Skynyrd member’s death signals end of era for Southern rock

NORFOLK, Va. — 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. “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. Erlewine said the band’s sound — and that of Southern rock in general — eventually became “a sort of Red State, old-fashioned rock.” The original members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, which released its first album in 1973, had an intense musical chemistry and were harder and grittier than other groups lumped under the Southern rock banner, such as The Allman Brothers Band and The Marshall Tucker Band. But the label “Southern rock” was nebulous at best, said Alan Paul, a music journalist who interviewed Rossington several times for Guitar World and for his upcoming book, “Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s.” The most accurate way to describe the genre shaped by wide-ranging influences “would be rock bands who sounded distinctly Southern — they didn’t hide anything about their Southernness,” Paul said. The Truckers’ 2001 album “Southern Rock Opera” examined misconceptions about the South, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s legend and Wallace’s legacy, among other things.