The Last Rebel Lounge — Lynyrd Skynyrd's Final Concert, Greenville, South Carolina

Lynyrd Skynyrd played their final concert on October 20, 1977, at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina — hours before the chartered Convair CV-240 carrying the band crashed into a Mississippi swamp. The show was part of the Street Survivors tour, promoting the album released just three days earlier. The band reportedly played a strong set. After the show, the band and crew boarded the plane for the next date in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The aircraft ran out of fuel over southern Mississippi and the pilots attempted an emergency landing in a field near Gillsburg.

The crash killed Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, backing vocalist Cassie Gaines (Steve's sister), assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, and the two pilots. Survivors included Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, Billy Powell, Leon Wilkeson, Artimus Pyle, and others — many badly injured. Artimus Pyle, despite broken ribs, crawled from the wreckage and walked to a nearby farmhouse to summon help. The band's roadie JoJo Billingsley was not on the flight and survived.

The Greenville Memorial Auditorium still operates as a venue. Greenville, South Carolina, has grown dramatically since 1977 into one of the South's most prosperous mid-sized cities. The concert that night is marked in local memory as one of the last nights of a particular era in Southern rock. The crash site near Gillsburg, Mississippi, is the more visited memorial location.