ORANGE PARK – The hardest parts of hitting the road for a concert tour are the hours traveling, the mindless hours of sitting in a different hotel room every night and counting on Ma Bell to maintain a relationship.

For Doug Gray, it’s the only life he’s known for the past 50 years.

No matter how many days he’s gone from his South Carolina home, one thing that makes it all worthwhile is knowing the crowd will be loud, happy – and appreciative.

“Once the (house) lights go down and the (stage) lights come back up again and music starts, it takes you back to when you originally first started, so your energy level goes up,” Gray said. “But then when you come off, you know you got to go 400 miles to the next gig.”

But make no mistake: Gray doesn’t plan to shut down Marshall Tucker anytime soon.

Gray joined former high school classmates in a band called The New Generation. That band then blended with The Rants. Military service broke the band up and Gray spent a tour in Vietnam with the U.S. Army. When he came home, he rekindled his musical relationships with Tommy Caldwell of The New Generation, Toy Caldwell of The Rants and saxophonist, keyboard player and flutist Jerry Eubanks. In 1972, the band changed its name to The Marshall Tucker Band after a blind piano tuner from Columbia, South Carolina, who inscribed his name into a piano key at their rehearsal space.

Fifty years later, Gray is still singing songs like “Can’t You See,” “Heard it in a Love Song,” “Fire on the Mountain,” “Long Hard Ride,” “Take the Highway,” “This Old Cowboy” and “Ramblin’.”

The iconic band that folded Southern Rock into jazz, progressive country and blues rock will stop its relentless sojourn long enough for a show at the Thrasher-Horne Center on Saturday, Nov. 18. The lights “will go down” at 8 p.m. with opening act Shannon Lawson, followed by the six-man band will tear into their remarkable setlist.

There’s a certain gift I found I could share, whether I was in front of five people or 20,000 people,” Gray said. “I was blessed with that ability and I’m thankful I can share with others.”

Marshall Tucker still maintains a demanding schedule. They’ve played more than 225 shows in the past 18 months, and they recently played a stretch of 22 consecutive nights on stage.

Gray is the last founding member of the band. Toy Caldwell died of viral myocarditis; Tommy Caldwell was killed in a car accident; guitarist George McCorkle died of cancer; and Eubanks broke away to make a solo album and Paul Riddle left to become a drum instructor.

The sound, however, remains the same.

“It’s just amazing that people are coming back with their grandkids and sitting there and the grandkids know the songs,” Gray said. “So that’s kind of a weird thing. I mean, me and Joe and Tommy, and George, and everybody else, we just wanted to make a point, but we didn’t know what that point was. Regardless, we knew that we would be giving 100% to it all.”

Marshall Tucker’s music catalog consists of more than 20 studio albums and a score of live releases. The band has racked up multi-platinum album sales many times over. The secret ingredient to the ongoing success of The Marshall Tucker Band’s influence can be seen and felt far and wide throughout many mainstream digital outlets, like Netflix and Amazon.

According to the band, “The framework for Marshall Tucker’s music is more like a spaceship than a house,” Gray said, “because you can look out of a lot of windows and see a variety of things that show where we’ve been and what we’ve done, and how we’ve traveled through time to bring those experiences out in all of our songs.”

A handful of tickets, which start at $39, are available at thcenter.org.