lthough most members of the Southern rock band Marshall Tucker have been in the group since the mid-1980s, lead singer Doug Gray is the only original member. He was in the band in 1972, when Marshall Tucker released an album containing big hits like "Can't You See" and "Take the Highway."

Other original members of the band wanted to get off the road, but not Gray. "I looked up at all those gold and platinum records and said, 'What are you going to do, take people's money and let them down?' There was no way I could give up," Gray said.

Marshall Tucker will perform Thursday night at the SEMO District Fair. The band will be followed Friday night, Sept. 12, by country star Phil Vassar. The grandstand entertainment will conclude Saturday, Sept. 13, with Operation Redneck, a country show that includes John Anderson, David Ball and the band Shenandoah.

Anderson was hospitalized with a heart attack last weekend but is still scheduled to begin his next tour Wednesday.

In addition to the headliners, the fair will host Sternwheel Drive, a rock 'n' roll group composed of musicians from the U.S. Navy. The band, which plays music by such contemporary artists as Jimmy Eats World and Creed, will play at 6 p.m. Saturday in the fair's activities tent. Admission is free.

Gray, like many of the musicians in Marshall Tucker, grew up in Spartanburg, S.C. He remembers imitating at age 7 the musicians in a three-piece band playing in a parking lot. Imitation is the way singers learn, he says.

Soon he was singing in talent shows. "My mother just wanted to show me off," he said in a phone interview.

After returning home from the Vietnam War he worked in a bank and later for a plumbing company. But he and the friends who formed the Marshall Tucker Band decided "let's give it one good shot," Gray said.

The band's self-titled first album soon had them touring with the Allman Brothers.

The Marshall Tucker Band's success continued with the albums "Long Hard Ride" and "Where We All Belong." In 1977, the band's album "Carolina Dreams" produced the hit single "Heard It in a Love Song."

Like fellow Southern rockers the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker has been hurt by tragedy. Bass player Tommy Caldwell was killed in a car wreck in 1980.

"We all lived a little bit in the fast lane in the early part of the '70s," Gray says.

"... We all were stupid. We'd go out and buy motorcycles. I went through a drug period like everybody else did."

The band dissolved when Caldwell died but re-formed in the mid-1980s with new members Rusty Milner, Tim Lawter and Stuart Swanlund, all of whom are still with the band.

Swanlund, the band's slide guitarist, originally is from Spartanburg but now lives in Chicago because he loves to go to Cubs games.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182