“At Old Crow’s conception, eight years ago,” Secor recalls, “we thought of it as something more than a band, more like a troupe — or, as the name says, like a medicine show. Now, I feel like it’s even more important to retain a sense of community among us, because things seem to be at a level where it would be really easy for it to become just a band.
“Originally, I wasn’t necessarily including fans in that — but music does create a larger community, a community which has a sound, and we’re all participants in it. It does go both ways; you could see that at the Ryman. There’s the part that’s up there onstage twisting and shaking and retching out these lyrics — and then out in the audience, they’re doing the same thing.
“Also, I think they like liking us,” he continues. “If you can feel as good liking a band that’s doing what we’re doing, at the point that we’re doing it, there’s a lot more payback to a fan of a band at this level, that’s not playing arenas, even as an opening act….They feel they can put their flag in our side.”
Veteran hillbilly rocker Marty Stuart, whose Fabulous Superlatives is arguably the strongest and most versatile working band in contemporary country music, has long been an advocate for the Old Crows. He was recording a new track with them at John Carter Cash’s Cash Cabin studio (where Johnny and June Carter Cash made much of their last music alone and together) later in the day of my interview with Secor. The Crows will Cash, Lester Flatt and Connie Smith on an upcoming retrospective disc of duets that strike Stuart as having been central to his varied musical experience.
“Sure, at face value they appear like a retro old-time band,” Stuart says. “But there’s really a whole lot more going on there than that. There’s old-timey stuff, traditional music, folk music, a lot of new things — and then there’s also a lot of rock ‘n’ roll colliding in there. There’s just a whole lot of energy headed out from those boys.”
That energy initially reached audiences when the Old Crow Medicine Show took to the road in 1996. They started out from Ithaca, New York, where they’d first assembled from scattered home bases, relatively unschooled musically but raring to go. They played on the streets, pass-the-hat style, for years thereafter.
“One of the things that they’ve brought from the beginning,” David Rawlings notes, in a separate interview, “is those miles — and all the work that they’ve done. You hear so many bands that make themselves a band — write some songs, play a few shows, then make a record. But these guys really did go off and busk their way through Canada, and spent years and years out playing shows — and they still do, working really hard.
“That hot thing that they do,” he adds, “that comes in part from having been out in front of people on the streets, and having had to figure out how to make them pay attention.”
Rawlings, along with his partner Welch, has, of course, been offering up an equally informed and highly effective but more deadpan take on acoustic American music for years. “I know they sound different,” he says. “You hope to do stuff that creates a mood or feeling, with an arrangement that suits the music and the performer.”
Welch & Rawlings’ song “Elvis Presley Blues” is virtually a commentary on the issue of roots music and turning on the heat. “We were interested in playing acoustic, and slow,” Rawlings explains, “and it fit the mood of what was happening. But that’s never the only thing to do!” He points to relative directness as one of Secor’s musical strengths, and the keen sense of audience interest as one of Old Crow’s strength’s.
“I like that they chose the hits from the 1920s string-band shows, not obscurities,” Rawlings says. “People always wanted to hear ‘Tell It To Me’ back in the day.”
If not exactly a worldwide hit anytime lately, that song has become one of Old Crow’s best-known numbers. The impolite “cocaine’s gonna kill my honey” song first introduced by Jimmie Rodgers’ onetime dance-band backup, the Grant Brothers (recently reissued on the informative Old Homestead disc Good For What Ails You: Music Of The Medicine Shows), has gotten faster and more aggressive along the road.
Secor agrees. “Yeah, we are playing that hotter. Our version of ‘Tell It To Me’ was pretty laid-back originally — and now I think that if we’d recorded a hot version of that, it would have sold a lot more records!”
The band has actually just taken that sort of “rev it up” re-recording opportunity with another hoary party-time song. On their self-made 2001 disc Eutaw, “Cocaine Habit” nodded lazily to the same-titled Memphis Jug Band version of the much-toyed-with old song “Take A Whiff On Me” (recorded in varied other versions by Charlie Poole, Lead Belly, and the Byrds). Old Crow’s new version on Big Iron World (“just banging it out — hot,” Rawlings calls it) rips into the song full-blast and sends a snarling shout out to both Karl Rove and Elijah Wood, without further comment. It worked up the crowd pretty forcefully at the Ryman.
The roving-street-band aspect of the Old Crows’ past was an aspect that first attracted Stuart to them. When he spotted them at the annual Uncle Dave Macon Days in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, they reminded him of the Rouse Brothers, the hot, generally forgotten Alabama duo that introduced “Orange Blossom Special”.
“When I first saw these guys,” Stuart recalled, “they were busking in the parking lot, and they really had a nice crowd around them and had their girlfriends selling CDs and stuff. There was just an energy and a magic about them that was real fresh to me. So I talked to the powers that be at the Grand Ole Opry to let me present them on there and eventually they went on and, of course, stole the show. I missed them between the two Opry shows that night — and then learned that they were out busking in front of the Ryman, after their encore!”
Today’s Old Crow Medicine Show lineup, only slightly changed over eight years, includes Secor on fiddle and harmonica, Willie Watson on guitar, and Critter Fuqua on banjo; these three also serve as the band’s strong and varied lead voices. The attention-grabbing Morgan Jahning adds a very consistent and rock-like slap bass, while Kevin Hayes (who tries out singing on the new disc) brings in the combined chop and growl of the guitjo, an instrument once played by the Opry’s Sam McGee that combines aspects of the banjo and guitar. Secor describes as “pivotal, like being bit by a dog — rhythmically!” Bassist Benny Gould and mandolinist Matt Kinman are among those who have been Old Crow members in earlier, sometimes expanded configurations.
