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

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “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. But Lynyrd Skynyrd embraced the Southern rock label “to the point of making people uncomfortable,” Paul said.