Pages tagged “old crow medicine show”

Click above to watch "Wagon Wheel" from Old Crow Medicine Show's self titled album. 

In the past decade, Old Crow Medicine Show has grown from nomadic old-time street buskers to big-stage, anti-establishment Nashville aces, selling out their hometown’s venerable Ryman Auditorium last fall and returning for a two-night stand this October. In September, the rowdy string band revivalists will release their third full-length album, Tennessee Pusher, on Nettwerk Records. Despite the title, the disc took the band outside of its home state for the first time to record in the big lot confines of Hollywood’s Henson Recording Studios, where they traded the guidance of Old Crow mentor David Rawlings, who produced the band’s first two discs, for veteran studio ace Don Was (Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt’s Grammy-winning Nick of Time).

Paste recently caught up with fiddler and songwriter Ketch Secor, who revealed a bit about the new disc and the band's never-ending obligation to play “Wagon Wheel,” the band's one hint of mainstream country crossover success, now edging into the realm of frat-party anthem.

Old Crow Medicine Show dabbles in new prescriptions

With its self-titled 2004 debut, Old Crow Medicine Show careened to the vanguard of modern bluegrass, largely due to the blast of energy the band brought to the genre. While it makes for an easily flammable straw man to imagine the rest of the bluegrass world as a taxidermy convention of hidebound traditionalists and corny neo-hippie banjo plunkers, OCMS managed to be simultaneously reverent to the genre’s musical form and edgy as all hell. They demanded notice. Somewhere between fiddleman Ketch Secor’s chiseled-rogue looks and the scrawn and yawp of fellow vocalists Willie Watson and Critter Fuqua, OCMS struck a nerve—and to its credit, even the more traditional corridors of Nashville paid tribute, inviting the band to the Grand Ole Opry and Emmylou Harris’ induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.    

[Above: Old Crow Medicine Show]

This year, Halloween isn’t just about dressing up as your favorite superhero or deceased politician. It also marks the kick-off of the 8th annual Americana Festival and Conference in Nashville. In the middle of all the festivities is the highly anticipated Americana Honors & Awards Show at the Ryman Auditorium which has already confirmed a performance roster of artists including The Avett Brothers, Emmylou Harris and Elizabeth Cook.

The Americana Music Association spiced up its performance list a little bit more recently, adding Old Crow Medicine Show and Todd Snider to the already-stacked group. The ceremony also promises an appearance by Joel Ely, who is being honored with the Life Time Achievement Award in Performance.

For tickets to the event, check out the Ryman box office. Or you can just buy a pass to take part in the all of the conference festivities (Oct. 31-Nov. 3). The $35 awards show ticket is included in the package.

Related Links:
AmericanaMusic.org
List of awards show nominees
ToddSnider.net

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Any band trafficking in old-timey sounds risks crossing the fine line between celebrating its influences and mummifying them. Working from a musical template that stopped evolving, oh, 70 years ago, OCMS manages to stay on the right side of this line on its sophomore disc. Ketch Secor’s originals sound comfortably at home among the traditional folk, blues and country numbers, and by investing his tunes with a puckish modern sensibility, they manage to avoid sounding mannered or fusty. While it’s unlikely that any of the new material will be mined by future generations the way Secor mines the work of Woody Guthrie (whose “Union Maid” appears here), fiddle-and washboard-driven tracks such as the jaunty, surreal “Bobcat Tracks” and the lovely, despairing “James River Blues”—not to mention an Elijah Wood name-check on “Cocaine Habit”—prove OCMS understands that folk music is meant to be played, not studied.

Newly-signed Nettwerk America artists Old Crow Medicine Show are in New York, scheduled to perform on the Peeps float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Yes, Peeps. Those little yellow sugar-coated marshmallow chicks. The band’s hanging in the VIP area, having coffee, juice and donuts with Gordon from Sesame Street, Ronald McDonald, Miss America and American Idol’s Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard. Not bad for a bunch of musicians who didn’t even have a record deal last summer.

Playing atop a Pennsylvania-Dutch barn covered in Peeps, singer-fiddle player Ketch Secor was nearly overwhelmed by the experience. “We were really high up. When we got to Times Square we were looking down on the ticker tape and the MTV studios. There were two million people on either side of Broadway. We were lip-synching to three tracks from our live record over and over. The crowd knew but didn’t care. No one told me we’d be doing a harp tune, and I didn’t have a harp. So I just blew into my hands, which was nice because it was cold. Everything was really intense. When it was over I wanted to throw-up and cry.”

This February, Old Crow Medicine Show will be promoting its third studio release, OCMS, with in-store performances and TV and radio spots around the country, followed by a similar stint in the U.K. in the spring.

While the energetic, old-timey stringband’s first two albums drew heavily from Appalachian, Memphis and Mississippi Delta influences, Old Crow’s latest has more of a Texas feel. Secor is a veritable folk-music encyclopedia, always relating stories of virtually unknown musicians.

“When you play this kind of music,” he says, “it’s not just about playing the notes—it’s thinking about these old characters who made the music, studying them, conjuring them up. We’re into bringing old voices back.”

Half the songs on OCMS—produced by David Rawlings and featuring a cameo from Gillian Welch—are originals and half are covers. Secor explains, “if the band’s songs aren’t supplied by old dead men, they’re inspired by them.” “Trials & Troubles” was inspired by Henry Thomas, a black songster who was playing square-dance tunes in East Texas in the early 1900s (“He broke all the rules,” Secor says). Then there’s “Take ’em Away,”—a song penned by banjo player/guitarist Critter Fuqua, inspired by another Texas songster, Mance Lipscomb—as well as the Grant Brothers cover, “Tell It To Me,” a decadent white-hillbilly tune about cocaine and corn liquor.

Since 2001, when the band’s Grand Ole Opry debut at the Ryman received a standing ovation, Old Crow has been invited back to the legendary Nashville auditorium seven times. “You feel like Hank [Williams] whenever you’re on that stage,” Secor says, “So many tunes of ours come from what I consider to be the heyday of the Ryman—the 1930s. There was this four-and-a-quarter-foot-tall black kid named Deford Bailey. He was in his early 20s and blew harp and told jokes. Whenever I blow harp at the Opry, I think about Deford. When you’re there, you can feel all the ghosts running around.”