Grief does not keep office hours, and the song that came out of it does not keep chart schedules either. Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington wrote 'Simple Man' in roughly an hour, in Van Zant's apartment, after both men had recently lost the women who had shaped them. Van Zant's grandmother was gone. Rossington's mother was gone. What they did with that loss was sit down together and start telling stories, and by the time the afternoon was over, they had one of the most plainspoken songs in the southern rock canon and a producer who didn't want to put it on the record.
The songwriting split was clean. Rossington grabbed a guitar and worked out a chord progression. Van Zant took the advice those two women had passed down over the years and turned it into lyrics. The voice in the song is a mother's, steady and unhurried, telling her son to find something good, love it simply, and not let the world grind him down. Rossington later described the process without any of the usual industry modesty: 'We just put down in a song what our mama or grandma had said to us. They really wrote it, we just played it.' Van Zant was not writing a character. He was transcribing a conversation.
The album was recorded at Studio One in Doraville, Georgia, from March 27 to May 1, 1973, with Al Kooper producing. Kooper was the right man for the job in almost every respect. He had come across the band playing a bar in downtown Atlanta, signed them to his Sounds of the South imprint through MCA, and had the ears and the credibility to translate a Jacksonville bar band into something a national audience could hear. But when the band worked up 'Simple Man' in rehearsal, Kooper told them the song was too weak to make the final cut. The band disagreed, completely and without apology. Van Zant's solution was direct. He walked Kooper outside to his car and told him to stay there until the song was finished. The band went back in and cut it without him. When it was done, they called Kooper back in to add his organ part. He did.
The track that appears on (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd) features Rossington on lead guitar, Allen Collins on rhythm guitar, Ed King on bass, Bob Burns on drums, Billy Powell on keyboards, and Kooper's organ sitting in the mix like he'd been there all along. King had joined the band as bassist when founding bassist Leon Wilkeson departed before the sessions; Wilkeson would later return and King would shift to guitar, creating the three-guitar attack the band became famous for. On this record, though, he was holding down the low end, and the personnel on 'Simple Man' reflects exactly that.
'Simple Man' appeared as the fourth track on the debut, released August 13, 1973. It was never put out as a single. The album did produce two singles, 'Gimme Three Steps' in November 1973 and 'Free Bird' in November 1974, but 'Simple Man' was left to find its audience on its own terms. It did. The song has accumulated more than 100 weeks on Billboard's Rock Streaming Songs chart and over 875 million official on-demand U.S. streams, numbers that accumulate not because of a promotional push but because the song keeps getting discovered. Kooper, by his own later admission, understood fairly quickly that he had been wrong. The question of whether it belonged on the record answered itself the first time they played it live.
The Van Zant family's relationship to the song did not end with Ronnie. His brother Donnie fronted .38 Special, a band that shared the same Jacksonville bloodline. His younger brother Johnny eventually took over as Skynyrd's frontman after Ronnie was killed in the October 1977 plane crash. Johnny has said that 'Simple Man' is probably his favorite song to perform live, that the feeling of a mother talking to her son in those lyrics is something he thinks about every time he steps up to the microphone. When a song passes from one brother to another like a piece of furniture from the family home, it was built to last.
The lyric that gives the song its emotional center comes early: 'Mama told me when I was young, come sit beside me, my only son.' Van Zant was not, in fact, his mother's only son. He had two younger brothers, and the lyric was a compression of feeling, not a biography. But that compression is exactly how the song works. It takes the specific grief of two young men sitting in an apartment talking about women they would not see again, and it opens up until anyone who has ever been given advice they didn't fully understand until too late can walk inside. Kooper heard a slow, soft song that didn't fit the album. Van Zant and Rossington had written the thing that would outlast everything else on it.
