Old Crow Medicine Show

This article is about the American old-time string band. For their self-titled debut album, see Old Crow Medicine Show (album).

Old Crow Medicine Show
Performing at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, October 2004.
Background information
Origin	Ithaca, New York
Genres	Alternative country, Bluegrass
Years active	1998–present
Labels	Nettwerk ATO Records
Associated acts	Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, The Felice Brothers, Justin Townes Earle, Hackensaw Boys
Website	Official Site
Members
Ketch Secor Critter Fuqua Kevin Hayes Morgan Jahnig Gill Landry Cory Younts
Past members
Ben Gould Matt Kinman Willie Watson

Old Crow Medicine Show is an old-time string band based in Nashville, Tennessee. Their music has been called bluegrass, Americana, and alt-country, in addition to old-time. Along with original songs, the band performs many pre-World War II blues and folk songs. They have been recording since 1998.

History

Early

Ketch Secor and Critter Fuqua first met in the seventh grade in Harrisonburg, Virginia in Rockingham County, and began playing music together. They performed open mics at the Little Grill diner which was "really the first chance that . . Critter had to play on stage." Being "a bit younger" than the "college students at James Madison University who typically hung out there" Ketch "was considered a townie." As Ketch says today: "They knew that we had talent, but it was raw. I mean, I was up there beating on a jaw harp when I was 13."

It was at Little Grill Ketch first saw his "contemporary" Robert St. Ours--who later went on to found The Hackensaw Boys--singing and "he was so cool with his leather jacket and side burns. I knew that's what I wanted to do." His early influences also included " . . driving up to Mt. Jackson, VA to the bluegrass Saturday night in the summer. And going up to Davis and Elkins College to participate in the Old Time Music week there, and meeting guys like Richie Stearns." Secor formed the Route 11 Boys with St. Ours and his brothers and performed often at Little Grill.

Meanwhile, Willie Watson first met Ben Gould in high school in Watkins Glen, New York in Schuyler County, and began playing music together. Both Watson and Gould dropped out of school and formed the band "The Funnest Game". They played a unique brand of electric/old time music heavily influenced by the lively old time music scene prominent in Tompkins and Schuyler County, New York. Most notably, The Horse Flies and The Highwoods Stringband. "We were like Tommy Jarrell jamming with Crazy Horse". Performing locally from Watkins Glen to Ithaca, New York the young band earned the respect of their local "old-time heroes" and gained a dedicated local fan base by performing weekly at the Rongovian Embassy with Richie Stearns and annually at the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance in Trumansburg, New York

Upstate New York

After Secor finished his schooling at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he learned to play the banjo, he spent a year taking short musician-hobo jaunts up to Maine and Canada from his home in Harrisonburg. "I had just read the book, Bound for Glory, and I knew that I wanted to go hobo with music. So we went out on the road . ."

After the breakup of the Route 11 Boys, Secor attended Ithaca College and brought Fuqua up to New York State, where they met Willie Watson through mutual friend Richie Stearns. Watson dissolved the Funnest Game and they assembled "a whole bunch of these players all around Ithaca, New York, They gathered in Critter's bedroom to record an album that they could sell on the road; a cassette of ten songs, called Trans:mission. In October of 1998 the band left Ithaca for the "Trans:mission" Tour. Busking their way west across Canada and circling back east again where they settled in the Appalachian Mountains outside of Boone, North Carolina.

Busking break

One day, while the band was busking outside a pharmacy called Boone Drug in Boone, North Carolina, the daughter of folk-country legend Doc Watson happened by and was impressed by what she heard. Doc Watson invited the band to participate in his annual MerleFest music festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. That break led to the act's relocation to Nashville in 2000, where they were "embraced and mentored" by Marty Stuart, the president of the Grand Ole Opry, Gillian Welch and Welch's longtime songwriting partner and guitarist, David Rawlings. Stuart helped them land some high profile gigs and Rawlings later produced their first two albums "O.C.M.S" and Big Iron World (2006).

They made their Grand Ole Opry debut on the Ryman Auditorium stage in 2001 to a standing ovation.

A country song

Ketch Secor is married to writer Lydia Peelle, winner of the O. Henry Award and Whiting Award for her short stories. They met freshman year at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, later moving to Ithaca, New York together—where she attended Cornell and he Ithaca College. It was her breaking up with him in 1998 that led to the creation of Old Crow.

She later had a change of heart, but "honestly thought (she)'d never see him again." Shortly after graduating from Cornell, she read in the newspaper about an old widower who visited his wife's grave daily. "Something about that true love and devotion hit" her and she "thought of Ketch." Getting an his address from his parents, she boarded a train the next morning, landing in Butler, Tennessee at 2 a.m. "Secor and his band were living in a tiny cabin in the woods" in this "freckle of a town near the North Carolina border." Once she knocked on the front door and Secor opened it "it was like (they) had never left each other."

"She was young, but she was always in love with him. It just took her time to realize that."

—Deborah Schoeneman, college friend

Peelle is named for her great-great-aunt Lydia Maria Child, the novelist, journalist, teacher, and abolitionist who authored the poem "Over the River and through the Woods" (later sung as a Thanksgiving song).

Live performance

The band has performed at such major music festivals as CMC (Country Music Channel) Rocks the Snowys, Bonnaroo (2002, 2005, 2007, and 2011), Telluride Bluegrass Festival (2005 and 2011), Coachella, All Good Music Festival (2010), and the New Orleans Jazz Festival. Their 2007 live-performance itinerary included shows in Boone, NC, Seattle, Arcata, CA, Knoxville, TN, Nashville and Boulder, CO, as well as overseas in London and Amsterdam. The band has also toured the UK several times, including an appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival and on the BBC show Later with Jools Holland.

They have headlined at the Grand Ole Opry, after earlier having performed at that institution's 75th-anniversary celebration. They opened for the Dave Matthews Band in 2009. In the summer of 2009, the band co-billed The Big Surprise Tour with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, The Felice Brothers, and Justin Townes Earle. They performed as part of the Prairie Home Companion Cinecast October 23, 2010 broadcast from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, MN and viewable in cinemas throughout the U.S. and Canada. They appeared New Year's Eve 2010 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

In April 2011 the group joined Mumford and Sons and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros on Railroad Revival Tour, traveling exclusively in vintage rail cars, the three bands performed in six "unique outdoor locations" over the course of a week starting in Oakland, California.

Hiatus

Old Crow Medicine Show announced in August 2011 that the group would be on hiatus until further notice. Three scheduled shows for September 2011 were cancelled. The banner announcing the hiatus was removed from the official band website as of December 13, 2011. Secor and Chris 'Critter' Fuqua, an original member of the group who has not performed with them for some time, began playing tour dates January 2012, including a benefit show at Little Grill Collective where their performing careers started. Proceeds of this benefit performance went to Our Community Place, for whom Secor recorded his original Christmas song "Send No Angels" for the fundraising album Our Christmas Present in 2008.

Founder rejoins

Founding member Fuqua rejoined the group in January 2012, after years of separation. Also an original member, Willie Watson, guitarist and lead vocalist for the group, has 'parted ways'. The official announcement at the group webpage reads as follows:

We are happy to announce that one of the original founding members, Critter Fuqua, is back in the band. Critter has written and recorded some of Old Crow’s classic songs, including “Take ‘em Away”, “James River Blues”, “Big Time In The Jungle”, and “New Virginia Creeper”. Old Crow Medicine Show have decided to part ways with Willie Watson. They wish him all the best in his future endeavors.

The band has recorded a new album for According to Our Records (or ATO Records), which will be released in 2012. ATO was founded by Dave Matthews and his business manager Coran Capshaw in 2000 as a division of RCA Records. Based in New York City, it distributes through RED Distribution, the Sony Music independent-distribution arm.

Wagon Wheel

"It sort of exists separately from the world of things that are on the radio. 'Wagon Wheel' has made it around the camp fires and the jam sessions and the parking lot scenes, in a way that songs of this decade or the last decade tend not to. When you go to a drum circle at a camp fire, you’ll hear songs that are 40 years old that a kid with a hemp leash just learned, like 'The Weight' by The Band, and then you’re going to hear 'Wagon Wheel.'"

Ketch Secor

"Wagon Wheel" has become something of a signature song for the group, but its origins predate its formation. Says Ketch of its authorship:

"I heard a Dylan song that was unfinished back in high school and I finished it . . As a serious Bob Dylan fan, I was listening to anything he had put on tape, and this was an outtake of something he had mumbled out on one of those tapes. I sang it all around the country from about 17 to 26, before I ever even thought, 'oh I better look into this.'"

The Dylan outtake, generally titled "Rock Me Mama", came out of recording sessions for the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid movie soundtrack (1973) in Burbank, California. Secor later met Dylan’s son, Jakob, who said "it made sense that I was a teenager when I did that, because no one in their 30s would have the guts to try to write a Bob Dylan song."

When Secor sought copyright on the song to release on an album in 2003, he discovered Dylan credited the phrase “Rock me, mama” to bluesman Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, who likely got it from a Big Bill Broonzy recording. As Secor says: "In a way, it’s taken something like 85 years to get completed." Only the chorus (or refrain) comes from the Dylan outtake:

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel

Rock me mama anyway you feel

Hey mama rock me

Rock me mama like the wind and the rain

Rock me mama like a south-bound train

Hey mama rock me

Secor and Dylan signed a co-writing agreement on the song. It has been covered by an increasing number of acts since its release on O.C.M.S. in 2004. The group's version of the song was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America in November 2011. To celebrate they released a limited edition 7” vinyl record of the song with "'All Night Long' Live At The Station Inn" (2003) on the B-side.

Musical style

The band plays a wide variety of music, seeming to pull influence from any of the many musical forms that would have been performed by musicians of the turn of the century to the nineteen-forties, including old time, bluegrass, country, and folk blues. Country Music Television notes the band's "tunes from jug bands and traveling shows, back porches and dance halls, southern Appalachian string music and Memphis blues."

"I feel like when we play, people can feel the timelessness. They can feel that they're rooted in something. Like we're able to play for a collective feeling that's lost, that used to be a big part of everything."

Ketch Secor

After three years playing guitar, Kevin Hayes switched over to the guit-jo, making him perhaps "the only professional guit-jo player in America."

"Well, the guit-jo is a very percussive instrument, and it's got the kind of hollowness that the banjo has, that kind of plunk that the banjo has, but it doesn't have a twangy thing. It's not really high end. It's like an empty, hollow, bass-y sound. If you need to identify it on the record, once you hear it, once you identify it as the guit-jo, then you'll be able to determine where it is through the record. Because once you know what it sounds like, I mean, it only sounds like a guit-jo. You'll never have it confused with anything else."

—Ketch Secor

Awards, honors, distinctions

• The group's version of "Wagon Wheel" was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America in November 2011.

• The band was nominated for a 2007 Americana Music Award in the category of "Best Duo Or Group."

• Their video "I Hear Them All" was nominated for two 2007 CMT Music Awards. Directed by Danny Clinch, it was a first-round finalist in the Best Group and Wide Open Country categories. The video was shot in the Mid-City area of New Orleans and features local residents each with inspirational stories regarding Hurricane Katrina.

• Their 2004 album O.C.M.S. was selected by CMT (Country Music Television) as one of the top-10 bluegrass albums of that year.

• The group appeared at the inaugural 2002 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival--taking the invitation turned down by The Hackensaw Boys-- and have returned in 2005, 2007, and 2011. Rolling Stone magazine named Bonnaroo "Best Festival" in 2008, calling it "the ultimate over-the-top summer festival." The New York Times says "Bonnaroo has revolutionized the modern rock festival."

Special appearances

• Ketch Secor wrote, arranged, and performs "Send No Angels" with Lani Marsh on Our Christmas Present (2008) produced by Our Community Place.

• They performed "Tell Mother I Will Meet Her" at the induction of Emmylou Harris and Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman into the Country Music Hall of Fame April 27, 2008.

• They perform Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee” on Song of America (2007), a 3-CD set tracing the history of the U.S. through new versions of songs by major artists. Proceeds benefit the Center for American Music, National History Day, and Folk Alliance.

• They joined Uncle Earl, Sunny Sweeney, Todd Snider, The Avett Brothers, Guy Clark, Emmylou Harris, the Hacienda Brothers, Elizabeth Cook, Amy LaVere, and Ricky Skaggs with Bruce Hornsby as performers for the Americana Honors and Awards Show held November 1, 2007 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

• They appeared on Austin City Limits after Lucinda Williams, aired December 2007 (taped September 2007).

• They make frequent guest appearances on A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor.

• They appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2003 and again in 2008.

• They have performed at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

• They performed on the soundtrack for the film Transamerica which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005.

• They performed at the first annual BamaJam Music and Arts Festival in Enterprise, Alabama.

Personnel

• Critter Fuqua - Banjo, Resonator Guitar, Guitar, Vocals
• Kevin Hayes – guitjo, vocals
• Morgan Jahnig – bass
• Gill Landry – banjo, resonator guitar, guitar, vocals
• Ketch Secor – vocals, fiddle, harmonica, banjo, guitar
• Cory Younts - mandolin, vocals

Former members

• Ben Gould – bass
• Matt Kinman – bones, mandolin, vocals
• Willie Watson – vocals, guitar, banjo, fiddle, harmonica

• 

  Gill Landry at Cambridge Folk Festival
  Cambridge, England
  July 30, 2005

• 

  Cambridge Folk Festival in Cambridge, England
  July 30, 2005

• 

  Willie Watson at Golden Plains Festival
  outside Meredith, Australia
  March 8, 2009

• 

  Ketch Secor (harmonica) Morgan Jahnig (bass) Willie Watson (guitar)
  Tivoli Theatre in Chattanooga, Tennessee
  May 5, 2010

• 

  Kevin Hayes on guitjo
  Tivoli Theatre in Chattanooga, Tennessee
  May 5, 2010

Recordings

Studio albums

Year	Album	Chart Positions				Label	ASIN
		US Bluegrass	US Country	US	US Heat
1998	Trans:mission (cassette)A
2000	Greetings from WawaA					Blood Donor
2001	Eutaw	6				Blood Donor
2003	Live
2004	O.C.M.S.B	1	68			Nettwerk	B00019JQHI
2006	Big Iron World	1	27	125	2		B000FNO1DE
2008	Tennessee Pusher	1	7	50			B001DXF9MM

• ^AOut of print.
• ^BO.C.M.S. was re-released under the title Old Crow Medicine Show as an import in 2006. (ASIN: B000GFLI64)

EPs

• Vegas (out of print) **Cassette only
• Troubles Up and Down the Road (2001) (out of print)
• The Webcor Sessions (2002) (out of print)
• NapsterLife 09/29/2004 (2004)
• Down Home Girl (2006) Nettwerk Records — ASIN: B000FORKT0
• World Cafe Live from iTunes (2006) Broadcast on NPR's World Cafe October 25, 2006
• Caroline (2008) Nettwerk Records - Three track single featuring previously unreleased song "Back To New Orleans"

Other

• The group recorded "Angel From Montgomery" for Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, an album celebrating Prine's rich and influential catalog.
• Song of America (2007) Various Artists Split Rock Records/Thirty One Tigers — ASIN: B000T3GK8O
  • OCMS perform Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) (Disc 2/Track 15)
• Ketch Secor wrote, arranged, and performs Send No Angels with Lani Marsh on Our Christmas Present (2008) produced by Our Community Place

Broadcasts

• World Café with David Dye November 4, 2008.
• NPR "Old Crow Medicine Show: Punk Americana" by David Dye World Cafe October 25, 2006.
• NPR "Old Crow Medicine Show Revives Traveling Tradition" by Melissa Block All Things Considered September 4, 2006.
• A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor February 12, 2005.
• A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor September 25, 2004.
• A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor (all shows and references).

Videographic documentation

• Down Home Girl
• I Hear Them All
• Music Video- Tell It To Me (Windows Users: Right-Click and select Save As)
• Music Video- Wagon Wheel (Windows Users: Right-Click and select Save As)
• Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour Michael Jonathon's Old Time Radio Hour
• Austin City Limits recorded June 9, 2007, broadcast December 22, 2007.
• CMT OCMS videos.

See also

• Old-time country
• Old time fiddle
• Old time music

External links

• Old Crow Medicine Show official site
• Old Crow Fans unofficial fan site
• Country Music Television "Top 10 Bluegrass Albums of 2004" January 3, 2005
• 650 AM WSM Online: Guest Artist Thursday with Ketch Secor.

Reviews, interviews, articles

• State of Mind "Purely Righteous" - State of Mind Magazine, December 2008, by Gary Miller
• Hickorywind review of Tennessee Pusher posted September 24, 2008 by Brendan McKennedy
• Crawdaddy! review of Tennessee Pusher by Matt Gewolb
• Paste Magazine "Catching Up With...Old Crow Medicine Show" interview by Jedd Ferris on September 25, 2008
• Boston Herald "Old Crow's show rules the roost" by Christopher Blagg, review of Berklee Performance Center concert, September 24, 2008
• Chattanooga Times Free Press CD Reviews: New release 'Old Crow Medicine Show – "Big Iron World" – Nettwerk Records – Out Aug. 29' filed by M. Trevor Higgins July 30, 2006
• The Village Voice The Sound of The City "Big Ole Time Country-blues revivalists wail against wars for Phish-heads" by Yancey Strickler March 22, 2005
• Country Standard Time "Old Crow Medicine Show dispenses the right potion" by Dan MacIntosh March 2004
• News8Austin "Meet Old Crow Medicine Show" by Doug Shupe March 12, 2003
• In Music We Trust review of Eutaw (OCMS) by Mark. A Lawrence the IV, Issue Sixty May–June 2003