A Frazetta Painting, Three Guitars, and a Sunday Night in Murfreesboro: Molly Hatchet Plays Hop Springs
There is a particular kind of late-August Sunday that Middle Tennessee does better than almost anywhere: the heat finally lets go around seven, the light turns the color of weak tea, and somewhere out past the edge of town a field fills up with lawn chairs. On Sunday, August 23, one of those fields belongs to Molly Hatchet.
The Southern rock institution is booked at Hop Springs, the beer park at 6790 John Bragg Highway, with doors at 7 p.m. and the show at 8. Tickets are $43.52.
The band that looked like a fantasy paperback
Molly Hatchet came together in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1971, built around guitarist Dave Hlubek and fronted by the granite-voiced Danny Joe Brown. They arrived in the wake of the bands that had already made Jacksonville a Southern rock capital, and they distinguished themselves the way a lot of great bands do — by being louder and more literal about it. Where their peers leaned on twin leads, Hatchet stacked three guitars and let them argue.
But the thing that made them unmistakable on a record-store rack had nothing to do with guitars. Their first three albums were wrapped in paintings by Frank Frazetta, the fantasy illustrator whose muscular barbarians and storm-lit skies defined a whole era of paperback cover art. The self-titled 1978 debut carried Frazetta's Death Dealer — a horned, faceless warrior on horseback. The follow-up, Flirtin' with Disaster, carried his Dark Kingdom.
That second record, released on Epic in 1979, became the band's best seller and the reason a certain guitar riff still turns heads in a parking lot. It is genuinely strange and wonderful that a bar band from Jacksonville ended up sharing shelf space, visually, with Conan the Barbarian — and it worked. The art promised something enormous and slightly dangerous, and the records mostly delivered.
Nearly five decades on, Molly Hatchet is a band that has outlived several of the men who built it, which is its own kind of Southern rock story. The songs have been handed forward, played several thousand more times, and worn smooth in the way that only happens on the road.
Why this keeps happening out on John Bragg Highway
Hop Springs has quietly become one of Rutherford County's most dependable rooms for exactly this kind of booking — a sprawling outdoor property with a taproom and disc golf that can absorb a national name without anyone having to drive to Nashville and pay to park.
Look at the rest of the month and the pattern is obvious. The Black Dogs bring a Led Zeppelin tribute on August 20. Kyle Smith plays the 22nd, the night before Hatchet. Little Hopes takes the stage August 28, Def Leppard tribute Excitable on the 29th, and The Cure tribute LOVESONG on the 30th. That is six shows in eleven days at one address in Murfreesboro.
It is worth saying plainly: a county of this size having a venue that books a national Southern rock act on a Sunday is not a small thing. For years the assumption around here was that if you wanted a real show, you got on I-24. Increasingly, you don't.
🎟 Get tickets to Molly Hatchet at Hop Springs »
If you are making a season of it, the same property has a busy fall ahead — the Middle Tennessee Pickle Festival returns September 5, and the inaugural Hops Half Marathon runs October 24. Bring a chair. Leave room for the encore.
