I tried making the following change to my wordpress site to permanently redirect a common link to a new page. I could've -sworn- that this used to work. But it simply does not (at least in WP 3.9). I have had to resort to using a Redirect Plug-In.

I'm wondering -why- it doesn't work and if there is a technique which -will- work. I'd prefer to continue to use .htaccess for simplicity.

Below is the .htaccess file:

 # MY CHANGES
 Redirect 301 http://mysite.com/gigs  http://mysite.com/booking/

 # BEGIN WordPress
 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
 </IfModule>

Again, it works by using a redirect plug-in inside WP, but there must be a way to force the 'redirection' to occur -before- the URL is passed to the WP engine, right? How is the done?