Similar in attitude, if not sound or references, to the young Bob Dylan’s audacious “Chimes Of Freedom”, the song lists verse by verse a growing assortment of people it dares to wish well, and better than well, right out loud, the obviously and more subtly downtrodden alike. The choruses keep ringing — “I hear them all, hear them all, I hear them all” — which in 2006 produces a fresh shock of recognition.
“Yes, this collection goes a little deeper,” Secor agrees, “and asks a little bit more, states and plays more to the potential of music, in a Woody Guthrie kind of way. Beneath it is something that’s a little darker — there’s bondage and barbed wire and slavery. So ‘I Hear Them All’ has a friendly chorus and can, on one level, be about all of the voices singing — kind of a Carl Sandburg America. But that’s not the whole story.”
The more pointed, darker side of the lyrics on that song, and other new ones, takes listeners (as did their earlier song “Take ‘Em Away”, with its plea, ‘Take these chains from me”) into the realm of the outright political.
Yet it still comes as something of a surprise when one of the most raucous tracks on Big Iron World, and a crowd-rouser live, turns out to be Woody Guthrie’s hilarious but quite pointed organizing anthem “Union Maid”, first sung by Guthrie’s bandmate Pete Seeger in their 1940s agitprop group the Almanac Singers. The Old Crow Medicine Show boys just as easily could have worked up a charging version of “Redwing”, the old fiddle tune Guthrie copped for the number. To bring forward “Union Maid” instead is a statement, and a choice, though one made with a bit of fudging.
“I don’t really have a stance on the unions per se,” Secor submits, putting himself and the band in a different place than Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle, Billy Bragg or Jon Langford might choose in taking up the same theme. And certainly their intentions differ from those of the Strawbs when they updated the song as a fighting anthem, “Part Of The Union”, for the British labor movement in the 1970s.
In our conversation and in some written comments he’s made on the new disc’s packaging (though not in the music, where the lyric is delivered straight), Secor played with the song’s famed and much-used chorus, “You can’t scare me I’m sticking to the union,” as, “You can’t get me I’m stickin’ it to the union.” Secor has his reasons for that sort of volunteered “explanation,” which appear to be partly strategic, partly a matter of iconoclastic temperament.
“In that song, I am stickin’ with something — and I’m stickin it to someone at the same time,” Secor emphasizes, when challenged on this point which would have mattered to the Almanacs a lot. “There’s a defiance in it, as well as the solidarity in it, a part where you’re pulling apart from the mainstream and saying we have to have something stronger than what’s around us, with strength in numbers. It’s more like, take your shackles off, man, and shake your ass. That union lady wants to boogie!”
In short, Secor and company see an audience readied by mass-market music and the general ’80s-’90s social climate as needing to be shaken before it can be stirred. That’s reflected in Old Crow’s aggressive musical revivification as much as in the content of their lyrics.
The audience, Secor notes, “could want to take a stand and not quite even know how, not quite have the tools to do it right. Anybody who’s gonna stand up has got to know about Woody Guthrie, has got to know about Bob Dylan, has got to know that it all happened before — about the continuum, and the ebb and flow of this….It doesn’t even matter if you’ve won a fight before if your descendants have totally forgotten everything. And I’m talking about Old Crow ourselves — and about a thousand other people.”
So there’s shaking that thing and shaking that thing. Which brings us to the new disc’s combative title.
“The Big Iron World is partly the monolithic skyscraper city of steel with big mouths at the tops, and hungry arms reaching down into the streets to scoop up more and more and more,” Secor explains. “We also thought about the big iron guns.”
In Old Crow’s formulation, those intrusive arms apply to society, and to sounds. No one — the songs suggest, this band argues — need passively accept force-fed musical product.
“The soundtracks of daily lives of people here in Nashville, or of anywhere in the U.S., tends to be really bland, or saccharine sweet music, if you can even call it that,” Secor says. “It’s the kind of music you’re supposed to want to shop to, or sleep to, or use to forget what’s really going on.
“But pivotal songs are out there, too, because in the midst of everything going on in our country, there are artists continuing to redirect attention. Really, what’s going on here is that the songs are trying telling the truth, as we perceive that to be.
“With the title, we were thinking, also, about the alchemy of this record. There’s sort of a chemical structure to certain kinds of songs. They’re very old; they go back and are essential. They have a kind of mineral wealth to them. So Big Iron World suggested to us also, and first, the kind of way we mean to melt down and recast. And sometimes, we recast that big iron into bullets.”
For anyone who’s witnessed previous rounds of music meant to liberate and motivate, that the Old Crows approach all this with a certain worldliness is something to be thankful for in itself. No false front of innocence is presented in the style of some early folkies susceptible to A Mighty Wind satire; this is probably a specific legacy of Old Crow’ grounding in punk rock.
Meanwhile, for a band not particularly attracted to the bluegrass aesthetic of ever-increasing technical accomplishment with instrumentation and vocalizing, Old Crow has become markedly more effective at what they do. There’s particular pride in the growing strength of the band’s contemporary original material, which shows itself in the insinuating, winning vaudeville tones of some of the latest Secor/Fuqua collaborations especially.
“Bobcat Tracks” is one of those, based on a dream Fuqua had one night about a bobcat leaving tracks on the snow — one peculiar dream among many, apparently — with some Dylanesque tones. “New Virginia Creeper” is another; the title refers to the route of an old Virginia train line. And “James River Blues”, with additional input from Watson and Rawlings, will be hanging in the band’s repertoire for a long time.
