Old Crow Medicine Show is an Americana string band based in Nashville that has been recording since 1998. They were inducted into the Grand Ole Opry on September 17, 2013. Their ninth album, Remedy, released in 2014, won the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album. The group's music has been called old-time, folk, and alternative country. Along with original songs, the band performs many pre-World War II blues and folk songs.
Bluegrass musician Doc Watson discovered the band while its members were busking outside a pharmacy in Boone, North Carolina, in 2000. With an old-time string sound fueled by punk rock energy, it has influenced acts like Mumford & Sons and contributed to a revival of banjo-picking string bands playing Americana music—leading to variations on it. The group released their sixth studio album, Volunteer, through Columbia Nashville on April 20, 2018—coinciding with their 20th anniversary as a group. They released 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde on April 28, 2017 (their first album on Columbia Nashville). Previous studio albums were Eutaw (2002), O.C.M.S. (2004), Big Iron World (2006), Tennessee Pusher (2008), Carry Me Back (2012), Remedy (2014), and Volunteer (2017). Their song "Wagon Wheel", written by Ketch Secor through a co-authoring arrangement with Bob Dylan, was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America in April 2013 and has been covered by a number of acts, including Darius Rucker, who made the song a top 40 hit.
The band was featured along with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and Mumford & Sons in the music documentary Big Easy Express, which won a Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video in 2013. They performed on the Railroad Revival Tour across the U.S. in 2011. They appeared at the Stagecoach Festival 2013 and multiple times at other major festivals, e.g., Bonnaroo Music Festival, MerleFest, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Newport Folk Festival. and the Mariposa Folk Festival 2024.
They have made frequent guest appearances on A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor, and have had numerous performances at Red Rocks Amphitheatre as well as a New Year's Eve Residency at The Ryman. The group received the 2013 Trailblazer Award from the Americana Music Association, performing at the Americana Honors & Awards Show.
History
Early history
Ketch Secor and Chris "Critter" Fuqua met in the seventh grade in Harrisonburg, Virginia and began playing music together. They performed open mics at the Little Grill diner, as did Robert St. Ours who went on to found The Hackensaw Boys. Secor had been "driving up to Mt. Jackson, VA to the bluegrass Saturday night in the summer, 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, often performing at Little Grill.
Willie Watson first met Ben Gould in high school in Watkins Glen, New York. After playing music together, both dropped out of school and formed the band The Funnest Game. Their brand of electric/old-time was heavily influenced by the old-time music scene prominent in Tompkins and Schuyler County, New York, including The Horse Flies and The Highwoods Stringband.
After the breakup of the Route 11 Boys, Secor attended Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. He brought Fuqua to New York where they met Watson. Watson dissolved The Funnest Game and together they assembled players all around Ithaca, New York "where there is a very lively old-time music scene." This included Kevin Hayes. They recorded an album that they could sell on the road—a cassette of ten songs called Trans:mission. The group embarked on the Trans: mission tour in October 1998, busking across Canada. Circling back east in Spring 1999, they moved into a farmhouse on Beech Mountain, near Boone, North Carolina, where they were embraced by the Appalachian community. Their repertoire of old-time songs grew as they played with local musicians."
"Wagon Wheel"
Fuqua first brought home a Bob Dylan bootleg from a family trip to London containing a rough outtake called "Rock Me, Mama", passing it to Secor. Not "so much a song as a sketch," Secor would later say, "crudely recorded featuring most prominently a stomping boot, the candy-coated chorus and a mumbled verse that was hard to make out". But the tune kept going through his mind. A few months later, while attending Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, and "feeling homesick for the South," he added verses about "hitchhiking his way home full of romantic notions put in his head by the Beat poets and, most of all, Dylan."
Secor says he sang his amplification of the song "all around the country from about 17 to 26, before I ever even thought, 'oh I better look into this.'" When he sought copyright in 2003, to release the song on O.C.M.S. in (2004), 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) "In a way, it's taken something like 85 years to get completed," Secor says. Secor and Dylan signed a co-writing agreement, and share copyright on the song, agreeing to a "50–50 split in authorship." Officially released twice, on an early EP and their second album ("O.C.M.S." in 2004), the song became the group's signature song—going gold in 2011 and platinum in 2013.
Busking break
The earliest beginnings of the group involved busking in the northeast U.S., attracting fresh talent. "Our performance comes out of all those years spent cutting our teeth on the street corner," claims Secor. One day the group were busking outside Boone Drug in downtown Boone, when the daughter of folk-country legend Doc Watson heard them. Certain her father would be impressed, she led the blind musician over for a listen. The group "struck up 'Oh My Little Darling', a well-known old-time song they thought Doc would like." When they finished, he said: "Boys, that was some of the most authentic old-time music I've heard in a long while. You almost got me crying." Doc invited the band to participate in his annual MerleFest music festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina
"That gig changed our lives and we look to it as a pivotal turning point as Old Crow Medicine Show," says Secor. He and Fuqua wrote a song called "Doc's Day" "About being on the corner in Boone and [Watson] discovering us. It honors Doc and the high country blues sound."
Guitjo player Kevin Hayes, originally from Haverhill, Massachusetts, was in Bar Harbor, Maine raking blueberries when he encountered Secor "on the street in front of a jewelry store playing the banjo." Bassist Morgan Jahnig joined the group as a result of a "random" encounter with early Old Crow performing on the streets of Nashville in 2000. Guitarist Gill Landry first met the group in 2000 while both were street performing during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, joining full-time in 2007.
Grand Ole Opry The big busking break led to relocation to Nashville in October 2000. At MerleFest, Secor explains, Sally Williams "from the Grand Ole Opry... invited us to participate in some summer music events at the Grand Ole Opry House doing our street act, our busking, and that's why we came to Nashville . ." Williams first booked them for "an Opryland Plaza outdoor show." In Nashville they were "embraced and mentored" by Marty Stuart, the president of the Grand Ole Opry, who first spied the group at the Nashville-area Uncle Dave Macon Days festival and added them to his "Electric Barnyard old-fashioned country variety package show bus tour" with acts including Merle Haggard, Connie Smith, and BR5-49. Soon they were opening for "everyone from Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton to Ricky Skaggs and Del McCoury . ."
The group made their Grand Ole Opry debut at the Ryman Auditorium, "The Mother Church of Country Music", in January 2001. Given just four minutes on stage, they played "Tear It Down", a "singing jug-band romp about punishing infidelity", and received a "rare first-time-out standing ovation, and a call for an encore." Old Crow began a tradition of appearing for an annual New Year's Eve show in 2009. A second show was added December 30 of each year due to popularity. The Rolling Stone commented: "Ketch Secor dazzled the Ryman Auditorium audience with his vaudeville banter, fiddle playing, and some harmonica magic." SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country station broadcast the 2020 New Year’s Eve concert live.
In August 2013, Stuart unexpectedly appeared onstage at the Ohio Theatre in Cleveland, where the group was performing, to invite them to become official members of the Opry. They were formally inducted at a special ceremony at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, September 17, 2013. In 2020, the group released three tracks that all referenced contemporary events: "Nashville Rising," written after Nashville's Super Tuesday tornadoes and directly benefiting relief efforts; "Quarantined", a tongue-in-cheek, classic country-inspired number about not being able to kiss your lover while quarantined; and "Pray For America," which was commissioned by NPR as an inspirational piece for listeners coming out of COVID. They appeared on a duet with Keb' Mo' titled "The Medicine Man" as well as teaming up with filmmaker Julia Golonka to create a video for the 2008 track "Motel In Memphis" raising funds for Nashville's community-based grassroots organization Gideon's Army.
Later in 2008, Old Crow Medicine Show purchased a building in Nashville which has been dubbed the band's "Hartland Studio," where they record new music and produce their "Hartland Hootenanny" live-stream variety shows.
Albums Carry Me Back (2012) Carry Me Back was released July 17, 2012, on ATO Records. Recorded at Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville, produced by Ted Hutt, the name derives from "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny", former official state song of Virginia.
"Levi" is "about a soldier who grew up in the wild hillbilly woods of Virginia," First Lieutenant Leevi Barnard from Ararat, Virginia who was "killed by a suicide bomber" in Baghdad's Dora Market in 2009. In the NPR broadcast where Secor heard the story, the late lieutenant's friends "broke into Barnard's favorite song"... "Wagon Wheel" at his funeral.
The album sold over 17,000 copies its debut week, "landing at No. 22 on the Billboard Albums Chart", leading to both the band's best-ever sales week and their highest ever charting position. It attained #1 on both the Bluegrass and Folk charts and was the No. 4 Country album in the nation".
Remedy (2014) The group's ninth album, Remedy, was released in July 2014 by ATO Records and produced by Ted Hutt—who produced their previous studio record. The album features a collaboration with Bob Dylan, "Sweet Amarillo", and ballads "Dearly Departed Friend" and "Firewater", the latter written by Fuqua. Remedy won the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album in 2015. The award, created in 2012 to address "challenges in distinguishing between" previous category Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Traditional Folk Album musical genres, was won by Guy Clark in 2011 and Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn in 2012. Also nominated in 2015 were Mike Auldridge, Jerry Douglas and Rob Ickes for Three Bells, Alice Gerrard for Follow the Music, Eliza Gilkyson for The Nocturne Diaries, and Jesse Winchester (1944–2014) for A Reasonable Amount of Trouble.
50 Years of Blonde on Blonde (2017) The group released 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde on April 28, 2017 on their new label Columbia Nashville. The album pays tribute to Dylan's 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde with live recordings of the group's re-creation of it at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in May 2016.