Lynyrd Skynyrd began in 1964 in Jacksonville, Florida, where its founding members named the band after gym coach Leonard Skinner and developed their sound through loud rehearsals that eventually moved outside the city to a one-room cabin called the "Hell House." With Ronnie Van Zant as lead singer, Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, and Ed King on guitars, Billy Powell on keyboards and piano, Leon Wilkeson on bass, and Bob Burns on drums, the group emerged as a tight musical unit whose 1973 debut album introduced songs such as "Simple Man," "Tuesday's Gone," "Gimme Three Steps," and "Free Bird." In the years before the crash, the band released five studio albums, ending with "Street Survivors," which came out three days before the disaster and later reached the highest chart ranking of their work. On October 20, 1977, while flying from Greenville, South Carolina, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on an early tour for "Street Survivors," the band and crew traveled on a chartered Convair CV-240 that had shown signs of trouble and was scheduled for maintenance. After the plane ran out of fuel over Mississippi, the pilots tried to reach first Baton Rouge and then a closer airfield in McComb, but the aircraft stalled and crashed into the forest in Amite County near an open pasture where an emergency landing had been hoped for. Eyewitnesses saw the plane flying low over the treetops, and local farmers, hunters, and other volunteers quickly converged with blankets and flashlights; because there was no fire or smoke, they used a helicopter hovering above the trees to locate the wreckage in the darkness. The absence of fire and the swift actions of volunteers and medical staff helped most of those aboard survive, but Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary, and co-pilot William Gray were killed, while twenty of the twenty-six passengers survived, most with serious injuries. The band's music endured after the crash, and in 1987 surviving members Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, Billy Powell, Leon Wilkeson, and Artimus Pyle reunited for a tribute tour with Randall Hall, Ed King, and lead singer Johnny Van Zant, while the group continued recording and performing with changing musicians, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, and had sold over 28 million records in the United States alone by the time of the dedication.
