Robert E. Lee High School

This is the school where Ronnie Van Zant, Allen Collins, Gary Rossington, Larry Junstrom, and Bob Burns first met and started playing music together in 1964. They were students at Robert E. Lee High School on Jacksonville's Westside, and the band they formed — originally called My Backyard, then The Noble Five, then One Percent — would eventually become Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The name itself is a mocking tribute to Leonard Skinner, a gym teacher and later assistant principal at the school who was notorious for enforcing the dress code, particularly the rule against boys having long hair. Skinner would send long-haired students to the principal's office. The band took his name, mangled the spelling, and turned it into one of the most recognizable names in rock history.

Leonard Skinner himself took it in good humour. He later became a real estate agent in Jacksonville, and the band even used the phone number from one of his property listings on an album's inner sleeve. He occasionally introduced the band at Jacksonville concerts.

The school was renamed in 2021 and is now known as Jean Ribault High School. The building and campus remain, though the school the band attended has changed considerably over the decades. For Skynyrd fans, though, this is ground zero — the place where a group of working-class Jacksonville kids started a band that would define Southern rock.