Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington discussed the process behind writing the band’s signature song, “Free Bird,” in a recent interview.
“Allen Collins had the chords all written, and he had planned a lot and he was trying to get Ronnie [Van Zant] to write lyrics to it,” Rossington told the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show.
“Ronnie thought there was too many chord changes. So it took about two or three weeks of Allen playing the chords around. Then one day [Van Zant] just went, ‘Hey, play that again.’ That’s what he’d do – if something caught his ear, he’d go, ‘Play that a few times.’ But it would really be a half-hour, an hour he’d play it,” Rossington added.
Rossington noted that the song just “got longer and longer and longer as we played it.”
“At first it didn’t have the end, the long guitar end; it was just the slow love song. Then we came up with the end, and as we practiced every day, it came along,” he said about the song’s evolution.
Source: Read Full Article