Kendell Marvel is known for many things.
He is a Grammy-award winning songwriter who has penned songs and worked with the likes of Chris Stapleton, George Straight and Jake Owen. He is a talented solo artist in his own right, and, if I’m being real here, he should probably have a black belt in jujitsu, or play ball for the Tennessee Titans.
Yep, you heard it, the dude don’t take no sh*t…
In Nashville, the singer-songwriter hosts Kendell Marvel’s Honky Tonk Experience: a music city staple where some of the best acts in town share songs and stories. It’s a great show and you never know who will show up, or what will happen on – or off – the stage.
At a Honky Tonk in the early summer of 2019 all was going well; Randy Houser had just melted some faces with a guest performance and Kendell followed suit with a Merle Haggard song. The song ended, and instead of going into the next number, Kendell laid his guitar down, and jumped six feet down from the stage, and like a Titans linebacker, straight plowed into some dude in the crowd.
Kendell explains exactly what was going down:
“Well it had been brewin’ for a couple of songs, you know, this guy he was just really drunk, and you know I’ve made an ass of myself as well, and I’ll tolerate it up to a certain point…
But he was fucking with them girls, there were two ladies in the front, and he was botherin ‘em. I seen him doing it, and I finally asked them girls… ‘is he bothering you?’
And they was like ‘yeah, he is.’ And I politely told him to leave them alone.
‘Dude you know everyone’s here to have fun, leave them girls alone’, ‘get away from ‘em.”
He continues:
“We proceeded into the next song, and it was a Merle Haggard song, and at the end of that song he was lookin’ at me straight at my face and said ‘we don’t wanna hear no fuckin’ Merle Haggard’
And when he said that, that was all it took…
Marvel then dropped his guitar on the stage, jumped into the crowd, and took the pester down.
There is some security footage of the takedown, but you really can’t make out what is happening. What you can hear though, is indisputable: “God Bless Merle Haggard” a fan yells, and the crowd goes wild.
“I can tolerate a lot of shit, but I can’t tolerate nobody swearing in the name of Merle Haggard.”
The singer-songwriter got back onstage to cheers and went into the next number; the room was on fire.
When asked for a takeaway from the show, Marvel says:
“If you let someone walk over your fans, they’ll walk all over you… You gotta whoop a man’s ass sometimes. Don’t fuck with my fans… or Merle Haggard.”
Kendell Marvel is preparing for the release of his third studio album, Come on Sunshine, slated for release September 23rd.
From the album, you can listen to the single, Hellbent on Hard Times here:
