Marshall Tucker Band still brings it

Though the famed Marshall Tucker Band has racked up fans from multiple generations with a career spanning 40-plus years, the group has had a distinct spike in attention and sales the last several years. Sure, they still tour all the time. But they’re also bolstered by situations only possible in this era: getting name-checked in top-selling digital country songs and getting covered on TV singing competitions.

“When we start having offers for two or three shows for one day, then something, somebody, somewhere, is doing something right,” lead singer Doug Gray said. “Not just us.”

If you weren’t familiar with the ’70s Southern rockers, you might have looked up the name when the band got a shout-out in Florida Georgia Line’s massive hit “Cruise.” “She was sippin’ on Southern and singing Marshall Tucker,” frontman Tyler Hubbard sings. The song was a hit on the country charts, but in summer 2013, it exploded with a Nelly remix pop version: Eventually, it become the highest-selling digital country song in history.

Coincidentally at the same time, country star Lee Brice also name-checked the band in his hit “Parking Lot Party”: “A little Marshall Tucker on the radio,” the South Carolina native croons. Released in June 2013, the party anthem shot up the charts faster than any of Brice’s previous singles. Google searches of “Marshall Tucker” also had quite a bump around that time, about the same as when former band member Stuart Swanlund died in August 2012.

Viewers probably also looked up the band when C.J. Harris sang their hit “Can’t You See” on Fox’s “American Idol” last spring, which got judge Jennifer Lopez dancing in her seat. And when eventual winner of “The Voice,” Craig Wayne Boyd, performed the same song a few months later on the NBC show to an audience of millions.

While Gray says there’s not a definitive answer about sales ebbs and flows, there’s no question there’s been an increase in purchases in the past few years particularly from younger customers after the TV airings — along with young fans who come out to see their shows.

“It doesn’t just happen the next day. It happens that night and the next week and next month,” Gray said of downloads picking up after the song is performed on TV. “It snowballs.”

Of course, he can remember back in the day the likes of Hank Williams Jr. called out the Marshall Tucker Band in a song. But he recalls how he first realized that “Cruise” might be kind of a big deal: from his 23-year-old daughter, who was in college at the time.

“She calls me up and says, ‘Daddy, have you heard this?!” I said, ‘Baby, I heard about it, but I haven’t heard the song,’” Gray says of her. “Then my oldest daughter called me about 10 minutes later, and she said ‘Did you hear this song?!’?”

Gray later chatted with the band via phone from their respective tour buses (Florida Georgia Line’s driver had Gray’s number from when he used to chauffeur Marshall Tucker years ago). He says he loves seeing younger fans at concerts, such as the crowd that went crazy at a recent Texas A&M University show.

“What it has done for us is made people more aware that we were around 40-something years ago,” Gray said. “We don’t look like what a lot of people think their grandmas and grandpas look like, even though we’re the same age.”

Marshall Tucker Band isn’t alone, of course. Recording artists these days are constantly calling out classic country acts, with lyrics from pop and rock-infused singers like Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean, boasting that their “mix tape’s got a little Hank, little Drake” and how they’re “chillin’ with some Skynyrd and some old Hank.” Even Blake Shelton is running some “ole Bocephus through a jukebox needle.”

While it may sound like a bunch of young-uns trying to use old-school name-checks to prove their street cred, Gray thinks they’re earnestly paying tribute to people who inspired them.

“It would probably be to honor the fact they were stimulated by that particular artist,” Gray said. “I don’t think they’re doing it to get attention.”