The Invention of Southern Rock and The Greatness (Really!) of Lynyrd Skynyrd

Photo by Jim McRary, courtesy of UMe

Welcome to the second edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know. 

Today is the anniversary of a very terrible three days in rock music history: On this day 48 years ago, the southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd released Street Songs, their sixth LP. Within 72 hours, the band’s focus, main songwriter, and best asset, Ronnie Van Zant, and band members Cassie and Steve Gaines, along with a road manager and the pilots, would perish in a plane crash when the band’s plane ran out of gas between Greenville, SC, and Baton Rouge, LA. It was one of the *knock on wood* last major air accidents in rock history (Stevie Ray Vaughan’s helicopter crash would follow in 1990), the ‘70s version of the Day the Music Died.

Lynyrd Skynyrd would eventually reform without Van Zant, release a clutch of albums and become perennials on the State Fair circuit, where their ever-presence and impossible to document lineup changes would eventually dull, at least in the mind of younger generations, the groundbreaking nature of their ‘70s oeuvre. Lynyrd Skynyrd were, at their heart, the defining band of what would later be (at worst) claimed by less-talented bands as a posture and a worldview. That is of course, the lightning rod genre of southern rock.

Lynyrd Skynyrd were formed in the mid-‘60s by some rock-loving ne’er do-wells in Jacksonville, Florida. They were among the first generation of southern kids who grew up listening to “black” radio; their parents’ exposure to black music was in all ways limited. So, instead of being brought up not even aware of what their black neighbors were listening to, white southern musicians of the time were exposed to the same touchstones. Ray Charles, Little Richard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash: All those artists got fed into the south’s celestial jukebox, and at the other end spawned Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Isaac Hayes, the Allman Brothers Band, Bonnie and Delaney, and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Defining southern rock is difficult, but to paraphrase a Supreme Court justice: You know it when you hear it. It’s rock music that acknowledges the deep history of the southern genres of soul, jazz, and blues while also leaning into the rock explosion of the ‘60s. The Big Bang moment of southern rock is hard to pin down, but I’d point to Duane Allman’s session work on Wilson Pickett’s Hey Jude album.

Allman hadn’t yet formed his own band and by chance happened to be in Muscle Shoals looking for work when Pickett rolled into town to make his new album. If you listen to the above, you can hear southern rock take shape: Allman absolutely going sicko mode over the well-defined soul of Pickett, his solo ascending to a higher plane of existence, slashing and burning across a night sky.

The solo would put Allman on the radar of Otis Redding’s former manager Phil Walden, who at the time was figuring out what to do with his career after Otis’ own tragic 1967 plane crash. Walden started managing Allman, and eventually what became the Allman Brothers Band was formed, and Walden formed Capricorn Records to push the band in record stores. That “Hey Jude” also put Allman on Eric Clapton’s radar, as he hired Allman for Derek and the Dominos’ one LP, Layla, which in turn helped put Allman on the major music map as a future star in waiting. Unfortunately, Allman would die in his own tragic crash, this one of the motorcycle variety in 1971.

It is into this void that Lynyrd Skynyrd stepped, fully formed with their debut, (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd). Still a staple of classic rock radio, the singles from this album—“Free Bird,” “Simple Man,” “Gimme Three Steps,” and “Tuesday’s Gone”—will be played whenever our AI robot overlords try to figure out what the 1970s sounded like. But what strikes me now, in considering the context of southern rock as a genre, is how close these songs are to soul ballads. “Simple Man” and “Tuesday’s Gone” would have worked on any Redding album, arranged the same way.

Those piano swells are pure soul music; the crescendos pure Little Richard. Their most famous song will forever be “Sweet Home Alabama,” off their second LP, Second Helping. Written in response to Neil Young’s “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” which Neil himself admitted in later years deserved the shot Skynyrd gave him in the song’s lyrics. Remove that controversy, and the fact that the song has been beaten into the collective unconscious with a ballpeen hammer, and listen to it with fresh ears, and hear how it incorporates years of juke joint rave-ups into Bo Diddley blues and creates a new vernacular of southern music. But also listen to Merry Clayton, a soul singer of underrated talents, sing backup, as she bridges southern rock to soul music in a real way backing up Van Zant in the choruses. She also ties them to the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” which she also sang back up on. Soul connecting to southern rock, connecting to the British invasion, connecting to Neil Young in four minutes and 45 seconds.

By the time they hit Street Survivors, the band had become a well-oiled southern rock machine, spawning imitators like .38 Special (lead by Van Zant’s little brother!), Molly Hatchet and paving the way for even more famous southern boys to make their own version of rock (Tom Petty and Z.Z. Top chief among them). Street Survivors got overshadowed by the plane crash, but it had some of Van Zant’s best songwriting. “That Smell” is probably the best song about how coke was too easy to procure in the late ‘70s ever written, and that includes J.J. Cale’s “Cocaine.” It’s a broken, sweaty, nervous ballad about knowing you’re going to wrap your car around a tree—or worse—if you keep on keeping on the way you’re going. It’s Van Zant crawling through the proverbial muck, unsure he’ll ever see the other side of it.

The Skynyrd crash was a tragedy, of course, but what listening to their ‘70s records now makes clear is how much music we probably are missing out on now. Van Zant was the poet bard of southern rock, and made the genre’s best albums in his short period as a recording artist. He only took four years to drop six albums and, in the process, defined a whole genre.

You can shop our curated collection of Southern Rock vinyl (including plenty of Skynyrd!) here. 

--Andrew Winistorfer