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From the moment Greensboro native Dave McCracken first saw Donna the Buffalo play live, at MerleFest in 1997, he knew he belonged in the band.

“I watched them for the first time, and I remember I saw them move the organ across the stage,” McCracken says, speaking by phone from his mother’s house in Liberty. “I said out loud, 'Man, that should be me.’ Ten years later — 10 years later! — it’s me. I swear, I don’t even know how that happened. I just knew it should be me for some reason.”

Donna the Buffalo, a jam band that incorporates American roots music and reggae, is scheduled to perform Friday at the new Blind Tiger in Greensboro. The club is in the final stages of its move, and its owners hope to unveil the venue Friday. Patrons should call ahead to confirm the show.

Donna the Buffalo formed in 1989 in upstate New York but has made many N.C. connections in the years since — McCracken and North Wilkesboro’s MerleFest among them. The group signed with Sugar Hill Records, a fixture in Durham for more than two decades before the label moved its offices to Nashville, and the members of Donna the Buffalo founded the twice-yearly Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance in rural Chatham County, now entering its eighth year.

For McCracken, 37, the only down side to playing with the band is being away from his wife and 12-year-old son back home in Boone.

“It does involve being gone a lot, but I’m incredibly blessed,” he says. “And I really like the band a lot — musically, and their mission, what they stand for; it’s pretty darned rewarding.”

McCracken replaced former keyboard player Kathy Ziegler, filling in a couple of times while she went on maternity leave beginning in 2006. When Ziegler decided to move to the Netherlands about three years ago, McCracken quit his job as Donna the Buffalo’s sound man and became a full-time performer with the band.

Jam band fans already knew McCracken via Folkswaggin’, which started in Greensboro in 1994 and played at the Blind Tiger regularly.

“I really cut my teeth in that place,” he says. “That’s where I learned how to play keyboards. I’ve been playing there since ’97. I’ve gone through a lot of things in that place, and it means a lot to me. I’m looking forward to playing there again. It’s been a long time since I’ve been there.”

In recent years, McCracken has played at the Blind Tiger with Q-Bex, a version of the band Hobex which includes acclaimed drummer Jeff Sipe.

McCracken did a stint in Hobex about 10 years ago, and he played in a metal band called Perpetual Iniquity in Greensboro as a teenager in the late 1980s. But his musical ambitions go all the way back to his early childhood in the 1970s.

“Playing music for a living was seriously a dream I had when I was, like, 3,” McCracken says. “You know how Facebook reunites people so much? I reunited with somebody who was my friend until I was 5. He was like, 'Wow, you’re playing music for a living.’ He said it wasn’t surprising at all because all I talked about back then was how I wanted to do it.”

McCracken came from a musical family. His father, Jay, has played drums for Scott Adair for more than 30 years and worked in local music stores, for a time running his own music store on High Point Road called Angus McCree.

“That was kind of like my after-school day care center,” McCracken says. “I kind of grew up there, running around from instrument to instrument.”

After playing drums since age 5, he switched to guitar around age 12 “because I thought it just looked more handsome,” McCracken says. A guitar-heavy lineup in Folkswaggin’ finally pushed him to keyboards around 1996.

“I just realized, 'We need a keyboard player,’” he says. “And there aren’t any keyboard players. It ended up being the smartest thing I ever did, career-wise, for music, was to pick up keyboards, and specifically vintage keyboards — the Hammond organ, especially.”

Contact Eddie Huffman at ehuffman@triad.rr.com