The Marshall Tucker Band & Why Those Classic Southern Rock Songs Are More Popular Than Ever Before

This will be another busy year for The Marshall Tucker Band. The group kicked off its 2023 Infinite Road Tour in early February and will continue crisscrossing the country for shows all the way through mid-November.

For Doug Gray, lead singer and founding member, it’s still hard to believe the band, that got its start back in 1972 and helped launch the genre that became southern rock, is still drawing big crowds.

“It’s overwhelming to see so many fans coming out to our shows 50 years after we started,” he says.

Many of those fans are older and have followed the group for decades, but there are lots of younger faces in those crowds, too.

“I’ll ask them to turn on the house lights,” Gray says, “and I’ll look out at the crowd and see a wave of gray hair. And that’s okay because I’ve got mine, too. I’m 74 and will turn 75 later this month. But those older fans are also bringing their kids and grandkids. And that’s pretty special.”

Known for classics like “Can’t You See,” “Heard It in a Love Song,” “Fire on the Mountain” and others, Marshall Tucker has seen a wave of younger fans discovering their music in recent years.

Their songs are consistently used in movies and on TV and chosen time and again by young artists looking to launch their own careers on shows like The Voice and American Idol. And in this day and age of streaming, their music is more accessible than ever before.

A check of the Marshall Tucker Band’s artist page on Spotify shows an average of 2-and-a-half million monthly listeners.

When trying to explain their continued popularity, Gray always ties it back to the songs. Those timeless lyrics in “Can’t You See,” “Heard it in a Love Song,” and others, resonate with people today as much as they did decades ago.

A few years ago, he referenced “Can’t You See” to show what he means.

“I think that song portrays the way anybody can feel at any time, be it man or woman. I’m leaving, but ‘can’t you see’ what that man or woman has been doing to me.’”

Those lyrics, as well as most of the band’s songs, were written by Toy Caldwell. The Marshall Tucker Band was started by a group of high school friends in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Original members included brothers Toy and Tommy Caldwell, George McCorkle, Paul T. Riddle, and Jerry Eubanks. They played together for almost a decade until Tommy Caldwell was killed in a car accident in 1982. Soon afterward Toy decided to leave the band.

“It was two years after Tommy died and Toy just couldn’t take it anymore with Tommy gone,” Gray explains.

Today Gray is the last original member of the group. But he, and the current members of Marshall Tucker, most of whom have been together for more than two decades, continue honoring Toy Caldwell and the rest of the band, by playing their music.

“Songs like “Can’t you See,” Gray says. “I don’t see that song getting old to anybody. You start ‘Can’t You See’ with that little strumming part and then put the flute in there and everybody jumps up out of their seats. There are many songs that are that way for us. Toy Caldwell’s music will be around forever.

Gray says back then, they had no idea how much those songs would come to mean. He shares a story about “Heard it in a Love Song,” and how, initially, he didn’t want to do it.

“I put off singing it for a year,” he recalls, “because I thought it was a little too sweet for The Marshall Tucker Band. I made every excuse in the world when they tried to get me to record it. I had the flu, my car was broke and I couldn’t make it to Macon (Georgia) to record it, and so on. When they finally said they were going to put it out with just the music, I finally went down and sang it. And that’s the version you hear on the radio today.”

The song is so beloved now, he rarely sings it at all in the live shows.

“What happens now is I let the audience sing it. The crowd starts right at the beginning and ends up going through the whole thing.”

Gray has not only continued carrying the banner for the Marshall Tucker Band, but for southern rock, in general. With the recent deaths of Charlie Daniels (in July of 2020) and Gary Rossington, the last original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd (Rossington passed away in March), Gray has become sort of the torchbearer for the genre.

He has special memories of the early days when those bands were out on the road together.

“This was a bunch of guys that hit it off just right as we’d meet in the night passing each other at truck stops going to the same city or coming from the same city. With Charlie, he played on our first couple of records primarily because we were invited to come up to Nashville and Charlie was on the show and we got to know each other.”

Gray says things were different back then.

“Our love for each other came from seeing each other every night whether Marshall Tucker opened a show or Charlie opened a show, which happened at a lot of fairs and big festivals. And if they told us Charlie needs to get out of here tonight, he has a long ride to the next stop, we’d say okay and we’d cut our set a bit short and not tell anybody. Or the real blessing is we’d swap positions and Charlie would start first and we’d get more time. You wouldn’t find bands doing that now because everybody wants to be at the top of the heap. We could care less.”

Gray says he still loves the music, the people, and performing, and has no plans to slow down anytime soon.

“The guys were asking me about that downstairs at breakfast the other morning,” he says. “They said, ‘What’s the plan?’ And I said, you know what? I’m already booked into next year. So, I think the plan is to keep on rocking.”