In October 1998, four college-age buskers in Ithaca, N.Y., joined forces, recorded a quickie cassette and jumped in a brown van to drive across Canada to the West Coast, selling tapes and playing on street corners for tips. They weren’t so different from dozens of other young string bands doing old-time country music, but Old Crow Medicine Show survived and prospered while many comrades fell to the wayside. Ketch Secor, Critter Fuqua and Kevin Hayes — all aboard that original van trip with Willie Watson, who left the group in 2011 — commemorate the group’s 20th anniversary this year with current bandmates Chance McCoy, Cory Younts and Morgan Jahnig.
The celebration begins this Friday, April 20, with the release of their new studio album, Volunteer, produced by the ubiquitous Dave Cobb, followed by back-to-back shows on the Grand Ole Opry. The new recording features the strong songwriting that eventually separated Old Crow from the throng of like-minded bands, but it also includes the sort of high-energy, fast-tempo hillbilly dance numbers that this group of punk-rockers-turned-string-band-pickers specialized in before they ever worked original songs into their sets. On the new album, tunes such as the traditional “Elzick’s Farewell” and the recently written “Shout Mountain Music” fly by like a train at a breathless velocity upon the greased tracks of Secor’s fiddle, Fuqua’s banjo and Hayes’ guitjo.
“Playing uptempo music for people to dance to has always been a big component of not just our music,” Secor says, “but all old-time string-band music. That’s just what happens when you play banjos and fiddles, and those instruments interact not only with each other but also with the listeners. For the past 20 years, we’ve had an audience undulating along to the music. It was just a little puddle in the beginning, but now it’s a sea.”
When Old Crow first moved from Boone, N.C., to Nashville in the fall of 2000, the group’s members were so determined to stand apart in a songwriting town that they refused to play their own material and only performed traditional mountain songs.
“I’m a natural songwriter,” Secor says. “I had a bag of songs, and so did other people in the band. It was just to be contrary that we wouldn’t play our own songs. This town tends to dismiss traditional music, because public domain songs create money that can’t be pocketed. We came to Nashville to be soldiers of the public domain. People would ask if we wrote songs, and we said, ‘We do, but we don’t sing them.’ It’s a good thing too, because if we had played our own songs, we would have gotten a record contract and signed away all our rights for a pizza and a six-pack. We would have made one splashy video for MCA, gotten dropped, broken up and gone back to college.”
When they finally started working in an actual studio with an actual producer (David Rawlings), Old Crow pulled their own compositions out of the drawer. Songs such as “Wagon Wheel” (the Bob Dylan lyrical fragment that Secor fleshed out) and “I Hear Them All” (credited to Secor and Rawlings) gave audiences a reason to listen to the band even when the music wasn’t as danceable. Secor gradually emerged as the best songwriter in the whole movement of new-wave string bands.
“You dip your quill into the deepest well you can find,” he says, “and for me that was the heyday recordings of the 1920s and ’30s. ‘Wagon Wheel’ is a good example — it took 85 years to finish. We got it from Bob Dylan, who says he got it from Arthur Crudup, who says he got it from Big Bill Broonzy. You spend that much time with the Harry Smith anthology [of American folk music], you have that many more voices in your songs. You spend that much time with Roscoe Holcomb, you’re going to find echoes of English ballads in your rock ’n’ roll.”
Secor insists he couldn’t have written the songs he has without immersing himself in old-time music for so long. You can hear that on the new album, for which he wrote or co-wrote nine of the 11 songs. “Look Away,” for example, is a rewrite of “Dixie,” that compelling but troubling song about a fondly remembered South. His interest was piqued by research suggesting that the song was written by Thomas Snowden, a freed slave in Ohio. So Secor wrote a song about his own complicated feelings of affection and suspicion about the South, making sure to include references to the displaced American Indians and sharecroppers who were treated no differently than mules.
“ ‘Dixie’ is not a song from the past,” Secor argues. “You can hear it on ringtones and in pickup trucks all over the country today. It’s a song about loving the South and pining for it. The fact that that emotion could exist in the heart of a former slave makes it even more fascinating. There are these vortexes of American music. We’re never going to run out of words to describe what happened. My argument is you can still hear Emmett Till’s whistle, you can still hear the chains dragging, you can still hear the water swallowing the body, you can still hear the dogs barking.”
“Old Hickory” grew out of Secor’s desire to use the title phrase, so familiar from so many old songs, to tell a new story. This tale is of Virgil Lee, a mountain kid with a wildcat for a pet and a guitar like an extension of his right hand. It’s the tale of anyone who ever showed a flash of genius in a local bar but never managed to convert it into stardom, leaving only a memory as long and scraggly as an old hickory tree. In the melody and harmonies are echoes of another Virgil: Virgil Cain from The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
“We’re really related to The Band,” Secor says. “Like us, they came from outside American folk music. None of them except Levon came from the landscape of the canon. It’s the same in our band. None of us have dug coal from a mine or lived in that town. We can sing about Frankie and Johnny, but we don’t have to pull the trigger. But there was a time when the singer did pull the trigger and had the knife in his belt.”
