On Sunday, May 8th, Mac McAnally will stand on stage with Jimmy Buffett and The Coral Reefer Band in front of about eighty thousand people playing The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
A mere five days later, on Friday, May 13th, the 10 time Country Music Association Musician of the Year McAnally will be on stage in front of an intimate crowd of a few hundred at The Grand Magnolia Ballroom in Buffett’s hometown of Pascagoula.
And due to popular demand, a second show has been added.
McAnally is now set to play a pair of “Jazz Fest Unplugged” shows presented by Grand Magnolia Music in Pascagoula after the first show sold out in less than a week. He has added a second show on Saturday night, May 14th.
Tickets for the Saturday show only will go on sale Thursday, March 31st, at Noon on www.grandmagmusic.com. The first show sold out in less than a week.
This will be McAnally’s third and fourth shows in Pascagoula in the past five years. In addition, he also accompanied Buffett in his performance on the beach in The Flagship City in 2015 and Buffett also joined McAnally in his first show at The Grand Magnolia in 2017.
“I’m a Mississippi guy,” McAnally said, “I like coming back home and playing my songs. I like playing my own shows in small venues because my music is like a story you would tell to a small room of friends.”
McAnally, a Belmont, Miss., native, has been Buffett’s right-hand man in the Coral Reefer Band for the past twenty-plus years. His 10 CMA MOTY Awards is a record in that category.
The multi-talented McAnally is also a member of the Nashville Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame, the Alabama Music Hall of Fame and was nominated for a Grammy Award. He was also honored recently with having a start dedicated in his name on the Music City Walk of Fame in downtown Nashville
McAnally has also written numerous top hits over the years for the likes of Kenny Chesney (“Down The Road”), Alabama (“Old Flame”), Shenandoah (“Two Dozen Roses”), Sawyer Brown (“All These Years”, “Thank God for you”) as well as Steve Wariner (“Crazy World”) and Sammy Kershaw (“Southbound”) among others.
Buffett has also covered many McAnally songs such as “It’s My Job” and Buffett and McAnally’s rendition of Mac’s song “Back Where I come from” in Buffett’s live shows have become a crowd favorite all over the world. Chesney also had a number one hit with that song.
“I’ve been around storytellers all my life, Southern whittlers and guys at the courthouse,” McAnally concluded. “I’ve listened to the melodies in their conversation, the rising and falling. I’ve watched how they use their hands and tried to translate that into music. I’ve read a lot of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, you know the Mississippi writers. I’m definitely not in their league, but I’ve tried to write as if I were cooking short stories down to a reduction of three-minute songs. It’s not that I’m a brilliant guy or anything; that’s just the way I work.”
