Gary Rossington, a founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd whose ethereal slide guitar helped make the Southern rock band’s song “Free Bird” an indelible anthem, died Sunday at the age of 71.
“It is with our deepest sympathies and sadness that we have to advise that we lost our brother, friend, family member, songwriter, and guitarist Gary Rossington today,” the band wrote on Facebook. “Gary is now in heaven with his Skynyrd brothers and family and is playing it cool like he always does. Please keep Dale, Mary, Annie, and the entire Rossington family in your prayers and the family’s privacy during this difficult time.” Respect
Rossington was the last surviving original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, a hardliner who preferred to let his guitar do the talking and who cheated death more than once. He narrowly escaped a brutal car accident in 1976, in which he crashed his Ford Torino into a tree, which inspired the band’s cautionary song “That Smell”. A year later, he emerged from the infamous 1977 plane crash in which singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines died with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a punctured stomach and liver.
“I’ve talked about it here and there, but I don’t like it,” Rossington told Rolling Stone in 2006 about the accident, which remains an enigmatic part of rock and roll lore. “It was a devastating thing. You can’t have a real casual talk about it and not have feelings about it.
In later years, Rossington endured a slew of heart problems: he underwent quintuple bypass surgery in 2003, a heart attack in 2015, and has subsequently had multiple heart surgeries, most recently another in July 2021. Left to recover from the process. In recent shows, Rossington would perform parts of the concert and sometimes sit out entirely.
Rossington told Rolling Stone in November 2022, “I don’t have enough oxygen in my blood to move and keep moving normally.” “But I can still play well. It’s just the travel. It’s very hard on me, especially when you’ve got heart trouble. It’s really hard traveling and getting through that stuff.
Rossington was born on December 4, 1951, in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised by his mother after his father’s death. Upon meeting drummer Bob Burns and bassist Larry Junstrom, Rossington and his new friends formed a band, which they tried to combine their love of baseball. During an ill-fated Little League game, Ronnie Van Zant hit a line drive into the shoulder blade of opposing player Burns and met his future bandmates. Rossington, Burns, Van Zandt, and guitarist Alan Collins gathered at Burns’ Jacksonville home that afternoon to jam to Rolling Stone’s “Time Is on My Side”. An early version of Lynyrd Skynyrd was born.
“When we got together [as a band], the scene was pretty bad in Jacksonville. Nobody liked us because we liked the British thing—the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones,” Rossington told Rolling Stone. “Some places we got into fights—they didn’t like us because we had long hair. We went to Atlanta to hang out at the clubs there because there was really only one club in Jacksonville at the time.
Adopting Lynyrd Skynyrd as the group’s name – both in reference to the sports coach of the same name at Rossington’s high school and to a character in the 1963 novelty hit “Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh” – the band released their debut album Did (pronounced ‘leh-‘ nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd) in 1973. A collection of country-tinged blues-rock and Southern soul, the album included such classics as “Tuesday’s Gone,” “Simple Man” and “Gimme Three Steps,” but it was the closing track, the nearly 10-minute “Free Bird”. “, which became the group’s calling card, due in no small part to Rossington’s provocative slide playing on his Gibson SG.
“We always said we had plenty of balls, or gumshoes, whatever you call it, to play a song. Singles are only two, three minutes at most, and five are lucky,” Rossington said on guitar. said in an interview with the World. “‘Free Bird’ was nine minutes. He said, ‘Nobody’s ever going to play that song. You guys are crazy.'”
While the Lynyrd Skynyrd lineup changed frequently—Burns for Artimus Pyle in 1975, Ed King for Steve Gaines in 1976, Johnny Van Zant filling his older brother Ronnie’s shoes in 1987—Rossington remained a constant. He was not a part of Skynyrd during the years after the group’s breakup following the plane crash. With Alan Collins, Rossington formed the Rossington–Collins Band in 1980, releasing the LP Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere that same year and the follow-up This Is the Way in 1981. The former’s “Don’t Misunderstand Me” mixed some of the Southern swagger of his old band (which also included Skynyrd alums Billy Powell and Leon Wilkeson) with a dash of funk and lead vocals by Dale Krantz, whom Rossington would marry in 1982.
The Rossington–Collins band split in the early eighties, and Rossington and some of his former Lynyrd Skynyrd bandmates staged a tribute tour for their longtime bandmates in 1987 with vocals from Johnny Van Zant. The tour eventually evolved into various incarnations of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the band amassed a new generation of fans, even as they struggled from time to time to navigate the changing culture. When Skynyrd caught flak for their use of Confederate flag imagery (which they eventually abandoned in 2012), Rossington said the polarizing symbol was meant to show where they were from and not to offend. “Though I know that’s naive to even say that,” he admitted in the 2018 documentary If I Live Here Tomorrow: A Film About Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Despite all the drama – and death – that Lynyrd Skynyrd endured, Rossington told Rolling Stone that he never considered Skynyrd a sad band. “I don’t think of it as a tragedy—I think of it as life,” he said in 2006 upon the group’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “I guess the good outweighs the bad.”