Gary Rossington, Last Surviving Original Member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dies at 71
Guitarist and songwriter Gary Rossington, the last surviving founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, died Sunday at the age of 71.
No immediate cause of death was given. Rossington had dealt with serious health issues in recent years, including emergency heart surgery in 2021, almost two decades after undergoing quintuple bypass surgery in 2003.
“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,” Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote on its official Facebook page. “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.
The guitarist was known for contributing distinctive slide guitar parts to class songs like the band’s anthemic “Free Bird” — as part of what ultimately ended up being a triple-guitar lineup — as well for co-writing Skynyrd classics such as “Sweet Home Alabama.”
In December, Lynyrd Skynyrd had announced an upcoming 22-city co-headlining tour with ZZ Top that was scheduled to begin in July. However, Rossington had not been performing at the group’s recent concerts. A week ago, in response to online fan queries about when or whether the guitarist would be returning to the touring lineup, the official Skynyrd Facebook account replied: “Gary will come to shows for guest appearances as he is feeling well and able. He is planning to be in Plant City next month.” At some 2022 shows, Rossington played for only the second half of the concerts, due to his health issues.
Rossington did not make any apologies for keeping the group going, years after he became the last original member to be part of the lineup. “Me, Allen [Collins] and Ronnie started this band with a dream of making it big, and that dream came true. They’d love it if their music was still being played when they’re gone,” he told Rolling Stone late last year.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the group’s debut album, “Pronounced Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd.”
Rossington had a number of “cheating death” experiences over the decades — most famously surviving the 1977 plane crash that killed the Florida rock band’s lead vocalist, Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, backup singer Cassie Gaines and several members of their road and flight crews. Before that, Rossington survived a horrific 1976 Ford Torino car accident that inspired their roaring cautionary tale, “That Smell.”
“I don’t think of it as tragedy, I think of it as life,” Rossington told Rolling Stone upon the group’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. “I think the good outweighs the bad.”
Though the Allman Brothers Band and groups led by Charlie Daniels and Marshall Tucker preceded Lynyrd Skynyrd, the group was an avatar of the Southern rock brand, scoring platinum and gold albums lodged atop Billboard’s Top 200 and Top 10 pop singles starting with 1974’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Co-written by Rossington and lyricist-singer Ronnie Van Zant, that song humorously responded to Neil Young’s cutting putdowns of the South in “Alabama” and “Southern Man” with “I hope Neil Young will remember / A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”
After the plane crash, but before Skynyrd regrouped, Rossington formed the Rossington-Collins Band with his future wife, Dale Krantz, and fellow Skynyrd guitarist Allen Collins, which lasted only two years but resulted in two albums, 1980’s “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere” and 1981’s “This Is the Way.” Splitting with Collins, the guitarist then formed the Rossington Band with Dale Krantz-Rossington, releasing two albums in 1986 and 1988.
A decade after the plane crash seemed to have forced the group into emeritus status, Lynyrd Skynyrd roared back to life in 1987, for what was initially planned to be just one reunion tour. Ronnie Van Zant’s younger brother, Johnny, took over as lead vocalist, joined by five members who survived the crash — Rossington, Billy Powell, Leon Wilkeson and Artimus Pyle, plus guitarist Ed King, who had left the band two years before the crash, and new member Randall Hall. Collins, who had become disabled in a 1986 car accident, served as musical director but did not play with the reassembled group. The Johnny Van Zant-led edition of the band never did stop touring, and they resumed recording, as well, in 1991.
Stylistically, Rossington liked to say, “Guitar playing is really about what you don’t play; that’s what matters.”
Gary Robert Rossington was born December 4, 1951, in Jacksonville, Florida, and was raised by his mother after the death of his father. More interested in baseball than rock ‘and’n’ roll in his youth (he aspired to play for the New York Yankees), Rossington turned to music in his teens after falling in love with the Rolling Stones. In 1964, Rossington met Ronnie Van Zant and drummer Bob Burns while they were playing on rival Jacksonville baseball teams.
Van Zant immediately became something of a father figure to the guitarist, according to filmmaker Stephen Kijak’s 2018 documentary “If I Leave Here Tomorrow: A Film About Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
The threesome jammed together and formed a cover band, My Backyard, that featured Rossington, Van Zant, Burns, guitarist Allen Collins and bassist Larry Junstrom. As told to the New York Times by the vocalist’s mother, Lacy Van Zant, she once had to talk to Rossington’s teachers at West Jacksonville’s Robert E. Lee High School to allow the guitarist to keep his long hair; as playing in bands helped earn money for his mother, she explained, that long hair was part of the hard job of rocking.