VALDOSTA – Bobby Ingram said it took rearranging some things but Molly Hatchet is ready to step in Saturday night for the Marshall Tucker Band.

Ingram has been playing lead guitars – slide and acoustic – with Hatchet since 1987, is the band leader and owns the Molly Hatchet trademark.

He had plans to attend his high school reunion this weekend but now he will be in Valdosta playing a Hatchet show at Wild Adventures Theme Park.

Last week, when the Marshall Tucker Band canceled its scheduled April 26 Wild Adventures show due to an unforeseen medical event, theme park officials looked for a late replacement.

Enter Molly Hatchet.

“The theme park got in touch with my agent and I said I would love to do it but I got a class reunion,” Ingram said in a recent phone interview with The Valdosta Daily Times. “Pretty much, now, I’ll spend one day at my class reunion then we’ll be in Valdosta to cover for our friends in Marshall Tucker who we would do anything in the world for. Our thoughts are with Doug Gray (Marshall Tucker lead singer).”

Ingram said Molly Hatchet looks forward to visiting with their neighbors to the northwest and appreciates the theme park inviting the band to play.

“We really feel like we’re part of the Valdosta family,” he said, adding band members will stick around to sign autographs for fans after the show.

For Ingram and Molly Hatchet, Valdosta is a neighbor.

“I was born and raised and still live here in the heart of Southern rock & roll,” Ingram said, referring to his hometown of Jacksonville, Fla., which is the birthplace of Molly Hatchet, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers Band, 38 Special, etc.

Molly Hatchet had already released its platinum albums, the self-titled “Molly Hatchet,” “Flirtin’ with Disaster” and “Beatin’ the Odds,” by the time Ingram joined the band in 1987 but his connection to Hatchet reaches back past the band’s creation.

Ingram started playing guitar when he was 11 years old. In the mid-1970s, he said he and Danny Joe Brown, who would become Hatchet’s lead singer and co-writer of the band’s biggest hits, were in a band called Rum Creek. Though not a founding member of Molly Hatchet, Brown’s voice is still heard on classic rock stations singing “Flirtin’ with Disaster.” He died in 2005. All of Hatchet’s founding members are dead.

But the band continues playing, touring and recording.

Molly Hatchet recently recorded its first album in several years. The album’s title has not been made public yet and it is expected to be released later this year. The band recorded it in London’s famed Abbey Road Studios, home of most of the Beatles records, Ingram said.

“When putting the album together, we wanted to go back to the roots of the group,” he said. “We decided to go analog and couldn’t think of a better place than Abbey Road.”

He said the studio still looks the same as it does in iconic photos of the Beatles recording there decades ago.

“To be in that same room where it all happened. We knew we were in something really special,” he said. “We all started playing and looking around at each other … Can you believe we’re here?

“So everything has that old school feel to it. You can hear the difference in the sound. It’s amazing.”

He hinted the new album is expected to contain a surprise song – a cover of something originally recorded more than 50 years ago at Abbey Road.

The band is scheduled to tour Germany and Switzerland late this year and record another album at Abbey Road.

The Wild Adventures audience may hear something from the upcoming album. Ingram said the audience will definitely hear songs from 1978 through the years.

“We’re carrying on the legacy, the spirit and the tradition of the band,” Ingram said. “We’re keeping it alive.”