The main home has five bedrooms, three full bathrooms, a screened pool and a two-car garage.
The almost 2.5-acre property at 4734 Julington Creek Road is listed at $895,000.
An aerial view of the property.
The property has a small dock on Julington Creek.
The master bedroom.
The dining room.
The kitchen.
The property has a 1200-square-foot second home with two bedrooms and two baths.
The bedroom of the second home was one a music studio.
The living area of the second home.
It may not be Elvis Presley’s Graceland, but the home of a Jacksonville rock star is for sale.
Owners Sam and Catherine Swingle are marketing the Julington Creek home of the late Allen Collins, founding member and guitarist of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The property once housed the studio where much of Collins’ post-Lynyrd Skynyrd work with the Rossington Collins Band and the Allen Collins Band was written.
The Rossington Collins Band is best known for the single “Don’t Misunderstand Me.”
The almost 2.5-acre property at 4734 Julington Creek Road is listed at $895,000. Records show an assessed value of $441,550.
Wendy Hughes at Keller Williams Atlantic Partners Southside is listing the property. An open house is 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Feb. 22.
The main home has five bedrooms, three full bathrooms, a screened pool and a two-car garage.
A wooded area leads to a small dock on Julington Creek.
The smaller building that housed the studio is 1,000 square feet with two bedrooms, two full bathrooms and a three-car garage. A windowless bedroom is where the studio operated.
Collins bought the property before the 1977 airplane crash that killed Lynyrd Skynyrd members Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and his sister, Cassie Gaines and three others.
Collins died in 1990 from injuries suffered in a 1986 car crash just before the reformation of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The Swingles bought the home in 2004 for $665,000 from Amie Williamson, Collins’ daughter, and his father, Larkin Collins Sr., who owned the house at the time.
Williamson extensively remodeled the home, including dismantling the studio. She didn’t move in, Catherine Swingle said in an email interview.
The Swingles have three grown children and decided to downsize. They plan to remain in Jacksonville.
While nothing outwardly marks that the house was owned by Collins, Catherine Swingle said fans find the address on the Internet and come by to take photos.
Derek Hess, drummer in both the Rossington Collins Band and the Allen Collins Band, remembers the studio.
It was a much more laid-back place to work than Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Hell House,” a small building without air conditioning where Van Zant ran the band with an iron hand.
Before Lynyrd Skynyrd had a record contract, Van Zant would rehearse the band for hours at a time.
“Allen would rehearse when we could get him in here. He was partying all of the time,” Hess said of Collins’s work habits during the Rossington Collins days.
Work did get done in the studio, including rough mixes for Rossington Collins’s first album, “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere.”
Hess said the first album had nine songs and was too long to fit a normally pressed vinyl album. Studio trickery squeezed the ninth song on by pressing the groves closer together. However, that resulted in 200,000 faulty albums that had to be returned. The Rossington Collins Band members had to pay for the returned albums, Hess said.
Catherine Swingle has fond memories of the home and said she will miss it. She especially likes the privacy.
“(I’ll miss) having bonfires in the backyard and kayaking on Julington Creek,” she said.
The couple has “the memories of raising a family in this large, nature parklike space,” she said.
