Before you ask me how I did all of the diacritics in the title, let me tell you that cut and paste is probably the greatest feature ever created for computers. You can thank some OCD person doing free work for the Wikimedia Foundation for the real hard work in that.
Pronounced is the first, and probably best, Skynyrd album. That's my advice to anyone wondering what album they should get. Second Helping and Street Survivors are also worthwhile. The others don't really do a lot for me. It's a fairly well-known fact that the band is roughly named after their gym teacher, one Leonard Skinner, so the title of the first album really rubs it in that they were lampooning the guy and wanted to be sure the public pronounced the name just right. For what it's worth, the band and the man buried the hatchet in later years, and Skinner may have gotten the last laugh by outliving almost every original member of the band (he died in 2010).
The lineup evolved through the decade, so this album sports a different cast than any of the other albums, mainly because of the unusual appearance and role of guitarist Ed King on bass. I say unusual because he was the outsider of the band, a California boy formerly from the Strawberry Alarm Clock (yes, the "Incense and Peppermints" band). Also, as is well documented by the rest of the band, he really wasn't cut out to play bass, but with the sudden departure of Leon Wilkeson, he boldly took over the role for one album. Wilkeson would soon realize what an ill-timed decision leaving the band was and return for the next album, moving King back to guitar and officially creating Lynyrd Skynyrd's signature three-guitar sound.
Maybe understated here is the contribution of Al Kooper to many of the tracks. I usually don't think of a Southern band with a "hard as nails" reputation of putting a mellotron to good use, especially when they had a perfectly good keyboardist already in Billy Powell, but he really adds another layer to the music, making "Tuesday's Gone" and "Free Bird" shine.
I know a lot gets made about the devastating copter crash that effectively ended the band as a serious recording entity, but of everyone here, only singer Ronnie Van Zant was killed in the incident. The rest of band all died later: Allen Collins (pneumonia, 1990), Wilkeson (natural causes, 2001), Powell (heart attack, 2009), and drummer Bob Burns (car crash, 2015). Ed King and Gary Rossington are still around, but only Rossington still actively associates with the band.
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