Blasting during preshow for Alabama at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium at moderate volume from a passing Silverado on I-40Īpril 7th: 8:18 p.m. It could be cited in Almanacs, like the phases of the moon or the next neap tide.įebruary 18th: 2:40 p.m. No one ever had to take the trouble to play it because it just got played, it came on like an assumption, like the weather. They thought it was cool because it just made the car louder, and the volume on “Free Bird” on the radio would just have to be twice as loud. “Free Bird” people bought Trans Ams and Fieros and drove them until the sound insulation fell out of them and the mufflers started to rust. “Free Bird” is the song of the kinds of people a kid growing up in Tennessee desperately hoped to avoid. “Free Bird” is not the song anyone alive at any point in the 1980s would have liked in order to be cool. It is the song I associate with the relatives and neighbors who’d inevitably fall out of trees they’d climb as adults on a dare, kill rattlesnakes in their driveways with shotguns while kids rode bikes around the cul-de-sac, and show up to family events with new wives without warning.
It is the song played in the documentary The Dancing Outlaw, while Jessco White and his friends party and drunkenly tear up someone’s front yard in a car doing donuts until the engine smokes and the back axle almost falls off the car. It started as a joke, because “Free Bird” was the song rednecks loved to play when doing super redneck things, things you hoped weren’t contagious but wanted to try anyway. Though Van Zant often dedicated “Free Bird” to Duane Allman, contrary to urban legend, it was not written for him.Everyone wants to be free. On Skynyrd’s first live album, 1976’s One More from the Road, Van Zant can be heard asking the crowd, “What song is it you wanna hear?” The overwhelming response leads into the 14-minute version of the song that became iconic. “Of course, that was the song everyone gravitated towards!” “MCA said we couldn’t put a 10-minute song on an album, because nobody would play it,” recalls King. A 3:30 radio edit was cut and the single, at 4:10, became a Top 20 hit. The original album version of the song clocked in at almost 10 minutes and according to Rossington and Ed King, MCA objected to putting such a long song on the band’s debut album. “We did–and Billy went from being a roadie to a member right then.” “One of our roadies told us we should check out this piano part that another roadie had written as an intro for the song,” says Rossington. The structure of “Free Bird” was set, but it was still lacking one final element the elegant piano intro, which was written by then-roadie Billy Powell. Ronnie said, ‘Why don’t you do something at the end of that so I can take a break for a few minutes.’ I came up with those three chords at the end and Allen and I traded solos and Ronnie kept telling us to make it longer we were playing three or four sets a night, and he was looking to fill it up and get a break.” That was not by design, recalls Rossington: “When we started playing it in clubs, it was just the slow part. Like “Stairway to Heaven,” one of its chief competitors for the unofficial title of rock’s most epic song, “Free Bird” starts out as a ballad before becoming a solo-fueled rocker. Play them again.’ He said, ‘I got it,’ and wrote the lyrics in three or four minutes-the whole damned thing! Then one day we were at rehearsal and Allen started playing those chords again, and Ronnie said, ‘Those are pretty. He thought that he had to change with every chord.
Words to free bird full#
Recalls Gary Rossington, “Allen had the chords for the beginning, pretty part for two full years and we kept asking Ronnie to write something and he kept telling us to forget it he said there were too many chords so he couldn’t find a melody.
But while everyone recognized the grace of the chord progression, Ronnie Van Zant could not come up with a suitable vocal melody. Guitarist Allen Collins came up with the music to “Free Bird” very early in the band’s songwriting process. Originally released on pronounced leh-nerd skin-nerd (MCA, 1973)
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