The Marshall Tucker Band will bring its brand of southern rock to Sebring International Raceway March 14 to perform the night before the 73rd Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring.
While lead vocalist and founding member Doug Gray is the lone original member of the band, which got its start in Spartanburg, S.C. in 1972, the group continues to perform in front of sold-out crowds with guitarists Rick Willis and Chris Hicks, keyboardist Marcus James Henderson, bassist Tony Black and drummer B.B. Borden.
Perhaps the group’s most endearing and well-known hits – “Can’t you See,” and “Heard it in a Love Song,” both now sung by Gray, almost took a different path because of Gray’s reluctance to sing either of them.
Original member Toy Caldwell, who remained with the band until 1983, and was the main songwriter, wrote both songs. Caldwell and Gray disagreed on who should sing “Can’t You See,” with Gray never wanting to sing it given Caldwell’s delivery.
“Toy would come down and say, ‘Hey, take this song,'” Gray recalls. “He said, ‘I just don’t feel good, and I don’t want to sing.’ I told him, ‘You go into that studio and you sing.’ So he sang it two or three times all the way through and he got it. There ain’t no way I could compete with the intensity that he put in that song. That’s his song. He made it his song, and now it belongs to the entire world.”
“Can’t You See” has been streamed more than a billion times on Pandora.
It took Gray more time to warm to another major hit for the band – “Heard It in a Love Song.” “I love the song, but I have to tell you that I thought it was too wuss of a song when it was written,” Gray recently told a reporter at the Spokesman Review in Spokane, Wash. “I kept putting off recording it because I didn’t think it fit Marshall Tucker. But the guys said, ‘You got to put this on a record.'” It’s one of the band’s highest charting singles and is today as popular as it was when originally recorded in 1977.
For decades Gray and MTB have played those, and other singalong classics such as “Fire on the Mountain,” “Long Hard Ride” and “Ramblin,” among many others.
The Marshall Tucker Band incorporates country, pop and jazz into its sets. “We’ve always mixed it up,” Gray said. “That’s the way Toy wanted it.”
The 73rd Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring will start on March 15 at approximately 10 a.m. As many as eight races and four full days of on-track activity will take place March 12-15, headlined by the iconic IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship event. Gates open to spectators March 11 at approximately 2 p.m. On March 12 and 13, following on-track racing activities, regional bands will perform in the Fan Zone with The Marshall Tucker Band headlining Friday night’s activities.
All Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring tickets, including one-day tickets, allow admission to The Marshall Tucker Band concert which will start at approximately 9:30 p.m. Guests with one-day tickets will be admitted to the raceway Friday evening prior to the concert. General admission tickets and parking passes can be purchased in advance online and free parking is available outside the main gate. Children 12 and under are admitted free with a paying adult.
Tickets are available for North America’s longest running and most historic sports car race by visiting www.SebringRaceway.com.
About Sebring International Raceway and the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring
Sebring International Raceway is nestled among the orange groves and cattle ranches of Highlands County, Florida. The famed Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring endurance race began in 1952 and boasts a list of previous winners that include legends such as Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Stirling Moss, Dan Gurney, Juan Manuel Fangio, Phil Hill, Bobby Rahal, Hurley Haywood, Al Holbert and Tom Kristensen. Sebring’s punishing 3.74-mile concrete and asphalt circuit is also among the world’s leading test circuits for race teams and automotive manufacturers. Additionally, the circuit is active nearly 300 days a year for club events, racing schools, vintage racing, and other special events.
Sebring is known as the Birthplace of American Endurance Racing given it is the oldest permanent road racing facility in North America, evolving from the World War II U.S. Army Air Forces base Hendricks Field. Race cars still compete on the concrete runways that served as a training base for pilots in heavy bombers – including the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator – before deployment to Europe. Sebring’s first race was run on New Year’s Eve, 1950. The Sam Collier 6 Hour Memorial race was won by Frits Koster and Ralph Deshon in a Crosley Hot Shot car that was driven to the track by race fan Victor Sharpe. Koster and Deshon borrowed the car for the race. The first 12-hour race was held March 15, 1952, and except for 19474 during a global energy crisis, has been run annually since. Sebring was the site of the first United States Grand Prix Formula One race in 1959.
