There’s a moment in every Marcus King show when the guitar stops being an instrument and starts being a weather system — the notes pile up, the band leans in, and that voice, all gravel and gospel, breaks over the top of it. King has been chasing that moment since he was a kid in Greenville, South Carolina, the fourth generation of a musical family who learned to play before most of us learned to ride a bike. On Sunday, September 13, 2026, he brings the Marcus King Band to the State Theatre of Ithaca — and rooms like this are exactly where his blend of blues, soul, and Southern rock hits hardest.
This stop is part of the band’s Darling Blue Tour, the run supporting King’s 2025 album of the same name, with Penelope Road opening the night. It’s the kind of pairing that rewards getting to the venue early.
About Marcus King
King made his name fronting the Marcus King Band, a unit built to carry his genre-spanning vision — blues, country, soul, and Southern rock all welded together by his playing and that unmistakable voice. In 2020 he stepped out under his own name with El Dorado, produced and co-written by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, a record that earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards. He followed it with Young Blood in 2022 — again with Auerbach — which topped Billboard’s Top Blues Albums chart. Darling Blue is the latest chapter, and this tour is built around it.
Venue Info
The State Theatre of Ithaca is a restored 1928 movie palace seating around 1,600 — the kind of warm, vertical room where a guitar tone can actually breathe and a crowd can actually hear each other between songs. It anchors downtown Ithaca on West State Street, surrounded by enough bars and restaurants to build a full evening around the show. Read more in our State Theatre of Ithaca venue guide, and see what else is happening across the Finger Lakes.
Tickets
Doors and show details point to an 8:00 PM start. This is an artist whose rooms keep getting bigger, so a 1,600-seat theater won’t be the norm for long.