JamFest • New Release • October 2026

Marcus King Announces a Surprise Live EP from the Ryman Auditorium, and the Summer That Produced It Was One of the Best of His Career

Marcus King • Live from the Ryman • JamFestRadio.com

Thirty-nine cities, a sold-out run at the Mother Church of Country Music, and now a digital live EP that captures what Marcus King sounds like when everything is working and the room knows it.

Marcus King has announced Live from the Ryman, a surprise digital live EP scheduled to hit all major streaming platforms next Friday, and the announcement arrives at a moment when the Greenville, South Carolina blues-rock guitarist is operating at as high a level as he has ever reached. The EP captures tracks from his sold-out, multi-night headlining run at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, the building that the music world has called the Mother Church of Country Music since long before Marcus King was born and that carries a specific weight for any Southern musician who has grown up understanding what that stage represents in the history of American music. For King, whose music draws directly and unapologetically from the blues, Southern rock, and soul traditions that the Ryman has hosted across its history, a headlining run at that venue is not simply a career milestone. It is a homecoming of a particular kind, an arrival at a place that the music has always been pointing toward.

The EP follows the conclusion of the Darling Blue Part 2 Tour, a massive 39-city trek that ran through mid-September and that functioned as an extended celebration of King’s most ambitious and most acclaimed recording period. The tour supported his 2026 studio work, which includes the twin projects Darling Blue and No Room for Blue, both of which demonstrated that King’s abilities as a songwriter and a vocalist have developed alongside his already considerable reputation as a guitarist in ways that make the full body of his 2026 work one of the most complete artistic statements he has yet produced. A 39-city tour is a significant undertaking for any artist, and completing it with a multi-night sold-out run at the Ryman is the kind of conclusion that earns a live document.

What listeners can expect from Live from the Ryman is the full Marcus King live experience, which is a different and more expansive proposition than his studio recordings, however good those recordings are. King’s live shows have always been built around his band’s ability to extend and develop the material beyond what the studio arrangements contain, with improvisational passages that open up inside the songs and give his blazing guitar work room to move in directions that a fixed arrangement cannot accommodate. The horn section that the band has developed into a signature element of the live experience adds a dimension of soul and funk that connects the performance to the Memphis and Muscle Shoals traditions that have always been part of King’s sonic DNA. And King’s vocals, which have matured significantly across his recording career, carry in a live setting the rawness and emotional directness that the best Southern soul music has always demanded from its singers.

The EP is expected to include live versions of material from across King’s catalog, drawing from the Rick Rubin-produced Mood Swings and the Dan Auerbach-produced El Dorado alongside the 2026 work that the tour was built around. The combination of those production pedigrees tells a story about King’s career that the live context completes: here is a guitarist who has worked with two of the most significant producers in American rock and blues across the past decade, who has absorbed the specific approaches each brought to the recording process, and who has synthesized all of it into a live performance identity that is entirely his own. The Ryman shows captured on this EP are the evidence of where that synthesis has arrived in 2026.

Marcus King is one of the artists that JamFest plays because he represents the live music tradition at its most honest and its most committed. His guitar playing is the kind that happens when someone has spent their whole life inside a specific body of music and has emerged from that immersion not as an imitator but as an original voice who could only have come from that tradition. Live from the Ryman is available on all major streaming platforms next Friday, and it is the kind of release that rewards listening at volume, the way the people in that sold-out room heard it when it was being made.

LISTEN ON JAMFEST

Thirty-nine cities. The Mother Church. Next Friday on streaming. Marcus King is giving you the whole summer in one EP.