In 2018 we examined the prog credentials of the Marshall Tucker Band, Southern rock pioneers with a subtle difference.
“We have so many people who have been in the band over the years and the original band had so many musical tastes, which is why we can play a jazz festival one day and a blues festival another,” The Marshall Tucker Band’s frontman Doug Gray told The Sarasota Post in 2014. “Our music fits in just about anywhere.”
Released in April 1973, the first Marshall Tucker Band album emerged at the perfect moment, as the phenomenon known as southern rock began to widely exert its charms. Superficially at least, MTB weren’t radically different from their more prominent peers in Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band. But in reality, founder Gray (vocals) and Toy Caldwell (guitar/vocals) had taken a circuitous route to the genre.
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In the late 60s, Gray and Caldwell had been members of a band called The Toy Factory, based in their native Spartanburg, South Carolina. Both subsequently served in Vietnam, during which time Caldwell was wounded, eventually being discharged in 1969.
On returning home, the musical landscape was changing, and by 1972, Gray and Caldwell had formed a new group with Tommy Caldwell on bass, George McCorkle on rhythm guitar and Paul Riddle on drums. Newly dubbed The Marshall Tucker Band (supposedly after a blind piano tuner who had earlier rented the band’s rehearsal space), they also added flute player and saxophonist Jerry Eubanks to their ranks.
As a result, Take The Highway, the opening track on the band’s debut album, sounded quite unlike anything else around at that point. It’s southern rock, of course, but with strong jazzy hues and the distinctly psychedelic rush of that flute: at points it sounds more like Camel than Skynyrd.
The young band’s early influences, which ranged from their country music heritage to legends from other fields such as Dr John and BB King, had gently collided to create something subtly idiosyncratic and very much in keeping with the free spirit of the era.
The rest of the album, while not quite as startling, sustains that level of gently expressed imagination and verve. Can’t You See is a beautifully mellifluous psychedelic amble, Ramblin’ is a joyous slab of prime jam-band soul replete with a euphoric brass section, and My Jesus Told Me So sounds like early Chicago going gospel after an epic weed binge.
As time progressed, the band’s sound settled into a slightly more conventional groove, but Eubanks’ flute and sax continued to set the group apart from their more texturally prosaic brethren. They’re still motoring along today.
