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Biography All Music Guide Wikipedia
Group Members: Gill Landry
All Music Guide:
Mountain music revivalists Old Crow Medicine Show spin traditional folk and bluegrass yarns with a rock & roll attitude. Critter Fuqua (vocals/banjo/resonator guitar), Kevin Hayes (guitjo), Morgan Jahnig (upright bass), Ketch Secor (vocals/fiddle/harmonica/banjo), and Willie Watson (vocals/guitar/banjo) may specialize in rags, hollers, and pre-World War II blues, but they were weaned on Nirvana and Public Enemy. The quintet's members -- who are all from different states -- met in New York, hit the road, played before an impressed Doc Watson in front of a North Carolina pharmacy, and were promptly scheduled to play the folk icon's Merlefest. Old Crow Medicine Show then relocated to Nashville, where they found themselves gracing the stage at the Grand Ole Opry, opening for the likes of Dolly Parton and the Del McCoury Band, touring with Merle Haggard and Marty Stuart, and appearning on NPR's Prairie Home Companion.
They signed to Nettwerk America in 2003, began crafting their own compositions among the jug band standards and reels that had become the backbone of the group, and went into the studio to make a record with Gillian Welch's other half, guitarist David Rawlings, at the helm. The self-titled debut, which was recorded in RCA's legendary Studio B (Elvis Presley, Waylon Jennings) as well as Woodland Sound Studios (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), arrived the following year. The group's second album, Big Iron World was produced by Rawlings and appeared in August of 2006. The band then switched producers, going with Don Was for 2008's Tennessee Pusher.
Wikipedia:
Old Crow Medicine Show is a folk band based in Nashville, Tennessee. Their music has been called bluegrass, Americana, and alt-country. 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" Secor "was considered a townie." As Secor 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 . ."
"We took our name from a medicine show — from minstrelsy. That’s an entertainment form that predates vaudeville [and] that sort of swept the American South and many other environs across America starting up at the Civil War.
Ketch SecorAfter 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 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 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 friendPeelle 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
Busking in Boone, North Carolina led to Doc Watson's daughter discovering the group and a personal invite from the country legend himself to appear at his annual MerleFest music festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina in April 2000. This break knocked the act into the popular spotlight, and they have continued to appear at the festival in years since (2004, 2008).
Since then the band has performed at such major music festivals as CMC (Country Music Channel) Rocks the Snowys in Thredbo, Australia (2009), Bonnaroo (2002, 2005, 2007, and 2011), Telluride Bluegrass Festival (2005 and 2011), Coachella, All Good Music Festival (2010), and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival (2003, 2004, and 2009). They performed at the 41st Annual New Orleans Jazz Festival in 2010, an event featuring Pearl Jam, Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, Lionel Richie, The Neville Brothers, Allman Brothers Band, and Anita Baker. 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 and appeared in special New Year's Eve shows in 2009 (with special guest Chuck Mead) and 2010 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. They opened for the Dave Matthews Band in 2009 at the John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville, VA; the Verizon Wireless Music Center in Pelham, AL; and the Nikon at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, NY. 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.
In April 2011 the group joined Mumford and Sons and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros on The Railroad Revival Tour, a tour inspired by the Festival Express tour across Canada in 1970 that included Buddy Guy, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and The Band. 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. They appear in the musical documentary Big Easy Express, directed by Emmett Malloy, being made of the trip which premiered March 2012 at the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival (SXSW Film) in Austin, Texas--winning the Headliner Audience Award.
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 began. 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 wheelRock me mama anyway you feelHey mama rock meRock me mama like the wind and the rainRock me mama like a south-bound trainHey mama rock meSecor 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 19th to 20th century to the 1940s, 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 SecorAfter 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 SecorAwards, honors, distinctions
The group joins Vince Gill and the Carolina Chocolate Drops 'and other notable acts' on the main stage at Yellow Creek Park in Owensboro, Kentucky June 2012 for The International Bluegrass Museum’s 9th annual ROMP: Bluegrass Roots and Branches Festival, 'the largest annual fundraising event for the Bluegrass Museum.'They took part in the Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration Concert, "This Land Is Your Land", March 10, 2012 at the Brady Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma, performing classic Woody Guthrie songs with Arlo Guthrie, John Mellencamp, Jackson Browne, Rosanne Cash, Del McCoury Band, The Flaming Lips, Hanson, Tim O'Brien, and Jimmy LaFave.The group helped celebrate the life of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival founder/benefactor Warren Hellman at a free tribute concert in San Francisco February 19, 2012, appearing with such acts as John Doe, Dry Branch Fire Squad, Steve Earle, The Wronglers with Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Gillian Welch, Boz Scaggs, and Emmylou Harris.As a part of Black History Month, Ketch Secor gave a talk and musical demonstration entitled "Black Tennesseans and Old-Time Music" at the Nashville Public Library, Hadley Park Branch, February 4, 2012 during which he explored "the rich African-American musical traditions of (Tennessee) from the time of slavery up to the present."Their recording of "Wagon Wheel" was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America in November 2011.They performed at the first annual BamaJam Music and Arts Festival in Enterprise, Alabama in 2008.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.The band was nominated for a 2007 Americana Music Award in the category of "Best Duo Or Group."Their music video of "I Hear Them All", a song from Big Iron World (2006), was nominated for two 2007 CMT (Country Music Television) Music Awards; making first-round finalist in the Best Group and Wide Open Country categories. Directed by Danny Clinch, the video was shot in the Mid-City area of New Orleans featuring local residents with inspirational stories regarding Hurricane Katrina.Their 2004 album O.C.M.S. was selected by CMT as one of the top-10 bluegrass albums of the year.The group appeared at the inaugural 2002 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival and have returned in 2005, 2007 and 2011. Rolling Stone magazine named Bonnaroo "Best Festival" in 2008.Special appearances
Old Crow Medicine Show appear on "veteran roots/Americana band" Marley’s Ghost album Jubilee, released June 2012 on Sage Arts, celebrating their 25th anniversary. Recorded at Nashville’s Sound Emporium and produced by Cowboy Jack Clement, the album features other "full-on collaborations between the band and their friends" such as Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Marty Stuart, and Larry Campbell. The album cover a wide variety of classic American songwriters including Kris Kristofferson, Levon Helm, Bobby and Shirley Womack, and John Prine "alongside a half-dozen original compositions."Ketch Secor wrote, arranged, and performs "Send No Angels" with Lani Marsh on Our Christmas Present: 2008, a fundraising album for Our Community Place in Harrisonburg, Virginia where his music career began.Old Crow Medicine Show 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 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 performed on a float for the 2003 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.They performed on the soundtrack for the film Transamerica which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005.Personnel
Critter Fuqua - Banjo, Resonator Guitar, Guitar, VocalsKevin Hayes – guitjo, vocalsMorgan Jahnig – bassGill Landry – banjo, resonator guitar, guitar, vocalsKetch Secor – vocals, fiddle, harmonica, banjo, guitarCory Younts - mandolin, vocalsFormer members
Ben Gould – bassMatt Kinman – bones, mandolin, vocalsWillie Watson – vocals, guitar, banjo, fiddle, harmonicaGill Landry at Cambridge Folk FestivalCambridge, 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
