04.07.2017 | GREENVILLE JOURNAL | 17
COMMUNITYJOURNALS.COM
INTRODUCING
THE
MARCUS KING BAND FROM HOMETOWN FAVORITES TO NATIONAL BLUES SUPERSTARS
WORDS BY VINCENT HARRIS Photo by Emily Butler
M
arvin King had been to a lot of places and seen a lot of things by the time he became a father at age 40. Before moving to Greenville, he spent his childhood in Germany where he watched Jimi Hendrix take Europe by storm. Marvin’s father was country guitarist Bill King, who played with Johnny Cash and a host of other big stars. Like father, like son, Marvin grew up to become an incredibly skilled blues-rock guitarist and landed two different record deals with Polydor and Capitol in the ’80s and ’90s. But in addition to all of those great memories, he still very clearly remembers the day that he came home from work and his young son, Marcus, not yet 10 years old, proudly told him he’d learned to play an entire Lynyrd Skynyrd album on guitar.
Marvin had only recently bought his son his own Fender Squier Stratocaster electric guitar, mostly because he couldn’t keep the boy away from his own six-string. “I’d taught him ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ already,” Marvin says, “So I said, ‘You mean you learned the song.’ And he said, ‘No, I learned the whole record.’ He’d learned the whole album in a day, just playing along with it. He had an incredible ear. He was improving by the millisecond.”
GROWING UP IN MUSIC
That level of passion was clear from the second King picked up a plastic toy guitar when he was in diapers, and it’s fueled him for most of his 21 years. Marcus has said before that when he was bad as a child, his dad would tell him that he could either get a spanking or have his guitar taken away. He picked the spanking every time. “My dad would go to work and leave me with his music collection and I’d go through it,” he says. “I loved the Allman Brothers; he put me onto them at a really early age. I loved Stevie Ray Vaughan and B.B. King. I loved Johnny Winter. I would also get into the early Skynyrd stuff, with Ed King, Allen Collins, and Gary Rossington playing guitars.” As Marcus moved into his teens, he developed an incredible feel, control, and tone. His solos were blistering and dazzling displays, almost as dazzling as the sight of a 13- or 14-year-old standing on stage with veteran musicians, blazing away at clubs he technically wasn’t old enough to get into as a customer. That’s where keyboard player Matt Jennings first saw Marcus — onstage at the now-defunct Brown Street Club in downtown Greenville. “I don’t know if it was him sitting in with his dad’s band or him sitting in with Gypsy Souls, or some other concoction,” Jennings says. “I’d already had a couple of folks telling me, ‘Man, you gotta see this
kid sitting in and killing it,’ and I finally did. I know I didn’t get out there til 11:30 or so, and I remember thinking, ‘Isn’t it past this guy’s bedtime?’ But he was ripping from the first moment I ever saw him.” It was probably Gypsy Souls that Jennings saw Marcus with, because the band’s singer and trumpet player Craig Sorrells had already developed a rapport with King. “Marcus started playing with us at a very young age,” Sorrells says. “Around 12 or 13, I guess. We knew immediately that he was something special, because he was holding his own with Shane Pruitt, Troy House, and just about any other guitar player he shared the stage with.”
‘THE CURSE OF THE FIRST RECORD’
Jennings will return to our story later on, but in the meantime, the still-teenaged Marcus was busy forming his own band, writing songs, and aiming to get out into the world. “When I was in high school, maybe younger than that even, I knew I wanted to travel and play music and put everything I had into it,” Marcus says. “And I definitely made a conscious decision at a young age that as soon as I was free to do so, I was going to go as far as I could as often as I could.” King’s first eponymous band independently released an album called “Soul Insight” in 2014, when Marcus was 18 years old. It was a mix of ferocious electric blues, deeply felt soul balladry, and stretched out jams, but in the aftermath of its release, King lost most of his band. “After ‘Soul Insight,’ me and [drummer] Jack Ryan came back home, and we’d caught what I call ‘the Curse of the First Record,’” King says. “That’s when the first record’s done and people start to see, ‘OK, we’re getting ready to start making tracks and we’re not go-