug use and said he had been sober since 2008. In 2013 he married the singer Marieangela King, known as Queenie, and for a while the couple turned up together on red carpets. The years that followed would test all of it.
Where Is Elijah Blue Allman Today?
The last few years have been painful for this family, and much of it has played out in court. In late 2023 Cher asked a Los Angeles court for a conservatorship over her son’s finances, arguing in filings reported by NBC News that he was “currently unable to manage his assets due to severe mental health and substance abuse issues.” Elijah fought the request. In September 2024 Cher withdrew it after the two reached a private agreement, and his attorneys told reporters the outcome would let the family “focus on healing and rebuilding their family bond.”
That hope was strained in 2026. In late February and early March, Elijah was arrested twice in New Hampshire, first after an incident at St. Paul’s School in Concord and then after police say he broke into a home in Windham. He has pleaded not guilty to the Windham charges, and both cases remain unresolved. In April Cher filed a second conservatorship petition, and a Los Angeles judge turned down her emergency request, ruling there wasn’t enough urgency to act immediately. As of the end of October, WMUR reported that Elijah was at New Hampshire Hospital undergoing a competency evaluation and that a judge had appointed him a public defender. He and Queenie, who have filed for and then withdrawn a divorce in the past, are now described in reports as estranged.
None of that erases the teenager who once played guitar behind his mother on tour. Cher’s first petition warned that money in his hands was “putting Elijah’s life at risk,” and she has kept going back to court for him ever since. Her other child’s year looked very different.
And What About Cher’s Firstborn, Chaz Bono?
Chaz was born in Los Angeles on March 4, 1969, the only child of Sonny and Cher, and millions of viewers watched him grow up in the closing moments of their variety show. As an adult he became an activist and author, writing Family Outing in 1998, The End of Innocence in 2003 and Transition in 2011. His transition was the subject of the documentary Becoming Chaz, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011, and that fall he competed on Dancing with the Stars. He later turned to acting, with roles in two seasons of American Horror Story, Rob Zombie’s 3 from Hell and the 2024 horror film Little Bites, which he also executive produced.
Cher has been honest that she didn’t handle his coming out well at first. “It was very unlike me to, in the beginning, have a problem with Chaz being gay, and it disappeared like that,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2020, adding that today “Chaz is so happy, so unbelievably happy.”
This year proved her right. On March 8, 2026, Chaz married Shara Blue Mathes at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel in Los Angeles, and Cher watched from the front pew. “I first met Shara more than 40 years ago when we were just teenagers,” he told People in a wedding exclusive reported by Extra, and the two reconnected and began dating in 2017. “I think it’s safe to say that not many grooms ultimately end up marrying the very first girl they ever kissed,” he said. “She makes me feel complete knowing she will always be there beside me as partner, my best friend, and the love of my life.”
Cher, meanwhile, is still working at 80, with the second volume of her memoir due out on November 17. Its chapters cover the years when one child grew up on a television set beside Sonny and the other learned guitar with Gregg’s blond hair falling in his eyes.
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