Free Bird!!!!

[Erin]

Originally Posted by Black_Moon

I don't get it...

It's a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Americans tend to shout it out at concerts regardless of the band on stage. I don't know how the tradition exactly started but according to Wikipedia:

Popular culture cliché:


It has become a popular culture cliché for the audience in many concerts to shout "Free Bird" as a request to hear the song, regardless of the performer or style of music.[7]

This phenomenon began earlier in the 1970s with The Allman Brothers Band's epic "Whipping Post", but then took off to a much greater extent with "Free Bird", very popular by 1979. This can be traced back to Skynyrd's first live album, 1976's One More From The Road. Skynyrd did not play the song during the main portion of the concert, or even in the encore performance. Instead they saved it for their second encore. After leaving the stage following the first encore of the concert, the crowd was riled by the apparent omission of Skynyrd's signature song. The crowd then began chanting "Free Bird, Free Bird ...". No one left the auditorium. The band then returned to the stage for a second encore and upon taking the microphone Van Zant asked the crowd, "What song is it you wanna hear?", which was immediately followed by several more shouts of "Free Bird". This interaction is recorded as an intro to the song on the album, and the band responded with a 14-minute version of the song.

Storyteller Mitch Myers tells a thoroughly entertaining story on NPR about how this phenomenon might have begun.