There is a line you can draw straight from John Lee Hooker to a Syracuse blues band called The Kingsnakes, and it is not a metaphorical one. For a stretch of the 1980s they were Hooker’s backing band on his Eastern North American tours, and he thought enough of them to put his name behind their 1989 record and note, approvingly, that they had done his song “Crawling Kingsnake” justice. Founders Pete McMahon and Terry Mulhauser have been playing this music together since 1983, and they still carry it the way you only can after that many miles. They bring it to Clayton Opera House, a 400-seat theater out on the St. Lawrence, on Friday, September 11.
About The Kingsnakes
This is a Syracuse band that was doing something serious long before the blues revival became a retrospective. Formed in 1983, The Kingsnakes spent a good stretch of their original run as John Lee Hooker’s backing band for Eastern North American tours — a gig that puts them in a very short list of regional acts with that kind of résumé. Hooker personally endorsed their 1989 album Trouble on the Run, which charted at #11 on Living Blues international radio charts. His words: “I’m proud they named their band after one of my songs, Crawling Kingsnake, and they done it justice!”
The name comes straight from that Hooker song. Over their original run, the band shared stages with Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Johnny Winter, headlined the 1990 Chicago Blues Fest before a crowd of 117,000, and appeared at the 1990 Saratoga Bluesfest alongside Bonnie Raitt and Hooker himself. That is not a regional band’s biography — that is a decade inside the real history of American blues.
Core members Pete McMahon (vocals, harmonica) and Terry Mulhauser (guitar) still carry the chemistry they built across thousands of dates. The Kingsnakes played the New York State Blues Festival as recently as June 2025 — so this is not a nostalgia circuit. It’s an active band with a catalog worth knowing before you show up.
About Clayton Opera House
The Clayton Opera House at 405 Riverside Dr, Clayton, NY 13624 is a 400-seat historic theater — and at that size, The Kingsnakes playing it is a proper event. Box office: 315-686-2200, Tuesday–Friday, 11am–5pm. More at claytonoperahouse.com.
Tickets
Tickets are on sale now. Get your tickets here before this one fills up — a 400-seat room books fast when the act has a résumé like this.