Gary Rossington, a founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd whose ethereal slide guitar playing helped make the Southern rock band’s song “Free Bird” an indelible anthem, died Sunday at age 71.
“It is with our deepest sympathy 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 with his Skynyrd brothers and family in heaven and playing it pretty, like he always does. Please keep Dale, Mary, Annie, and the entire Rossington family in your prayers and respect the family’s privacy at this difficult time.”
Gary Rossington was the last surviving original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, a fanatic who liked to let his guitar do the talking and who cheated death more than once. He survived 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 recovered from the infamous 1977 plane crash in which singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing singer Casey 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 to,” Rossington told Rolling Stone in 2006 of the crash, a mysterious part of rock & roll lore. “It was a devastating thing. You can’t just talk about it real casually and not have feelings about it.”
In later years, Rossington suffered a number of heart problems: he underwent quintuple bypass surgery in 2003, suffered a heart attack in 2015, and subsequently underwent several heart surgeries, most recently another procedure in July 2021. Left to recover from recent shows, Rossington would perform parts of the concert and sometimes sit out entirely.
“I don’t get enough oxygen in my blood to keep up and keep going like normal,” Rossington told Rolling Stone in November 2022. “But I can still play good. It’s just the travel. It’s so hard on me, especially when you got heart trouble. It’s just really hard traveling and getting by with that stuff.”
Gary Rossington was born on December 4, 1951, in Jacksonville, Florida, and was raised by his mother after the death of his father. After meeting drummer Bob Burns and bassist Larry Junstrom, Rossington and his new friends formed a band, which they tried to combine with 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 Zant, and guitarist Allen Collins gathered at Burns’ Jacksonville home that afternoon to jam to the Rolling Stones’ “Time Is On My Side.” An early version of Lynyrd Skynyrd was born.
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“When we got together [as a band], the scene in Jacksonville was pretty bad. Nobody liked us because we liked the British thing — the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones,” Rossington told Rolling Stone. “Some places we’d get into fights — they didn’t like us ’cause our hair was long. We went to Atlanta to make it out of 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 Muddah, Hello Fadduh”—the band released their debut album (pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘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 long “Free Bird”, which became the group’s calling card, thanks to Rossington’s provocative slide playing on his Gibson SG.
“We always said we had a lot of balls back then, or gumption, whatever you call it, for playing a song that long. Singles are only two, three minutes at the most, and five is lucky,” Rossington said in an interview with Guitar World. ’Free Bird’ was nine minutes. They said, ‘Nobody will ever 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 part of Skynyrd in the years after the group broke up after the plane crash. Along 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 funk and lead vocals by Dale Krantz, whom Rossington married in 1982.
The Rossington-Collins band split up in the early eighties, and Rossington and some of his former Lynyrd Skynyrd bandmates organized a tribute tour for their longtime bandmates in 1987 with Johnny Van Zant on vocals. 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 drew criticism for their use of Confederate flag imagery (which they eventually dropped in 2012), Rossington said the polarizing symbol was meant to show where they were from and to offend. “Though I know it’s naïve to say that too,” he admitted in the 2018 documentary If I Leave 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 to be a tragic band. “I don’t think of it as tragedy — I think of it as life,” he said upon the group’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2006. “I think the good outweighs the bad.”
