of MTB, George McCorkle, Jerry Eubanks and Doug Gray, owned a recording studio in Spartanburg county called Creative Arts. Be- cause of my association with The Silver Travis Band, I ended up spending quite a lot of time at the studio. I remember being in the studio with engineer Randy Merryman when Doug Gray was putting vocals on some songs for the album Tuckerized. It was quite an exciting experience for me. I had never seen anything like it. I received quite an education on studio work during those days. The studio was a great place to hang out, and while working with Silver Travis, I got to spend a lot of time there.
occasion, Toy, myself and Mark Emerick (Commander Cody Band) stood over the grave playing Toy’s songs, and Tony sang the song he wrote for Toy, that I recorded on my Southern Lights album, “Ride On My Friend.” It was a beautiful memorial. I had been working on the aforemen-
Doug Gray’s nephew Clay Cook was in the MTB for sev- eral years prior to joining The Zac Brown Band.
The original Marshall Tucker Band
broke up in 1984, but Doug Gray and Jerry Eubanks chose to continue on. At first, they hired Nashville session men, but later brought in guys like Rusty Milner, Ace Allen, Tim Lawter and Stuart Swanlund, all road veterans of local bands. When Toy Caldwell died on February
25, 1993, I was devastated. Toy was my all time inspiration for playing guitar, and his death rocked my world. I remember it was snowing outside when I received word, via a friend at WSPA-TV, that he had passed. Over the years, I have joined Tony Heatherly, Toy’s bass player, a couple of times to visit Toy’s grave on the anniversary of his death. On one
tioned Carolina Dreams book for a couple of years. It was to be a book about all of the great musicians to come out of our South Car- olina Upstate. People like Artimus Pyle of Lynyrd Skynyrd, jazz guitarist Hank Garland and of course, The Marshall Tucker Band. After pitching the idea to a few publishing houses, Doug Gray offered to publish it through Marshall Tucker Entertainment, a company he owned with his manager Ron Rainey. After several stops and starts and a few bumps in the country road, the book was published in 1997. We had a book signing party at Pic-a-Book in Spartanburg with MTB friend and store owner Jane Hughes, which was ironic since that was the first place I ever saw Doug offstage, years earlier. We had an- other one at Barnes and Noble in Greenville, and Doug came out for it. Then we did a smaller signing at Books-a-Million in Colum- bia, SC. I was a published author. I was thrilled.
In the years to come I would write the as of yet unpublished biography of Doug Gray, the voice of The Marshall Tucker Band, and in doing so, meet many of his old friends and family, including his dear mother Peggy, whom I just loved. Sadly, Peggy was killed in an auto accident just prior to The Volunteer Jam Tour of 2000. Marshall Tucker bowed out of the Greenville show, and Charlie Daniels dedicated “How Great Thou Art” to her memory. The day of the Greenville Jam, we all found ourselves at the funeral home in Spartanburg for Mrs. Gray’s funeral. It was truly a sad day. For a few years there I was working as editor of a weekly newspaper in Inman, SC,
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