What Happened to Lynyrd Skynyrd After the Crash

On October 20, 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd was on top of the world. Their album Street Survivors had just gone gold, they were three days into the most ambitious tour of their career, and their future looked limitless. Then their chartered plane ran out of fuel over Mississippi and everything changed. What happened to the band in the years that followed is a story of grief, survival, broken bodies, more tragedy, and an almost unbelievable return. Here’s what really happened to Lynyrd Skynyrd after the crash.

The immediate aftermath

The crash near Gillsburg, Mississippi, killed six people: frontman Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, backing vocalist Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, and both pilots, Walter McCreary and William Gray. Twenty others survived, but none walked away unscathed.

Drummer Artimus Pyle and two crew members crawled from the wreckage and hiked through swampy woods until they flagged down a local farmer, who sent for help. The rescue was slow and grueling — the crash site was remote and buried in dense vegetation, making it agonizingly hard to reach the injured.

The survivors’ terrible injuries

The physical toll was staggering. Guitarist Gary Rossington was the most critically hurt — he broke both arms, both wrists, both legs, both ankles, and his pelvis. His recovery would take years and multiple surgeries.

Bassist Leon Wilkeson, known as the “Mad Hatter of Southern Rock,” suffered so catastrophic an arm injury that he later had to reconfigure his bass to play it in a unique, almost upright style. He also broke his leg, took a chest wound, lost teeth, and reportedly had his heart fail twice at the scene. Keyboardist Billy Powell had his nose nearly sliced off, yet became the band’s de facto spokesman in the following weeks, giving hospital updates to the press with his stitches still fresh.

The band fell apart

Devastated by the loss of Ronnie Van Zant and the injuries to everyone else, Lynyrd Skynyrd disbanded. There was no band anymore, and for a long time it seemed there never would be again.

According to accounts that have long circulated, the survivors took a kind of “blood oath” never to use the Lynyrd Skynyrd name again — a promise not to capitalize on the tragedy. For a decade, that’s exactly how it stood.

The wilderness years

The surviving members didn’t stop making music — they just couldn’t recapture the magic. Rossington and guitarist Allen Collins formed the Rossington Collins Band, which had modest success but nothing near Skynyrd’s heights. There were other projects too: the Allen Collins Band, Vision, and Rossington’s own later group with his wife, Dale Krantz-Rossington.

None of them came close to what the original band had been. The shadow of Skynyrd loomed over everything they tried.

More tragedy followed

If the crash weren’t cruel enough, misfortune kept stalking the Skynyrd family.

In 1986, Allen Collins was in a drunk-driving accident that killed his girlfriend and left him paralyzed from the waist down. He would never play guitar the same way again. When the band eventually returned, Collins couldn’t perform — instead he served as musical director from a wheelchair, and publicly spoke about his accident as a warning to others. He contracted pneumonia and died of respiratory failure on January 23, 1990, at just 37.

The bad luck didn’t end there. Leon Wilkeson, who had survived so much in the crash itself, was later found dead in a hotel room in 2001 at age 49, his death attributed to natural causes after years of liver and lung disease. Billy Powell died of a heart attack in 2009.

The 1987 reunion

The first time the survivors performed together after the crash was actually in January 1979, when several members joined Charlie Daniels’ Volunteer Jam to play an instrumental “Free Bird.” But the real return came a decade after the tragedy.

In 1987, the surviving members reunited for what was intended as a one-time tribute — the “Tribute Tour,” also called “Southern by the Grace of God.” The lineup brought together Gary Rossington, Billy Powell, Leon Wilkeson, drummer Artimus Pyle, and guitarist Ed King (who’d actually left before the crash) — and, crucially, Ronnie’s younger brother Johnny Van Zant stepping in as lead vocalist.

Rossington was careful about how they framed it. “We hate the terms ‘anniversary’ or ‘reunion,’ because those are like happy occasions — and this is not happy,” he said, underscoring that it was meant as a memorial, not a celebration.

Johnny Van Zant steps into his brother’s place

Taking over for a beloved, larger-than-life brother was an enormous weight, and Johnny Van Zant carried it with care. “It wasn’t just about carrying on the music,” he later said. “It was about honoring Ronnie’s legacy and everything Lynyrd Skynyrd stood for.”

The one-off tribute struck such a chord that it revitalized the band entirely. What was meant as a single memorial tour became a permanent reformation, and Lynyrd Skynyrd has continued performing and recording ever since.

The decades since

In 1991, the reformed band released Lynyrd Skynyrd 1991, their first collection of new music since Street Survivors. Lineups kept evolving — guitarists Hughie Thomasson and Rickey Medlocke joined the “guitar army,” and albums like Twenty, Edge of Forever, and Vicious Cycle followed.

The band’s legacy only grew. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked them No. 95 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. In 2006, Lynyrd Skynyrd was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And in 2008 they played to a crowd of over 111,000 at Bama Jam in Alabama — the largest audience of their career.

The last original member

Through every lineup change, Gary Rossington remained — the last surviving original member, the thread connecting the modern band to its Jacksonville roots. When he died on March 5, 2023, an era formally ended: not one member of the band that recorded the 1973 debut remained.

Even then, the music continued. The surviving family and estates agreed the band should carry on for the fans. As Johnny Van Zant put it, the founders “left us all a legacy of music that has stood the test of time, and crossed three generations of fans… the music should continue for everyone to love and enjoy.”

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The bottom line: What happened to Lynyrd Skynyrd after the crash is one of the most remarkable survival stories in rock history. The band was shattered in a Mississippi swamp, endured a decade of grief and further tragedy, and by all logic should have ended for good. Instead, driven by Gary Rossington’s determination and Johnny Van Zant’s willingness to honor his brother, they came back — and turned a memorial tour into a legacy that’s now spanned nearly 50 more years. The plane took an enormous amount from them. It never took the music.