JJ GREY & MOFRO
From his early days playing cover music behind chicken wire at a west side Jacksonville juke joint while still working at a lumberyard, to playing sold-out shows at some of the largest venues and music festivals in the world, JJ Grey has always delivered his soul-honest truths. Since his first album, ‘Blackwater’, back in 2001, Grey has been releasing deeply moving, masterfully written, funkified rock and front porch Southern soul music.
Now, with ‘Olustee’ – his tenth album and first in eight years, and the first he has self-produced – Grey is back, singing his personal stories with universal themes of redemption, rebirth, hard luck, and inner peace. With his music, Grey also celebrates good times with friends, oftentimes mixing the carnal with the cerebral in the very same song. Fueled by his vividly detailed, timeless original songs spun from his life experiences, Grey’s gritty baritone drips with honest passion and testifies with a preacher’s foot-pounding fervor.
With ‘Olustee’, JJ Grey has once again pushed the boundaries of his own creative musical, lyrical and vocal talents, delivering an instant classic. Many of the songs are steeped in the mythical Southern stories of his ancestral Florida home and filled with people from JJ’s life. The songs are told through the eyes of a poet and sung with pure, unvarnished soul. Grey’s message is simple and strong – respect the natural world and always try to live in the moment. And never forget the importance of having a good time!
The Marshall Tucker Band
The Marshall Tucker Band came together as a young, hungry, and quite driven six-piece outfit in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1972, having duly baptized themselves with the name of a blind piano tuner after they found it inscribed on a key to their original rehearsal space — and they’ve been in tune with tearing it up on live stages both big and small all across the globe ever since. Plus, the band’s mighty music catalog, consisting of more than 20 studio albums and a score of live releases, has racked up multi-platinum album sales many times over.
Doug Gray sees no end to the road that lies ahead for The Marshall Tucker Band, whose legacy is being carried forward by the man himself and his current bandmates, drummer B.B. Borden (Mother’s Finest, The Outlaws), bassist/vocalist Ryan Ware, keyboardist/saxophonist/flautist/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 concludes. “People ask me all the time what I’m gonna do when I turn 80, and I always say, ‘The same thing that we’re continuing to do now.’ We’re road warriors, there’s no doubt about that — and I don’t intend to slow down.” May the MTB wagon train continue running like the wind on a long hard ride for many more years to come. One thing we absolutely know for sure: If you heard it in a Marshall Tucker Band song, it certainly can’t be wrong.
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