Arts & Entertainment

Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor Shares Career Insights Ahead of Music Hall Show

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Photo: Ketch Secor (far left) with Old Crow Medicine Show. (Credit: Chris Wood)

November 4, 2024

By W.B. King–

A band born from busking on street corners in places like Ontario, New York City and Boone, N.C., as well as many points between, the Grammy Award-winning Old Crow Medicine Show has spent nearly 30 years promulgating old-time American and Appalachian music.

“Busking led us to open quite a few doors,” the band’s co-founder Ketch Secor told The Hudson Independent. “At one point, the majority of members of the band had met through being tipped by somebody…like Morgan [Jahnig, bassist] tipped me a dollar in 1999 and he’s been with me for 25 years. So, the streetscape was part of the ethos of the band, especially in its early years.”

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Whereas the band could earn about $100 per hour playing for crowds in certain cities, these musical nomads lived hand to mouth, nourished mostly by the music they collectively loved and created. The group’s trajectory changed forever when a bluegrass, folk, country, blues, and gospel legend caught one of their street performances in North Carolina where they were living.

“We ran into Doc Watson up in front of his favorite restaurant, The Pharmacy, and Doc gave us this big break to finally get on a real, proper stage,” Secor said, noting that in 2000 the band was booked to play MerleFest, an event founded by Watson in memory of his son, also a musician, who tragically died in 1985“It sort of was the death knell of us playing on the curb anymore. Once we got elevated and came to Nashville, we stopped busking,” Secor said. “Within the year, we were trying to hit the honky-tonks as hard as we could.”

Old-Time Purists

Secor was born in New Jersey, but by the time he reached fifth grade, his family had moved five times—mom and dad were educators. Before arriving in Harrisonburg, Va., which became his new hometown, he had already been gripped my music—learning to play the mouth harp. And whereas he always had an affinity for old-time music, he was also a fan of Michael Jackson and Creedence Clearwater Revival, among others.

“I also loved straight up entertainment…somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Father Daniel Berrigan,” he said. “This is kind of my sweet spot…I want to spill my blood on the nuclear warhead, but I also want to make them laugh.”

By middle school, the multi-instrumentalist and singer who today plays fiddle, banjo, harmonica, and guitar, began jamming with friends, giving rise to his first group: the Route 11 Boys. Some years later while attending Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of his childhood friends and bandmates shared a rare Bob Dylan bootleg that had a rough track called “Rock Me, Mama.” The song snippet became an earworm of sorts, so much so that the homesick Secor, then 17, began adding wanderlust lyrics.

“Dylan, well, it’s a really deep connection for two perfect strangers and it’s a little one-sided. I haven’t met the man, but he is my biggest hero, that’s for sure,” he shared. “I listened to so much Bob…all these bootlegs and things that you would only hear because you were a super fan, and that’s where I heard the song.”

Over the coming year, he finalized the lyrics and altered the musical arrangement. “I thought after I was done, ‘Wow, I’ve got Bob Dylan’s greatest song right here,’” Secor said with a laugh of the now famous song “Wagon Wheel,” which he initially played sparingly.

In the subsequent years, he would land in Ithaca, N.Y. for a spell before touring with a growing group of like-minded minstrels throughout the U.S. and Canada—playing kitchen parties, street corners, Indian reservations and methadone clinics. “And then I joined Old Crow Medicine Show, and we never played it [Wagon Wheel] because it was not old-time string band music. We were purists.”

100 Years in the Making

Officially formed in 1998, the band had picked up a good head of steam after MerleFest and soon caught the attention of Nashville great Marty Stuart who invited the group to join his “Electric Barnyard old-fashioned country variety package show bus tour.” In the years that followed, the group shared stages with Merle Haggard, Connie Smith, Dolly Parton, Ricky Skaggs and Del McCoury—staying true to their old-timey ways.

“We didn’t really play it [Wagon Wheel] that much, but I had it in my hip flask, and knew I can always pull this one out,” he said. “And then we got to Nashville, and we pulled it out, and people flipped for it.” By 2003, Secor thought it was time to properly record and copyright “Wagon Wheel.” The latter turned out to be an arduous process as he had to track down the often-elusive Bob Dylan in hopes of receiving his permission.

During this process, Secor would interface with Dylan’s manager and in doing so learned that “Wagon Wheel” was a song nearly 100 years in the making. While Dylan agreed to give Secor 50 percent of the credit, he also said he didn’t write what Secor heard on the bootleg.

“Bob said he took it from Arthur Crudup…from Memphis,” he noted. The American Delat blues singer also penned “That’s All Right” made famous by Elvis Presley. Secor got a hold of the recording but said it didn’t sound like Dylan’s version or his. He later learned that Crudup said he didn’t write it either, but rather he had learned it from Big Bill Broonzy.

“If that’s true, then Arthur Crudup would have heard the 1920s Chicagoan from Mississippi play a song, and he would have written it down and Bob heard it, then I heard it, then Darius Rucker heard it,” Secor reflected. “And in that period is 100 years of gestation for this song to explode into America and become really popular.”

First released by Old Crow Medicine Show in 2004, Darius Rucker (of Hootie and the Blowfish fame) released “Wagon Wheel” in 2013. To date, his version has gone platinum eight times and is in the top five best-selling country songs of all time.

“It’s a folk song and even though my band was so dyed in the wool about old-time, string band music, we didn’t play it because we were just like, ‘well, that’s too poppy,’” he said. “We would play a Hank Williams song before we played ‘Rock me, Mama’. But then it turned out that the cultural offering I had was straight out of the John Cohen playbook. It was like I dressed up an old Roscoe Holcomb song for you.”

Secor referenced former Putnam Valley resident John Cohen who co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers—leaders of the American folk music revival in the 1950s and 1960s. The band also featured Mike Seeger, brother of Pete, both of whom Secor had the pleasure of meeting. Cohen, a musicologist, taught visual arts at Purchase College for 25 years. He was also a filmmaker, including his documentary The High Lonesome Sound, which investigated Appalachian culture and focused on Holcomb, a revered banjo player.

Secor also had the opportunity to spend a memorable day with Cohen in Valhalla years before he passed away. The two music scholars would also share a connection to Bob Dylan. With his camera, Cohen captured the early days of Dylan starting out in Greenwich Village—his renowned work landed him a featured spot in Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Dylan, No Direction Home (2005).

“It gives me an important role in Nashville that is really similar to John Cohen. It’s being the folklorist. And this scene here is like the anti-folk…it crushes folk music, pulverizes it and it turns it into a new kind of substrate,” said Secor, who will release a new solo album in 2025. “All God’s critters got a place in the choir, and it turns out somebody needs to sit there with a clipboard and make sure that that folk music doesn’t die in the commercial scape of Nashville. And that’s what I’m here to do.”

Soul Stirring

If Secor didn’t become a musician, he said he would have likely followed in his parent’s footsteps becoming a teacher and educational administrator, what he calls “the family business.” While touring, writing and performing keeps him busy, he and his wife, fiction writer Lydia Peele, founded the Episcopal School of Nashville, which is billed as “a diverse, urban, and independent school dedicated to nurturing the joy of learning and the spirit of discovery in each of our students.”

Now in its ninth year, the school, which began with 16 students, has 127 elementary pupils. “It’s the hardest thing I ever did, so much harder than getting a band from the street corner to the jumbotron or a platinum record,” said Secor who serves as board chair, emeritus. “You got to raise this thing up from nothing and you have to populate it with talent, and then you got to get everybody to recognize it as a brand, and then start running with it.”

In Secor’s view, the stage is a classroom of sorts. Along with playing music, he enjoys learning about the towns and cities he performs in and then sharing anecdotes between tunes.

“When I get up there to Tarrytown, we’re gonna talk about the Kensico Damn and we’re gonna talk about Washington Irving, and I’m gonna play a bunch of music too, but there’ll be a script,” he said. “I like to bring it back to an opportunity to learn because I’m always learning.”

When Old Crow Medicine Show returns to the Music Hall on November 7, Secor said the audience can expect a mixed bag of song offerings that span the group’s celebrated career, including their many studio albums, most recently the Grammy-nominated Jubilee (2023), as well as their tribute to Bob Dylan, 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde (2017).

“I think we’re gonna sing this song called ‘Tarrytown’ that we wrote probably the first time we played the Music Hall, and it kind of felt like a Creedence song. It’s been a while, and we never recorded it. So, you’ll probably hear that one,” Secor said. “We love the congregation, the feeling of collaboration and opportunity to raise the roof beams for a minute. It’s soul stirring stuff when you saw a fiddle—you just can’t fake it.”

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