Southern rock superstars Lynyrd Skynyrd embraced gothic noir for “Saturday Night Special,” their lurid and unflinchingly direct critique of gun violence in America.
Lynyrd Skynyrd was fast becoming a household name when MCA Records released “Saturday Night Special” in the spring of 1975. Singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarists Allen Collins and Gary Rossington formed the first incarnation of the group in Jacksonville, Fla. in 1964, adopting their moniker in mocking tribute to Leonard Skinner, a PE teacher notorious for enforcing their high school’s policy against long hair on boys. By 1970 Lynyrd Skynyrd was a mainstay of the Jacksonville music scene, headlining local venues and opening for national touring acts: their outlaw blues-rock encompassed elements of country music, R&B and even gospel, ultimately coalescing into the earthy, road-tested sound captured by producer Al Kooper on their 1973 debut LP (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd). Kooper, a close friend of Pete Townshend, managed to secure Skynyrd a spot opening for the Who on the American leg of its Quadrophenia tour, exposing the up-and-coming band to a national audience, and (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd) eventually climbed to number 27 on the Billboard 200 on the strength of now-classic songs like “Gimme Three Steps,” “Tuesday’s Gone” and the epic “Free Bird,” the sacred text of Southern rock.
Second Helping, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s sophomore effort, followed in 1974 and spawned the band’s biggest hit single, “Sweet Home Alabama,” Van Zant’s anthemic riposte to his pal Neil Young’s incendiary “Southern Man” and “Alabama.” The album was Skynyrd’s last with drummer Bob Burns, who suffered a mental breakdown while on tour in Europe. Burns’ replacement, Artimus Pyle, made his recorded debut with the band on “Saturday Night Special,” cut with Kooper over the course of a daylong August 1974 session at Doraville, Ga.’s Studio One, where Skynyrd produced its first two LPs. “Saturday Night Special” was fast-tracked to ensure its inclusion on the soundtrack of 1974’s The Longest Yard, the Burt Reynolds comedy feature about a prison football team; Skynyrd would not cut the remaining material for its third LP Nuthin’ Fancy until its members reassembled in Atlanta’s WEBB IV Studios in early 1975.
“Saturday Night Special” takes its name from the colloquial catch-all for compact, small-caliber, cheaply-produced handguns most commonly used in low-income communities. The expression came into wider use with the introduction of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which banned the importation and manufacture of many inexpensive firearms. Gun ownership advocates have frequently cited racial overtones in the term “Saturday night special,” which they argue derives from the slur “[n*****]-town Saturday night,” but research published in 2023 by the Duke University School of Law found no historical support for this claim. “It apparently appeared for the first time, unsourced, in a 1976 article and has been repeated in dozens of briefs and scholarly sources since,” Duke’s Jennifer L. Behrens and Joseph Blocher write. “Advocates and scholars should stop invoking this unsupported origin story, which if anything serves as a cautionary example of how citations can cascade. The most plausible origin of the nickname as it related to cheap firearms stemmed from the turn of the century, when the phrase ‘Saturday-night special’ was already in common usage with connotations of cheapness and convenience.”
More than 46 percent of American households owned guns in 1974, Ronnie Van Zant’s among them: at the time he co-wrote “Saturday Night Special” with Skynyrd’s third guitarist, Ed King, a century-old Springfield rifle hung on his mantle, and he also possessed a .22 caliber pistol for hunting rabbits and squirrels in the woods around Jacksonville. The target of the song’s wrath is not gun ownership or Second Amendment rights, but the scourge of illegal handguns, still the most commonly used weapon in homicides and the type of firearm most frequently possessed by federal and state prisoners. Van Zant pleads his case for greater gun control across a series of domestic vignettes — a deranged husband shooting the man he finds in bed with his cheating wife; a whiskey-soaked poker player murdering his friend after accusing him of cheating — before delivering his closing argument: “Handguns are made for killin’/They ain’t no good for nothin’ else/And if you like to drink your whiskey/You might even shoot yourself.” King’s steely, slashing riff amplifies the threat of imminent violence: from its opening chords through to its explosive climax, “Saturday Night Special” is the rare message song that isn’t afraid to crack some skulls to get its point across.
“Saturday Night Special” was finally released as a single on May 19, 1975, roughly nine months after it was recorded, and peaked at number 27 on the Billboard Hot 100. Nothin’ Fancy soared to number nine on the Billboard albums chart, becoming Lynyrd Skynyrd’s most successful LP to date, but King — a self-described “hippie from Southern California” who frequently struggled to fit in alongside his bandmates — quit the band while on tour in support of the album. “Ronnie and my guitar roadie who changed my strings were thrown in jail in Ann Arbor. They didn’t arrive… until 10 minutes before we went on,” King recalled in the 2018 documentary If I Leave Here Tomorrow: A Film About Lynyrd Skynyrd. “I had to play on old strings, and I broke two strings during ‘Free Bird.’ After, Ronnie was riding me, and a lightbulb went off and I said ‘That’s it.’ I went back to my room, packed up my stuff and left.” Lynyrd Skynyrd continued with only two guitarists before adding Steve Gaines in 1976; Gaines, his older sister Cassie (a member of the Honkettes, the band’s backing vocal trio) and Van Zant were all killed on Oct. 20, 1977 when Skynyrd’s chartered Convair CV-240 crashed into a heavily forested swampland outside of Gillsburg, Miss.
Although six of the seven members of Lynyrd Skynyrd who recorded “Saturday Night Special” are deceased — and despite the band’s continued popularity with conservative audiences — the musicians who now tour under the Skynyrd banner still play the song during most live performances.
“It’s a song that we all love, and I think it’s more relevant now than when Ronnie wrote it,” younger brother Johnny Van Zant, who assumed frontman duties when the surviving members of Skynyrd reunited in 1987, told Classic Rock in 2022. “When I was just a kid, growing up, we always had guns around our house. My family, we were hunters. But handguns scare me because I know there’s only one thing they’re gonna be used for. Every time I sing ‘Saturday Night Special,’ I feel the power in those words that Ronnie wrote. There are too many guns in America. My brother knew what he was talking about.”
Related Songs
