Jacksonville and Southern Rock

Jacksonville gets the title because the two bands that defined Southern rock both took shape here within a few years and a few miles of each other. Lynyrd Skynyrd came out of a group of Westside and Riverside teenagers in 1964, and the Allman Brothers Band came together at a jam session in a Riverside house on March 23, 1969. The Jaxson put it plainly in 2020: Southern rock was born in Jacksonville in the 1960s as a fusion of rock, blues progressions and Southern grit, and the Allman Brothers Band was arguably the first true Southern rock group.

The state recognizes part of that story. A Florida Historical Marker on Riverside Avenue, listed by the Florida Division of Historical Resources in 2018, marks the Gray House as the birth of the Allman Brothers Band. In July 2026, Action News Jax reported that Jacksonville is known as the birthplace of Southern rock and that plaques in the new Riverfront Music Garden on the St. Johns now honor the city's musicians, from LaVilla and Ray Charles to Skynyrd and 38 Special.

The state marker tells it in detail. On March 23, 1969, an interracial group of Southern musicians held a jam session in the front room of a Riverside Avenue house known as the Gray House. It went so well that Duane Allman, then a Muscle Shoals session guitarist, barred the doorway and announced that anyone not willing to be in his band would have to fight their way out. His brother Gregg joined three days later as lead singer and keyboardist. The lineup also included Dickey Betts, Butch Trucks, Berry Oakley and Jai Johanny Johanson, known as Jaimoe: four Florida musicians, a bassist from Chicago and a drummer from Mississippi.

Riverside was already full of players. The marker notes that the new band drew members from two other groups, the 31st of February and the Second Coming, who had lived and jammed in a Victorian house down the block known as the Green House. The band held its first rehearsals at the Comic Book Club on Forsyth Street downtown. While living at the Gray House, Gregg Allman wrote most of the first album, including Whipping Post, which he wrote in the middle of the night with burnt matches on an ironing board cover because he had no pen and paper.

The Jacksonville chapter was short. WJCT News describes four months in the spring of 1969 when the pieces came together in Riverside, with band members sharing a Riverside home and spending nights in Willowbranch Park, before the group left for Macon, Georgia. The marker says the move came within weeks of the first jam. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted the band in 1995, describes it as brought together by a fateful jam session.

Skynyrd is the more homegrown of the two. According to Clay Today, the band decided to form in the summer of 1964 among teenage friends and schoolmates connected to Robert E. Lee High School in Riverside: Ronnie Van Zant, 16, Bob Burns, 13, Allen Collins, 12, Gary Rossington, 12, and Larry Junstrom, 15. All were from Jacksonville except Junstrom, who came from Pittsburgh. The Jaxson reports that Van Zant, the frontman, was born on the Westside, and his brothers Donnie and Johnny also became Southern rock singers, Donnie with 38 Special.

The name was a joke at the school's expense. Clay Today reports that Lynyrd Skynyrd was a mocking tribute to the Robert E. Lee physical education teacher, Leonard Skinner, who objected to the boys' long hair. The band later put a photo of his real estate sign inside its third album, Nuthin' Fancy, and Skinner introduced the band at a 1974 concert at the Jacksonville Memorial Coliseum, the site now occupied by Veterans Memorial Arena.

The national break for the Jacksonville band came in the 1970s. Clay Today reports the first album arrived in 1973 with Free Bird, which reached No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, and The Jaxson says that by 1973 Skynyrd had joined the Allman Brothers as standard bearers of the Southern rock sound. On October 20, 1977, the band's plane ran out of fuel on the way to Baton Rouge and crashed in Mississippi, killing six people, including Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and backing singer Cassie Gaines, according to The Jaxson. Johnny Van Zant became lead singer of the reunited Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1987. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the band in 2006.

The depth of the bench is what convinces most historians. The Jaxson lists Cowboy, Blackfoot, Molly Hatchet and 38 Special as successful bands that emerged from Jacksonville's scene in the 1970s, and names JJ Grey and Mofro and the Tedeschi Trucks Band as more recent Jacksonville bands carrying the sound forward. Jacksonville media historian Michael Ray Fitzgerald, writing in The Jitney in 2025, adds the Johnny Van Zant Band, the Rossington Collins Band and the Derek Trucks Band to the list of groups assembled in Jacksonville.

Family ties run through it. Derek Trucks is the nephew of Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks, and he was in Riverside on March 23, 2019, to help unveil the Gray House marker on the 50th anniversary of the jam, according to Action News Jax. The 2026 Action News Jax report also credits the Van Zant brothers with carrying Jacksonville's name around the world.

Not everyone accepts the phrase. Fitzgerald, author of Jacksonville and the Roots of Southern Rock, argues in The Jitney that a musical style is not born on one day, and that the label southern rock was coined by Atlanta music journalist Mo Slotin in 1972, three years after the Gray House jam. He points out that Duane and Gregg Allman came from Daytona Beach and had already played early versions of their songs with the Los Angeles band the Hour Glass, and that Memphis, Nashville, Muscle Shoals and Los Angeles all have claims to the style's origins.

His conclusion still lands in Jacksonville. Fitzgerald calls the city the motherlode of southern rock, writing that from 1969 to the present Jacksonville was truly the home of southern rock, but not its birthplace, and that no other city produced as many Southern rock musicians. Read that way, the Jacksonville claim is less about a single day in Riverside than about how many of the genre's bands were assembled on the Westside, in Riverside and around Duval County.

The Gray House marker on Riverside Avenue is the best documented site. Its second side, written by the state, notes that the Allman Brothers Band played its last concert in 2014 at the Beacon Theater in New York, and that the last song that night, Trouble No More, was the first the band had played at the Gray House in 1969. The house itself is a private residence; the marker stands outside.

Other landmarks have changed. Clay Today reported in 2016 that the closing of Freebird Live in Jacksonville Beach had left fans looking for other ways to trace the band's history. The Jaxson reports that Ronnie Van Zant and the Gaines siblings were first laid to rest at Jacksonville Memory Gardens in Orange Park, in Clay County, and that Van Zant's remains were later moved to Riverside Memorial Park in Jacksonville. Downtown, the Riverfront Music Garden on the St. Johns now places Southern rock beside the older LaVilla music history that Action News Jax traced from the Chitlin' Circuit to Ray Charles.