They include Jason Isbell and groups such as the Tedeschi Trucks Band and the Drive-By Truckers who’ve also sung about life in the South. These days, musicians who could be seen as honoring the cultural and musical ideas of 1970s Southern rock - and building upon them - tend to be more progressive politically, Erlewine said. Plane Crash Carrying Coworkers Identified: They Were Valuable Members. Rossington told CNN in 2012 that the band would stop using the flag because of its association with hate groups, but then walked back the comment to say they would continue to use it, alongside the state flag of Alabama and the American flag. Lynyrd Skynyrds Last Surviving Founding Member, Guitarist Gary. ![]() The still touring Lynyrd Skynyrd regularly used the Confederate battle flag in their live shows for decades. Judy Van Zant-Jenness, widow of Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer Ronnie Van Zant. And it’s easier to keep playing to that stuff, because that’s where the audience is.” 9/11 and particularity the plane issue is the number one example of. He added: “Certain images, certain sounds, certain ideas were set in place. “Lynyrd Skynyrd doesn’t really play country music but there’s an overlap between the audiences … it all becomes sort of like a certain kind of Southern music.” “A lot of the sounds that were progressive in the ’70s and rock-based became incorporated into country music, and became the sound of country music,” Erlewine said. The lead singer, Ronnie Van Zant, died in a plane crash in 1977, but the band reformed ten years later and is still active. They didn’t really view the battle flag “as insurrectionist or pro-slavery, but more as garden variety rebellion,” he said. The band’s use of the Confederate flag back then was seen as “part of their rebellious streak,” Erlewine said. ![]() The music could be raw or bloom into an extended guitar solo, like on their anthem “Free Bird.”īut 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. Lynyrd Skynyrd sang about Southern life while playing a form of muscular and gritty blues rock. ![]() “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. 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. The iconic band’s last surviving co-founder was also perhaps the last flagpole in a once-powerful part of American music: Southern rock. (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.
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