Success Made to Last Legends with Doug Gray, leader of The Marshall Tucker Band

Doug Gray is the only remaining original touring member of The Marshall Tucker Band. Hear his tribute to Charlie Daniels and listen to the story of his 1955 Chevy "Peach" truck. For an extra bonus, Doug sings a few lines from Heard it in a Love Song. Doug Gray was encouraged by his parents to hop up on a stage with a band of musicians at a South Carolina AMVETS club when he was just 7 years old.He chortled out a laugh to open the band’s surf-rock song, “Wipeout.”“They didn’t expect it. I realized then that that was entertainment,” said Gray, now lead singer for the Marshall Tucker Band.“A guy come up and give me $5, and I went, ‘Holy crap! This is what I’m gonna do for the rest of my life,’” Gray said during a phone interview for The Herald Bulletin.Gray, now 73, went on with high school chums and military buddies to found The Marshall Tucker Band in 1972.Celebrating 50 years, the band is set to perform March 5 at Hoosier Park. Tickets are on sale. Opening will be guitarist and songwriter Dave Mason, co-founder of Traffic, whose biggest hit was the solo, “We Just Disagree” in 1977. Gray has known Mason since MTB opened for him in 1973, and they’ve performed together numerous times.Gray was talking from his home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, about a four-hour drive from his familial and band roots in Spartanburg. His voice is memorable on the No. 14 hit, “Heard It in a Love Song.”Gray performed in bands as a youth.“We had played beach music, like Ocean Drive (in Myrtle Beach), forever in little bands. I mean, hell, I was 10 to 12 years old playing fraternity parties,” Gray said.MTB started coming together after longtime friends returned home from the Vietnam War. Gray and rhythm guitarist George McCorkle joined brothers Toy (lead guitar and songwriter) and Tommy Caldwell (bass), plus Jerry Eubanks (flute/sax). Eubanks retired in 1996. The others have passed away, leaving Gray as the only original member.When the band was coming together, Gray had a day job working at a bank. “They said I was a natural. I said, hell, I ain’t a natural at nothing.”Toy Caldwell was working for his dad, a master plumber.“He said there was too much crawling around beneath houses, so he went to work at a place that sold plumbing parts. He was getting smarter as time went along,” Gray said, talking with a deep Southern drawl.In the early 1970s, an era when the Allman Brothers were popular, Capricorn Records invited the band to Macon, Georgia, after listening to its recordings. They rehearsed in the basement of a shuttered hotel. There, they found a key imprinted with the name “Marshall Tucker.”“We never knew if we were gonna to make it to the next weekend,” Gray recalled.The band wasn’t keen on the financial side of the industry.“What we were connected to was the people that come and watch you play. That was the most incredible thing for us, is to watch those people yell and scream when we would end a song.”The band grabbed attention by adding a flute for a distinctive jazz-oriented element compared with other early ‘70s bands employing trendy backing saxophones.“Everybody had saxophone players. … We talked about it in rehearsal, and somebody said, well, Jerry (Eubanks) was in high school and he played saxophone. Well, we don’t want a saxophone player but let’s call him up and see if he can play a flute.”It worked out, Gray recalled.“Comes to find out that I can play flute, but you don’t want to hear it.”Gray had hoped to reunite on stage with Charlie Daniels. However, the popular fiddle player died July 6, 2020, from a hemorrhagic stroke at the age of 83. Some musicians didn’t attend Daniels’ Tennessee funeral due to COVID-19 restrictions. Not Gray. He went and expressed condolences to Daniels’...