Marshall Tucker Band lights a ‘fire on the mountains’ Jan. 20

The Marshall Tucker Band is coming to Kalispell on its 50th Anniversary Tour and will perform Jan. 20 at the Wachholz College Center on the campus of the Flathead Valley Community College. Tickets are on sale now.

The Marshall Tucker Band continues to have a profound level of impact on successive generations of listeners — a tried-and-true Southern institution through the decades.

“I’ve been in tune with how music can make you feel, right from when I was first in the crib,” said lead vocalist and bandleader Doug Gray, who’s been fronting the MTB since the very beginning. “I was born with that. And I realized it early on, back when I was a little kid, and my mom and dad encouraged me to get up there and sing whatever song came on the jukebox … There’s a certain gift I found I could share, whether I was in front of five people or 20,000 people. I was blessed with that ability and I’m thankful I can share with others."

The Marshall Tucker Band came together as a young, hungry and driven six-piece outfit in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1972, having given themselves the name of a blind piano tuner after they found it inscribed on a key to their original rehearsal space — and they’ve been tearing it up on live stages both big and small across the globe ever since. The band’s mighty music catalog consists of more than 20 studio albums and a score of live releases. They’ve racked up multi-platinum album sales many times over. A typically rich MTB setlist has a healthy dose of hits like the heartfelt singalong “Heard It in a Love Song,” the insistent pleading of “Can’t You See” (the signature tune of MTB’s late co-founding lead guitarist and then-principal songwriter Toy Caldwell), the testifying “Fire on the Mountain,” “Long Hard Ride,” and the explosive testimony of “Ramblin,’” to name but a few.

Gray sees no end to the road that lies ahead for The Marshall Tucker Band, whose legacy is being carried forward by him and his current bandmates, drummer B.B. Borden (Mother’s Finest, The Outlaws); bassist/vocalist Ryan Ware; keyboardist/saxophonist/flutist/vocalist Marcus James Henderson; guitarist/vocalist Chris Hicks; and guitarist/vocalist Rick Willis.

“You know, I think it was Toy Caldwell’s dad who said, ‘There’s more to gray hair than old bones,’ and we still have a lot of stories yet to tell,” Gray said.

For more information and tickets, visit wachholzcollegecenter.org or call 406-756-1400.