Were These The Tragic Final Words Of Ronnie Van Zant?

The evening after Ronnie Van Zant and the rest of Lynyrd Skynyrd performed at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina, they boarded their private plane to head to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They were touring in support of their newest album, "Street Survivors," and they were in high spirits. But all was not right on October 20, 1977. Guitarist Allen Collins had a bad feeling about the twin-engine Convair 240. Two days earlier he'd seen a huge plume of fire shoot from the right engine while they were midair. He didn't want to board the plane that night. Neither did the band's backup singer, Cassie Gaines.

"There were a lot of people on the plane that knew something was wrong," Artemis Pyle, the band's drummer, told The Orlando Sentinel in 1988. "But we all kind of followed each other, and that's where we made our mistake." The only band member who didn't appear rattled was Van Zant. "'Hey, if the Lord wants you to die on this plane, when it's your time, it's your time," Gary Rossington, one of the band's guitar players, recalled him saying. "Let's go, man. We've got a gig to do." A few hours later, Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane ran out of gas and crashed into the Mississippi woods near Gillsburg, killing Van Zant, back-up singer Cassie Gaines and her brother Steve — another of the band's guitarists — as well as their assistant road manager and the plane's pilot and copilot.

Just before the right engine sputtered out and died, several band members were playing poker at the back of the plane while Ronnie Van Zant lay on the floor near the front suffering from back pain. Then, the left engine also went out. The pilot, Walter McCreary, came out and told the 24 passengers on board that they'd run out of gas and to buckle up and put their heads between their legs. Artemis Pyle saw Van Zant get up and head toward the back of the plane to grab a pillow and then return to the front. He and Pyle smiled at each other, clasping hands without a word. "He knew that he was going to die," Pyle recalled. Van Zant then took a seat and buckled himself in.

Gene Odom, Lynyrd Skynyrd's head of security, remembered things differently. He woke Van Zant, who'd fallen asleep on the floor, and helped him into a seat. "Man, just let me sleep," Odom recalled Van Zant saying (via "Lynyrd Skynyrd: Remembering the Free Birds of Southern Rock"). In Odom's recollection, these would have been the singer's final words before his tragic death. "The plane's gonna crash; put your head down," Odom yelled just before the plane hit the trees. The security officer was reportedly the only one not wearing a seat belt.

Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane ripped a 500-foot-long path through the woods. The impact tore the wings off and ripped open the fuselage. "The crash itself only lasted about 15 seconds at the most ... It felt like being rolled down a hill in a garbage can and being hit by about a hundred baseball bats at the same time," the band's keyboard player, Billy Powell, told The Orlando Sentinel. Ronnie Van Zant was killed instantly from blunt force trauma to the head along with guitarist Steve Gaines, the band's assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary, and co-pilot William Gray Jr. Meanwhile, Cassie Gaines survived the crash only to die from blood loss from her extensive injuries. Everyone else on the plane had been hurt, three critically. Van Zant's family took his body back home to Jacksonville, Florida, to be buried in the city where he had been instrumental in forming Lynyrd Skynyrd back in the mid-1960s.

We'll probably never know if Van Zant's tragic final words were the fate-tempting, "Hey, if the Lord wants you to die on this plane, when it's your time, it's your time" or the much more down-to-earth, "Man, just let me sleep." Either way, Van Zant's voice lives on in the music of the band he helped found.