The Marshall Tucker Band, The Marshall Tucker Band
Featured Album
Good ol' South Carolina boys make their charming debut.
Fresh out of Spartanburg, South Carolina, and, in a couple cases, not long out of Vietnam, the blue-collar boys in the Marshall Tucker Band audaciously open their Top 30 1973 debut album with two beautifully swinging six-minute rambles — the first, “Take the Highway,” pomped high with Jethro Tull style flutes; the second, FM radio staple “Can't You See,” a lonely lament about riding the train to the end of the line and committing suicide off a mountaintop. For Southern rock, the music doesn't feel redneck at all: more like old cowhands from the Rio Grande.
The album has its pleasantly mellow holding patterns — two or three ballads dead-set on Grateful Dead. But more often, this sextet focus on setting America's great wide yonder to 20th century dance rhythms. In “Hillbilly Band,” old-timey fiddles and jugs ride a Diddley beat for a foot-stomping swamp funk; trumpets and saxes in “Ramblin'” conjure a late ’20s riverboat jazz band.
There's folk and (on this reissue, in a 12-minute-plus live bonus cut) blues as well. But where Marshall Tucker truly perfect their sound might be “My Jesus Told Me So”: calm and spacious, like you're up before dawn driving the last leg of your journey, with the road to yourself. When three gospel singers enter, you can feel the sun coming up.
