Quote:
Originally Posted by GasHouseGang
That's not the story I heard. This is what the band said:
The basketball coach at their high school, Forby Leonard Skinner, had more of an impact than he could have imagined. Skinner was a gym coach who at some point in the 1960s disciplined two members for letting their hair grow long. The young musicians eventually dropped out of school, but remembered all the hassles. In 1970, the band, which at the time called themselves “One Percent,” had a gig at a local club where they called out to the crowd, "Hey, we're Leonard Skinner and we're gonna play for y'all tonight". Since most of the crowd had run into Coach Skinner at one point or another the name was an instant hit and stuck. To make themselves more original, the spelling was later changed to “Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
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I've seen that video also, but there's currently a documentary about the band on Netflix, and they do mention the high school teacher, Leonard Skinner. But in the documentary it also shows Bob Burns, the band's drummer, going into further detail about how the reference and name supposedly came from him and originally started from the Allie Sherman song 'Hello Muddah, Hello Fadddah'. They actually play a little soundbite from the song in the documentary and, lo and behold, the lyrics actually mention the name Leonard Skinner as one of the other campers at Camp Granada, who gets ptomaine poisoning. It was apparently a sheer coincidence that they also ended up with a high school teacher named Leonard Skinner, but Burns seems to clearly indicate the initial, earlier influence came from the song. You can check out the song's lyrics, and the documentary, to see I'm not making this up.