Album of the month - October 2023

Greatest Hits - The marshall Tucker band

​Tardy in getting this up for y’all… so we’ll use a cheater, since half of the great month of October is already over. A ‘cheater’ in this context, is a “Greatest Hits” collection.
When the singles, “Heard it a Love Song” and “This Ol’ Cowboy” hit the mainstream airwaves in the mid-1970’s, I heard the vocal and dismissed Marshall Tucker as ‘unworthy country trash’. I was a blinders-on classic/progressive rocker then.
Lead vocalist, Doug Gray, had/has that ‘immediately recognizable as country’ voice and my arrogant-at-the-time sensibilities didn’t let me give the songs a true listen. I think I heard “Can’t You See” with the awesome guitar in ‘er a few years later and wanted/needed MORE ! I was turning into a classic/progressive/jam band rocker quickly… was even being wonderfully poisoned by the best disco of the era (I hate(d) to admit, but this is another story for another time).
So what’s the most cost effective research available in pre-computer/Google times? A greatest hits album, of course. Maybe I matured or got hit in the ears by meteor ‘er sumthin’, but I recognized the special concoction of jazzy country jam wonderfulness all over this album – even/especially in the two tunes I erringly discounted a few years earlier. The Marshall Tucker Band has a lot of material not represented in this compilation, but as an initial MTB dive-in, this album is it. ‘Fantastic musicianship’ doesn’t even start to do it justice. Enjoy.
JJ & the Belmar Guitar Crew