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Then, at the height of its popularlity in 1977, the band was struck with tragedy -a plane crash that killed Ronnie Van Zant and two other band members. Their hits "Free Bird" and "Sweet Home Alabama" became classics. During the next decade Lynyrd Skynyrd grew into the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful of the rock bands to emerge from the South since the Allman Brothers. Lee Senior High School who constantly badgered the long-haired aspiring musicians to get haircuts, they were soon playing gigs at parties, and bars throughout the South. Naming their band after Leonard Skinner, the gym teacher at Robert E.
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In the summer of 1964 Jacksonville, Florida teenager Ronnie Van Zant and some of his friends hatched the idea of forming a band to play covers of the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Yardbirds and the country and blues-rock music they had grown to love. The first complete, unvarnished history of Southern rock's legendary and most popular band, from its members' hardscrabble boyhoods in Jacksonville, Florida and their rise to worldwide fame to the tragic plane crash that killed the founder and the band's rise again from the ashes.