Old Crow Medicine Show’s Secor bringing solo show to Owensboro
It turns out that Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor is a big fan of Owensboro. Not only has he played ROMP with Old Crow three times and toured the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum during the unveiling of the Tom T. Hall exhibit, but even more impressively, he correctly used the word “burgoo” in the right context and pronounced it perfectly during this interview!
When asked if he had any good memories of Owensboro, Secor said, “Sure! ROMP is always one of our favorite festivals to play. It’s a great community! There’s always a good turnout. Daviess County’s got a peculiarly large spirit for traditional music.”
On July 31, local fans will have a rare chance to catch Secor live in a more intimate setting when the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum hosts one of only four solo shows planned in support of his debut album, Story the Crow Told Me.
The reason for the limited solo run? A jam-packed calendar. Old Crow has a full slate of tour dates this fall, and Secor is also lending his talents to the house band on Mumford & Sons’ upcoming tour. As of now, the July show in Owensboro is one of just a few opportunities to hear Story the Crow Told Me live.
“I’ve never put out a solo record before, so we’ll see what these summer shows do, and if they do well, we might add some more solo shows,” Secor said. “But right now I’m working on my band’s career trajectory. I went all in on making this record, but I’m not trying to develop a solo career.”
Secor says his new record is a concept album with a song cycle that describes his musical journey over the last 25 years of moving to Nashville, busking in the early days, starting Old Crow Medicine Show, and everything that has evolved since then.
“For me, (this album explores) the feeling of spreading my wings with my love for old time traditional music but with a punk rock attitude about it,” he said. “It’s got a wanderlust threading through it. The songs sing like a recitation of road maps with a lot of names of rivers and county lines, mountains, tributaries, flora and fauna. It’s a talking tattoo,
if you will.”
The album’s title nods to the traditional folk song “The Tale the Crow Told Me,” which Secor says dates back to the 1920s or earlier.
“But for me this title is about the lore and legend of this funny band of tricksters that never should have survived through their first trip, let alone their thousandth,” he said.
The first single, “Dickerson Road,” was released in May and is a tribute to east Nashville’s “boulevard of broken dreams.” It’s got a spoken-word feel with a deep backwoods beat and grooving guitar by The Cadillac Three’s Jaren Johnston.
“In the year 2000 there was one premier destination for Nashville’s castoffs, rejects, n’er-do-wells, petty thieves, lowlifes, losers and users,” Secor said. “So like a barfly to a bottle I went to where I felt I belonged, straight up Dickerson Road.”
The full album releases in early July, giving fans a chance to dive in before the Owensboro show. Secor said the album shifts in tone — sometimes echoing Old Crow, sometimes veering into completely new territory.
“I grew up listening to hip hop as a white kid in a rural town in Virginia.,” he said. “Some of the music sounds like my 12-year-old self, some of it sounds like my 20-year-old self, some of it sounds like my real age, which is 47. It was just important to me to tell my story in my own words and they just started coming out so I went for it.”
The album’s first track, “Buskers Spell,” tells the story of a 15-year-old Secor riding an Amtrak train from Virginia to Seattle to stay with a cousin. During a long layover in Chicago, he took out his guitar and started busking right there.
“I think I made about 60 dollars, and that’s what got me hooked on busking,” he said.
This solo project may be separate from Old Crow, but Secor’s roots run deep. The band has notched two Grammy wins, a Grand Ole Opry induction, a triple-platinum hit with “Wagon Wheel,” and multiple No. 1s on Billboard’s Bluegrass Albums chart.
So why make a solo album now?
“There are a lot of things happening at this point in my life that are causing me to be more retrospective,” Secor said. “I’ve been in the game a long time. I do enjoy looking forward, but old-timey music is about simultaneously looking forward and backward. That’s why it’s a regressive art. You go back with it, but that’s where the strength is. The challenge is to carry the substance of the past into the present.”
Secor is clearly having a ball on this album. He wrote or co-wrote every song and played a dozen instruments in the studio. The press release announcing the album calls it “equal parts coming-of-age story, road-warrior autobiography, and love letter to the city (Nashville) that watched him grow into a man.”
As the songs and the vibe on the album will tell you, it’s been a fun ride for Secor and his Old Crow bandmates.
“Who knew that fiddles and banjos would get really popular about 12 years after we learned to play them, right?” he quipped. “A lot of our success is from the legacy that surrounds our band, but honestly it has more to do with a national consciousness toward traditional roots music that I’ve seen a resurgence in about every 10 years or so. A decade ago it was Mumford & Sons. There’s a new wave rising up now called Billy Strings.”
Secor added, “Our wave rose up back when the term ‘Americana’ meant quilting and there was a subgenre in Nashville called ‘alt country.’ But it just didn’t have enough powers to catapult anything. So our launch did what it did and it took about a decade before the legend of ‘Wagon Wheel’ sort of drew people back to early primitive American folk music. So that song, and those other waves I was talking about, all seem to conspire to point people back to Old Crow Medicine Show 27 years later.”
If you’ve never heard the story of how Wagon Wheel came about, it’s pretty cool.
Secor discovered an unfinished Bob Dylan recording from 1973, specifically the fragment with the “rock me mama” melody and most of the lyrics to the chorus. He fleshed out the verses and released “Wagon Wheel” as an Old Crow Medicine Show song, which is why Secor and Dylan share co-writing credit. Fourteen years later, Darius Rucker heard his daughter play the song on her ukelele, called his producer, and cut the song himself because he loved it so much — sending the tune soaring onto mainstream charts.
“That song continues to be a blessing to a lot of people,” Secor said. “My favorite stories are about young people getting turned on to American traditional music because they found an easy and catchy song to do that with. That happened to me when I learned ‘Heart of Gold’ by Neil Young. I’m honored that ‘Wagon Wheel’ is doing that for a lot of young people in this generation.” OL
Concert Details
When: 7 p.m. on July 31
Where: Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Tickets: Preferred seating $32; reserved seating $27
Bar and concessions available
