Ask your average American rock ‘n’ roll fan to name places that birthed rock of the genres, and you will likely receive the answers New York City (Simon and Garfunkel, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, KISS) (Kelley, 2025), Los Angeles (the Doors, Guns and Roses, the Beach Boys, the Eagles, the Go Gos, Van Halen, Jane’s Addiction) (Robinson, 2014), Detroit (Motown, Bob Seger, Alice Cooper) or Memphis (BB King, Elvis Presley, Booker T and the MGs).
There is, however, another less well-known US region from which American music thrived. Northeastern Florida is responsible for producing multiple popular music innovators through the late 1970s. One Gainesville native, Don Felder, knew them all.
Don “Fingers” Felder was born in Gainesville, Florida, in 1947. He would join one of the biggest bands in the world and play a pivotal role in the Eagles’ sound in the mid-1970s. A gifted guitarist, Felder co-wrote two of their biggest hits, “Hotel California” and “Victim of Love”. Curiously, Felder’s brushes with fame occurred much earlier in his life, while he was still a teenager in Gainesville. Felder’s connections to musicians who achieved later success offer a fascinating insight into the roots of Southern rock.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Before he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Eagles, Don Felder taught guitar lessons for 18 months at a Gainesville music store called Lipham Music. One day in 1967, a young, sandy-haired kid came into Lipham Music looking for a job. The kid identified himself as Tom Petty, a Gainesville native like Felder.
Petty explained that he had been playing bass, but was looking to learn guitar for his new rock ‘n’ roll band with locals Benmont Trench and Stan Lynch, then called, alternately, “The Epics” and “The Rucker Brothers”. The store’s owner, Buster Lipham, hired him.
Accounts differ on the extent to which Don Felder mentored him, but he certainly influenced Tom Petty at Lipham Music. Petty, Lynch, and Trench would later form Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. They would go on to worldwide fame with multiple hits and be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
The Allman Brothers
Don Felder’s slide guitar is featured on some of the Eagles’ biggest hits, including one of their last, “The Long Run.” Felder learned to play bottleneck slide guitar in Gainesville from Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers.
The Allman Brothers was formed in March 1969 in Jacksonville, Florida, by brothers Duane and Gregg Allman. Their meteoric rise to fame is remarkable: The Allman Brothers’ albums in the early 1970s, At Fillmore East, Eat a Peach, and Brothers and Sisters, are widely regarded as among the greatest of all time.
Unfortunately, tragedy would also befall the Allman Brothers at the height of their fame. Two founding members died in eerily similar accidents within 13 months of each other. Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident in October 1971, near Macon, Georgia. The following year, the group’s bassist, Berry Oakley, also died from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident on November 11, 1972, just three blocks from Duane’s crash site. The Allman Brothers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
Stephen Stills
Stephen Stills was not a Gainesville native, but he knew and performed with Don Felder while they were students at Gainesville High School. Stills was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1945. A military brat, the future member of Buffalo Springfield, Manassas, and CSNY lived in and traveled throughout the country during his youth.
In the early 1960s in Gainesville, he joined a band called the Continentals with a then-unknown guitarist named Don Felder. Stills played with the Continentals until he decided to relocate to New York, then to Laurel Canyon, California.
Stephen Stills would go on to sell millions of records as part of various groups and as a solo artist. He performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, Woodstock in 1969 and 1994, and Live Aid in 1985. He made history in 1997 by becoming the first, and thus far only, person inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the same evening.
Bernie Leadon
Stephen Stills’ absence in the Continentals was filled by a young Minnesotan named Bernie Leadon. Leadon’s family had moved to Gainesville in 1964 because his father, a physician, gained a position at the University of Florida.
Leadon, proficient in guitar, banjo, dobro, and mandolin, moved to Southern California in the mid-1960s. He joined The Flying Burrito Brothers in September 1969, replacing a bassist named Chris Ethridge. Leadon remained with the band until 1971, after which he became part of the original lineup of The Eagles, alongside Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and Randy Meisner.
In January of 1974, the Eagles were recording On the Border and looking for a guitarist with a harder edge. Leadon suggested that his old Continental bandmate, Don Felder, add slide guitar to the song “Good Day in Hell”. AfterFelder contributed the lead to “Already Gone”, Glenn Frey asked him to join the band permanently.
Leadon quit the Eagles the following year, infamously pouring a beer over Glenn Frey’s head before doing so. Leadon, Felder, Frey, and the other Eagles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Lynyrd Skynyrd, “the definitive Southern rock band”, was not always named after their high school P.E. teacher. Originally called My Backyard and then the Mods, the group that became Lynyrd Skynyrd formed in Jacksonville, Florida, about 70 miles from Gainesville, in 1964. Lynyrd Skynyrd, founded by Ronnie Van Zant, Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, Bob Burns, and Larry Junstrom, went on to phenomenal success in the 1970s.
Remarkably, in addition to Tom Petty, Duane Allman, Stephen Stills, and Bernie Leadon, Don Felder also frequently crossed paths with Lynyrd Skynyrd before they were famous. By the mid-1960s, performing musicians in Northern Florida had bonded together. The Continentals competed for stage time with Lynyrd Skynyrd, including University of Florida fraternity dances.
Like the others connected to Felder, Lynrd Skynrd hit it big in the music business. Driven by megahits such as “Freebird “ and “Sweet Home Alabama”, the band sold more than 38 million albums. Sadly, like the Allman Brothers, Lynrd Skynrd suffered tragedy at the height of their fame when, in October 1977, their chartered airplane crashed. The wreck killed three band members and seriously injured the others. Lynyrd Skynyrd was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.
By the time The Eagles broke up in 1980, the band included Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmidt, and Don Felder. They would rejoin them in 1994, but Felder would be fired in 2001. In between lawsuits with his former bandmates, Felder chronicled his tenure with the Eagles in a 2008 tell-all book, Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974–2001).
Five years later, Felder, along with the other members of the Eagles, was interviewed for an acclaimed 2013 documentary, History of the Eagles. The Eagles still perform, but with only one original member, Don Henley. Glenn Frey died in 2016, and Randy Meisner died in 2023.
With hundreds of millions of record sales and multiple Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions, Don Felder’s curious connections to the southern rock pioneers of northeastern Florida have been largely ignored. This may soon change, though. In the spring of 2026, a Music Heritage Garden behind the Jacksonville Center for the Performing Arts is scheduled to be completed. Northern Florida’s rock roots are finally getting their due, and Felder’s friends from his formative years will likely be included.