Skynyrd member’s death signals end of era for Southern rock

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington, who died Sunday, made it big when rock ’n’ roll was still a defining cultural force on par with today’s TikTok trends and superhero movies.

The iconic band’s last surviving cofounder was also perhaps the last flagpole in a once-powerful part of American music: Southern rock. Or at least a rebellious version of it that later became loosely tied to conservative politics and didn’t shy away from some of the problematic symbols of the South.

“They’re the band that sort of codified a lot of what we think of as Southern rock,” said Stephen Thomas Erlewine, a music critic who writes for AllMusic, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone.

Lynyrd Skynyrd sang about Southern life while playing a form of muscular and gritty blues rock. The music could be raw or bloom into an extended guitar solo, like on their anthem “Free Bird.”

But the Lynyrd Skynyrd of 2023 bears little resemblance to the one of nearly 50 years prior, when the original incarnation featured a group of long-haired musicians who fit into the American counterculture and were certainly not embraced by Nixon-era Republicans, Erlewine said.

The band’s use of the Confederate flag back then was seen as “part of their rebellious streak,” Erlewine said. They didn’t really view the battle flag “as insurrectionist or pro-slavery, but more as garden variety rebellion,” he said.

In more recent decades, though, the band came to represent a more specific brand of politics, especially after the distinctions between Southern rock and country blurred and their audiences mixed.

Some of the band’s current members have been openly political. Last year, current lead vocalist Johnny Van Zant penned a song with his brother Donnie – apart from the band – that praised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2024. Erlewine said the band’s sound – and that of Southern rock in general – eventually became “a sort of Red State, old-fashioned rock.”

The original members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, which released its first album in 1973, had an intense musical chemistry and were harder and grittier than other groups lumped under the Southern rock banner, such as The Allman Brothers Band and The Marshall Tucker Band.

They came to have three guitarists, whose layers produced a thick, brawny sound that could become “a locomotive for solos,” Erlewine said.

But the label “Southern rock” was nebulous at best, said Alan Paul, a music journalist who interviewed Rossington several times for Guitar World and for his upcoming book, “Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s.”

The most accurate way to describe the genre shaped by wide-ranging influences “would be rock bands who sounded distinctly Southern – they didn’t hide anything about their Southernness,” Paul said.

The Georgia-based Allman Brothers Band hated the term, Paul said, because it was too reductive. But Lynyrd Skynyrd embraced the Southern rock label “to the point of making people uncomfortable,” Paul said.

The Florida band’s pervasive “Sweet Home Alabama” was a response to Neil Young’s “Alabama” and “Southern Man,” which rebuked slavery in the South. The song name-checks Young and obliquely references Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a staunch segregationist who later softened his views.

The band’s original lead singer and songwriter, Ronnie Van Zant, claimed the reference wasn’t supporting Wallace.

“A lot of people believed in segregation and all that. We didn’t. We put the ‘boo, boo, boo’ there saying, ‘We don’t like Wallace,”’ Rossington concurred, in a documentary interview.

But Paul said he doesn’t really believe that – “I don’t think most people do.” Paul cites a memoir written by the band’s original manager, Alan Walden, who said Ronnie Van Zant was “a Wallace man all the way.”

“This kind of rocker is gone now,” Erlewine said of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s last surviving original member.

“Lynyrd Skynyrd was one of the biggest bands of the mid to late ’70s. When rock and roll was really at the centre of the cultural conversation – in a way that arguably hasn’t been since.”