The Marcus King Band and Billy Strings, two of the fastest-rising acts on the live music circuit, have announced a pair of co-headlining late-night shows at the Civic Theatre in New Orleans on Thursday, April 30th and Friday, May 1st during the second weekend of New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The announcement also includes a third Marcus King Band show at the Civic Theatre on Saturday, May 2nd featuring an unnamed “special guest.”
The gifted guitarists/bandleaders have notably crossed paths at Rooster Walk on two separate occasions for special performances billed as King & Strings. With both Billy and Marcus in the building and the creative spirit of Jazz Fest after dark in the air, fans can surely expect some memorable collaborations to take place at the Civic.
As Billy (born William Apostol) explained in a 2019 Live For Live Music interview about King & Strings, “The thing was that everyone is always asking me, and Marcus—when I met Marcus—he was like, ‘Man, every night at my show someone comes up to me and says, ‘You haven’t played with Billy Strings!’ And people used to always ask me, ‘Dude, have you ever met Marcus King?’ You know, everybody was saying that to both of us, so the universe was like, you’ve got to jam.”
The two finally met for the first time at a Martinsville, VA hotel just six hours before their first-ever King & Strings set was about to kick off at Rooster Walk 2018. They had time to run through a handful of songs in a hotel rehearsal room, alongside Jeff Sipe and other members of Billy Strings—but that was it. “I was really thrilled about the fact. I’m just such a big Billy Strings fan, ya know?” King explained ahead of Rooster Walk 2019. “I was like, ‘This is gonna be fun, no matter what.’ I knew that Billy and his crew were just easy-going folks, just like us, but when we got there and started practicing in that little room at the hotel, we all knew right away. We kind of threw the playbook right off the stage and went by the seat of our pants and had the perfect cats to do it with.”
Tickets for The Marcus King Band and Billy Strings at the Civic Theatre go on sale this Friday, December 6th, at 10 a.m. Central Time here. For more information and a full list of upcoming dates for both acts, head to the Marcus King Band website here or the Billy Strings website here.
